Doom – 3/1/2025
When catastrophe strikes, why are some cultures resilient while others collapse? How does politics intersect with calamity? Such are the questions posed by Niall Ferguson in his wonderfully researched and insightful book, Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe, published in 2021.
Ferguson observes that it is too simplistic to classify disasters as strictly natural or man-made. Economics, culture, and politics often play key roles. The impact of a large earthquake, for example, depends severely on whether the fault line runs through an urban area. A pandemic’s effects depend on the social networks available for its spread, which also depend on how efficiently people travel within and between geographical regions.
Since Ferguson wrote his book while we were still in the early days of COVID-19, he has only a modest amount to say about that pandemic, but he draws from a rich history of other catastrophes to make his points. For example, he tells of an Italian artist, Salvator Rosa, who painted a work he entitled Human Frailty, after the bubonic plague struck Naples in 1655, killing his infant son, his brother, his sister and her husband, and five of their children.
The piece depicts a hideously grinning winged skeleton reaching out to claim a child. The artist’s heartbreak is summed up in a Latin script on the canvas, translated “Conception is sin, birth is pain, life is toil, death is inevitable.” Ferguson recalls being thunderstruck when he first viewed the painting: “Here was the human condition, stripped down to its bleak essentials.”
Of course, the essence of life depends on whether we have a soul, a spirit that transcends the physical. After fasting, praying, and weeping for seven days over his terminally ill infant son, King David shocked his staff by recovering his equilibrium promptly after the child died. He explained (2 Samuel 12:22-23), “While the child was yet alive, I fasted and wept: for I said, Who can tell whether God will be gracious to me, that the child may live? But now he is dead, wherefore should I fast? Can I bring him back again? http://justrpg.com/author/mogarth/page/14 I shall go to him, but he shall not return to me.”
David’s worldview included an assured hope for a bodily resurrection, both for himself and for his son, whom he would see again, for sure! Worldview matters, especially when it is in sync with reality. A Christian worldview enables resilience, the ability to actually grow stronger in the aftermath of calamity. It’s not a passive process, though. Faith must be active and renewed continually.
When Mary and Martha wept over the loss of their brother, Jesus assured Martha that Lazarus would rise again. Martha professed that she knew that would happen in the “last day,” but she implies that such a distant hope was little solace in the moment. Jesus responds with the ultimate declaration (John 12:25-26), “ mail order Lyrica I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live. And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die. Believeth thou this?” A little while later, Jesus makes clear that He speaks more than metaphorically when, at the tomb, He cries out, “Lazarus, Come forth,” and the life of Lazarus is restored.
I don’t need to know exactly where Heaven is or how to get there. I only need to know Jesus. He’s got it covered. It’s not that He merely knows the way; rather He is the way.
Each year, worldwide, about 60 million people die; as Ferguson notes, this number was about the total world population when King David ruled Israel, about 1000 B.C. Daily, this equates to about 160,000 deaths. We are all doomed. “Life is a terminal condition.”
Atheistic physicists, materialists who believe that we derive from a cosmic accident, the so-called Big Bang, would contend that we are doomed as a species. Sadly, Ferguson buys into evolutionary story-telling. Apparently, and more recently, Niall Ferguson and his wife have professed to be Christians, of the Anglican variety, I think. Hopefully, they will dig deeper and ground their faith in God’s word, and discover that honest scientific analyses are completely in sync with biblical history.
Ferguson quotes others in projecting the ultimate doom of mankind and everything else on Earth when our sun eventually goes nova, in about 3.5 billion years from now. “This is the default fate for life on our planet.”
How depressing. I used to be an atheist and experienced the consequent doom and gloom quite personally. I didn’t become a Christian simply because I did not enjoy depression. Rather, the gloom of an atheistic worldview drove me to at least explore whether there might be more to life than molecules clumping about, damned to decay by the second law of thermodynamics. In seeking I did, indeed, find biblical truth. The reality is that there is a God who transcends all, who has made me in His image. And that life is more than matter in motion, but includes the transcendent qualities of hope, meaning, love, virtue, beauty, reason, kindness, and forgiveness – qualities found neither in the laws of physics nor in the Periodic Table of the Elements.
Interestingly, Ferguson cites the book of Revelation and the final judgments – true future history, but at the time of writing, apparently, just part of Christian mythology in his view. He notes that such literature “has been a remarkably recurrent feature of recorded history.”
Niall describes the “Doomsday Clock,” an image first appearing in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to denote how close the world might be to nuclear doomsday. In the 1950s the editors typically set the clock to two minutes before midnight. In 2020 it moved to 100 seconds before midnight, ostensibly because nuclear armageddon has been supplemented by climate change and cyber warfare. Now we have AI to scare us to death. Ferguson suggests that continual warnings of an imminent world’s end are like the cry of “Wolf!” . . . less credible through repetition.
Ferguson loves to get into the numbers. The saying, “One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic,” is usually attributed to Stalin, but it may not be original to him. There have probably been seven major pandemics in all of recorded history that claimed victims more than 1 percent of the world’s population at the time. The two world wars killed about 1 and 3 percent, respectively.
The Manchu conquest of China in the 17th century may have slaughtered 25 million. The An Lushan rebellion of the 8th century took thirty million. The European conquest of the Americas killed multitudes by introducing novel diseases to the natives. Ferguson cites many historical disasters to point out the different forms that doom takes and, in some cases, the comparable challenges to the people that survive. He notes that in the first half of 2020 the city of London was hit as hard by COVID-19 as it had by the rocket attacks of the last half of 1944 . . . the challenge was how to protect the population without unnecessarily paralyzing the city.
Ferguson asks whether disasters are predictable. In ancient societies, they clearly were not. Of course, since the day of Adam’s sin and his expulsion from the Garden of Eden, namely the Fall of man, tragedies have been inevitable with every individual condemned to die, whether alone or in a collective calamity. The author quotes Ecclesiastes 1:9 – “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.” Although Niall mentions the biblical arc of history, culminating in the final judgments, he lumps the Bible in with a variety of mythologies, asserting that man tries to find meaning in historical cycles. Yet if every narrative is merely mythology, there would be no hope at all, if all that is left is a materialistic worldview.
Ferguson is skeptical about secular prophets, since “history is a process too complex to be modeled.” Too bad, because if disasters could be foreseen, maybe some could be prevented, or at least mitigated. Jared Diamond in his 2011 book Collapse, suggests that catastrophes often occur because a society fails to recognize or address the threats it faces. Diamond observes that in some cases, including those of the Maya, Anasazi, Easter Islanders, and even the Soviet Union, “a society’s steep decline may begin only a decade or two after the society reaches its peak numbers, wealth, and power.” The reason, he insists, is simple: at its peak a nation’s wealth and resources couple to maximum consumption and waste. Resources can be outstripped rapidly and the environmental impact can be devastating.
An area completely neglected by Ferguson, of course, is God’s hand in the rise and fall of nations. The Old Testament is filled with examples of God’s blessings and curses on nations, not just Israel, but also the many nations that surrounded it. Some ancient promises are still in force, especially those tied to Israel’s historical arc, starting in Genesis 12:2-3. God still has a plan for Israel that will not be thwarted, as proven by the nation’s restoration and continued existence. Individuals or nations that would threaten God’s plan endanger themselves. Would that American politicians would read and heed Scripture.
Niall cites Richard Clarke and R.P. Eddy that modern disasters share elements we see in classic Greek tragedies, notably Agamemnon, featuring Cassandra who sees calamity coming, but she is unable to convince anyone. Similarly, Hurricane Katrina, the Fukushima nuclear meltdown, the rise of ISIS, and the 2008 financial crisis – in each there was a Cassandra who was ignored. Clarke and Eddy posit four components: the threat of disaster, the prophet of disaster, the decision maker, and the critics who reject the warning.
There are many factors contributing to despising the warnings – the Cassandra might lack skill in persuasion, the decision makers may be distracted by responsibilities, the claimed scale of disaster may defy belief, such a calamity may have never occurred or at least in common memory, bureaucratic inertia produces delays or inaction and, not least, cowardice is common among politicians.
Ferguson defines some cute terms to classify some disasters. A gray rhino is something “dangerous, obvious, and highly probable,” according to Michele Wucker. Examples include Katrina, the 2008 financial debacle, the 2007 Minnesota bridge collapse, wildfires, and water shortages. A poignant recent example is the onslaught of wildfires in California – there were many credible Cassandras who saw it coming, but the political leaders in California were cowardly and incompetent. A black swan is a very surprising event, something that might have seemed impossible. Examples include COVID-19 and World War 1.
The French geophysicist Didier Sornette defines a dragon king as an event so extreme it lies outside a power law distribution. Examples of power law distributions include city sizes, acoustic emissions from material failure, and (possibly) earthquakes. A typical power law distribution is plotted on a log scale, with a rather straight line showing the dependence of the number of events on the magnitude of those events. In the city-size example, we see only a very few cities of enormous size, but a large number of villages of small size. In contrast, a ‘normal distribution’ (bell curve) would imply a lot of towns of medium size with few either large or small.
The implication of this hierarchy – gray rhino to black swan to dragon king – is the difficulty in anticipating or mitigating the dragon king event. Ferguson notes that there have been three dragon king individuals who launched religions that attracted hundreds of millions and have lasted centuries: Jesus, Muhammad, and Gautama Buddha. Karl Marx, too, would qualify as a dragon king, spawning immense political catastrophes since the 19th century.
Ferguson sees a quirk in human nature in that “humans nearly always return to the scene, no matter how vast the disaster.” Settlements formed once again around Vesuvius. Naples has grown to be one of Italy’s largest cities, despite another eruption in 1631, killing thousands. The eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia (1815) killed 71,000, but nothing that large has occurred since. Despite significant advances in geological science, though, a Tambora-like event would surprise us . . . after all, it’s been a very long time since a huge eruption. Mount St. Helens, for example, was localized in comparison.
Niall cites Adam Smith on the subject of human perceptions of distant disasters. In Smith’s 1776 book Theory of Moral Sentiments (written just before The Wealth of Nations), Smith considers how a European man might react to the news that all of China was destroyed in an earthquake. Smith suggests that the man would express sorrow for the misfortune and opine on the fragility of life, but very shortly he would resume his business or his pleasure just as if nothing had happened. The loss of his little finger would have far more impact on him than the news of a foreign catastrophe.
Then Smith asks what is it that prompts men to sacrifice their own interests to that of others, especially those distant and not personally known. Smith’s answer is weak and self-righteous, suggesting that the generous man is driven by the love of what is honorable and noble, such love generated by the dignity and superiority of one’s character.
As counterpoint I would ask what motivated Gladys Aylward (as an exemplar of any foreign missionary) to travel to China and give her life over for the lives and souls of people she had never met. Clearly, she knew that the Bible is TRUE history and the Gospel is vital for the salvation of every soul on Earth. Her motivations were transcendent and rooted in the reality that God has revealed in Scripture. Life is short. Heaven and Hell are real. If you love at all like God loves, you must go and tell. No matter the cost. Worldview matters.
As a counter-counterpoint I’ll use Ferguson’s case of the Athenian plague of about 430 B.C. Multitudes were dying, regardless of wealth or social standing. Despair produced a general resolve to spend quickly and engage in all manner of immoralities, heedless of legal consequences or the disfavor of the gods – they figured the gods had already judged them with the plague. This case, I believe, is a preview of the coming Tribulation judgments. When the worst disasters are visited on people, many will exhibit the worst imaginable behavior.
Daniel Defoe wrote of the London plague of 1665 that people were quickly addicted to prophecies, astrological ‘conjurations,’ dreams, and old wives tales, “than ever they were before or since.” In the coming Tribulation there will be much speculation, with confusion multiplied by Satan’s lies about what is really happening. If the Tribulation is in our near future, I believe it is imperative for Christians now to preach truth and scatter Gospel tracts, praying that God will keep those scattered tracts ‘alive’ – ready to be rediscovered when someone needs one.
A random thought – I wonder if Pentecostal ‘healing ministries’ will operate during the Tribulation. There seemed to be a vast silence from the Pentecostals during COVID.
Human-caused disasters fall into two bins, according to pyschologist James Reason: active and latent. Active errors are committed by people “in direct contact with the human-system interface,” like the first officer on the Titanic’s bridge. Latent errors are perpetrated by people behind the scenes, like the owner or designer of the ship. Ferguson spends some time analyzing the Titanic’s case.
The lookout spotted the iceberg at 500 yards, but if he had used the binoculars he had misplaced, it might have been 1000 yards. The first officer gave the order “hard a-starboard” and commanded the engine room to stop the engines. This exposed the side of the ship for a longer time to the iceberg, which may have been avoided entirely if he had maintained speed and tried to go around. These were all active errors.
Latent errors included: The fifteen bulkhead compartments were watertight, but the walls connecting the bulkheads extended just a few feet above the waterline. When the ship pitched or listed, water could flow from one compartment to another. The marine engineer who designed the system was onboard and realized quickly that his design error would sink the ship in a couple of hours. Furthermore, there were only enough lifeboats to carry half the number of passengers and crew. Regulations on lifeboats were based on ship tonnage, not passenger count. The owners refused to spend enough to buy the lifeboats and did not want to reduce the space available to first-class passengers on the promenade deck. (The captain, first officer, and chief engineer all went down with the ship. The managing director of the shipping firm was on board, but survived, later was reviled as a coward, and spent the rest of his life in seclusion.)
On COVID, Niall finished his chapter on plagues in September, 2020, and so did not have the perspective available today. Yet he expressed some notable conclusions from the early stages. A study on lockdowns showed no relationship between the stringency of government edicts and the containment of the disease. Germany, for example, had milder restrictions than Italy, but was more successful in containment. Taiwan had the lowest stringency and the least viral impact on the population. The most comprehensive study of the period indicated that social distancing was more effective than closing businesses and mandating work from home. Of course, many vital jobs cannot be worked from home.
Enough on COVID, though. Ferguson concludes his book by wondering about what disasters might hit us next. He dismisses alien invasion because interstellar travel is simply too daunting. Predictable disasters include forest fires in California due to chronic mismanagement, Niall writes – He got that right! Excessive rains could endanger the Three Gorges Dam in China. Less predictable include the potential eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano, “which would render discussion of man-made climate change superfluous in the brief period before mass extinction ensued.”
Also, we won’t face extinction from a supernova in our part of the galaxy, but the Tribulation catastrophes will certainly generate fears beyond anything in history, while billions die. Our sun heating up will be part of that, along with massive earthquakes and eruptions, which may happen to include the Yellowstone caldera. Limited nuclear wars could occur even before the Tribulation, but God clearly (according to the Bible) reserves to Himself the privilege of bringing judgment to a rebellious Earth.
The Christian has an ultimately assured hope, however. Whether we die sooner or later, a resurrection is promised us, and a New Heaven and a New Earth, “wherein dwelleth righteousness.” Better to become a Christian before the Tribulation, so you can be raptured out of here. Those judgments are not aimed at the believer. Yet the disasters and persecutions of that time will facilitate many new souls coming to Christ.
In the meantime, let’s do our best to bring new children into the family before the Rapture by sharing the Gospel. If you’re not already addicted to getting out Gospel tracts – giving a chance to many people you cross paths with – then get started. I’ll send you tracts for free to help out. See the links near the top of the homepage to find out more.
- drdave@truthreallymatters.com