Niall Ferguson is the Milbank Family senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford, and the author of 16 books. His most recent bookis on the short list for the 2022 Lionel Gelber Prize, presented by the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy and Foreign Policy magazine.– which I finished writing in the fall of 2020 – I posed some unsettling questions:
• We tend to think of a pandemic as a natural disaster, whereas a war is man-made. But the two kinds of disaster are not so distinct. • Contagions of the body caused by pathogens often interact disruptively with contagions of the mind.• We cannot hope to predict disasters, because history is not cyclical, so we need to be generally resilient – or, even better, anti-fragile.
A significant number of history’s greatest disasters can be attributed to the decisions of dictators – from the man-made famines caused by Joseph Stalin’s and Mao Zedong’s policies of forced collectivization of agriculture to the Holocaust, which is very hard to imagine without the malevolent figure of Adolf Hitler as the German Fuhrer. The war in Ukraine is equally hard to imagine without Mr. Putin as Russian President.
nfergus Raise,' he says, 'raise a glass Raise a glass to our, our heterogeneity Our remarkable resilience through calamity' -said the Bedlamite
We need different political systems. We're too detached. That's part of it.