How many times in history has it happened that things were going smoothly, everything was going in the right direction, and then suddenly “boom”, or even a big “boom”, and the world turned upside down, it was impossible to live like before. We experienced this recently during the COVID-19 pandemic. The prophecies of the pundits of political science and sociology poured out in a cascade, saying that the world of the past would not return and everything would have to be anew.
The memory of COVID has not yet faded away, and the civilization train is back on the old tracks. Political institutions function as usual, international cooperation even more so. Geopolitics is also stuck in the old system (Larry Summers himself announced that we will count down the era of Chinese leadership in the world from the COVID pandemic; China, however, is still barely recovering after the pandemic). COVID has not caused any revolution in social consciousness and political culture. As usual, outstanding commentators did not anticipate the strongly programmed reflex in us to return to the beaten track, to rebuild everyday life, including political life, within a practised framework. This is not the first time that the great minds have missed reality. The world was not supposed to be the same after September 11, 2001, or after September 15, 2008. And actually it was.
Niall Ferguson used the COVID crisis to present a sweeping account of the impact of disasters on the functioning of our societies (Niall Ferguson, Doom. The Politics of Catastrophe. 2021).
Let us recall that Niall Ferguson summarized his theory of disasters in five theses.
First, disasters are unpredictable.
Secondly, there is no clear line between natural and man-made disasters.
Third, their harmful effects result from the failure of decision-makers, though not only those at the top, to deal with disasters.
Fourthly, as the author himself put it: “infection of bodies leads to infection of minds.”
Fifth, it is better to always be slightly paranoid about disasters.
Of course, since the dawn of time, humanity has been exposed to disasters. However, disasters are rarely entirely external phenomena. Apart from meteorite impacts (not recorded for 60 million years) or alien invasions (unlikely in the foreseeable future), all other disasters originate on our planet. In all of them, including the most natural ones (earthquakes and others), the human factor is involved (at least in terms of managing the effects).
In one sentence, human civilization has always been doomed to face uncertainty. Social awareness is prepared for disasters. They will happen. They will always put human civilization to the test. Uncertainty about the future is an inherent feature of our collective consciousness.
Ferguson divided disasters into three illustrative categories.
First of all, there are gray rhinos, i.e. dangerous, obvious and highly probable disasters, such as the financial crisis of 2008, cyber attacks, and water shortages.
Secondly, these are black swans, i.e. events that are impossible to predict, unlikely, such as, according to the author, World War I or COVID 19.
Thirdly, these are dragon kings, i.e. extreme events that escape the power law distributions. Ferguson puts into this category stock crises, earthquakes, and the growth of cities. But he states that these are, in some ways, predictable phenomena.
Today’s world is, on the one hand, more sensitive to the effects of disasters, but on the other hand, better prepared to anticipate and deal with them.
The world’s sensitivity has increased because interdependence has increased, resulting from, among others, globalization. Pandemics are spreading around the world much faster and more widely than in the past. The plague of Justinian’s era shook the foundations of Byzantium (over 7 million people died in the Empire alone, and in Europe over 50% of the then population), but the Slavs of that time did not feel it severely and effectively filled the population vacuum left by it, populating huge swathes of Europe. The Black Death wiped out the population of the medieval West in the 14th century (the population of the cities themselves shrank by 50%), but it fortunately bypassed Poland (although today this thesis is questioned). Today, COVID has been able to reach everywhere in a blink of an eye.
Civil wars and very local political turbulence also have much broader implications today. Political upheavals in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan contributed to an unprecedented migration crisis in the European Union in 2015 and subsequent years. The 2011 Japan earthquake and Southeast Asian floods severely disrupted electronics supply chains. The failure of one bank can trigger a chain reaction that will deprive the life savings of tens of millions of people around the world, as was seen in 2008.
The butterfly effect works everywhere in today’s world.
And in the case of cataclysmic wars, the atomic era has led to the fact that even a local flashpoint, technical failure of weapons or emotional instability of one leader can lead to global Armageddon with unpredictable consequences for human civilization.
It’s all true. But our knowledge, collective wisdom, accumulated forces and resources should allow us to better predict disasters and cope better with their consequences.
Ferguson insists that disasters can only be predicted to a small extent. The distribution of black swans follows power law rules and does not follow the normal probability distribution. Sometimes we can predict a disaster, but rarely its size and consequences.
But I still can’t accept that the 2009 financial crisis was predicted by only a handful of economists, including probably none of the well-known authorities. Ferguson justifies that it is the complexity of economic and financial processes, that a small disruption can lead to a huge change, that cause-and-effect relationships are non-linear, that they are non-deterministic, and that the scale of the disruption cannot be predicted. Even in the era of big data? Even in the era of artificial intelligence?
The ordinary man may have poor predictions. Well, for example in Poland. The Polish man did not predict that the government’s fight against the effects of COVID would trigger an inflation spiral, but Mr. Morawiecki did and cleverly protected his savings against inflation.
Yes, the responsibility for anticipating and dealing with disasters falls primarily on leaders.
COVID-19 has confirmed a truth that has been known for millennia – some people cope with disasters better than others. And sometimes politics itself leads to disaster.
Ferguson does not hide his critical assessment of the ability of contemporary leaders to manage the effects of disasters. They can only be explained to a limited extent by the fact that every human brain poorly takes into account the black swan factor. Magical thinking (including religious thinking) dominates their description. But, according to Ferguson, disaster management is becoming more difficult today because our political systems increasingly promote people who do not realize the scale of the challenges they may face. He writes about them that they are individuals capable of anything, including extremely incompetent behaviour.
Contemporary political leaders are painfully affected by the phenomenon of “psychology of incompetence”. It consists of an inability to draw conclusions from history, a lack of imagination, a tendency to rely solely on knowledge gained from the last war or the last crisis, underestimating the threat, and finally delaying decisions or waiting until certainty is achieved, which never happens.
Of course, society itself is to some extent to blame, especially in democratic systems. Politics has become a boring, technocratic art of managing expectations. It was affected by a phenomenon that Norman Dixon once attributed to the command staff in the army: the realities of the military, characterized primarily by boredom and repetition, push away talented individuals, which means that only average people remain in the army, without a flash of intelligence or initiative, who climb up laboriously the career ladder. Quite similar is happening in politics.
The worst thing, however, is that the most useful feature of a politician in dealing with sudden disasters, that Jared Diamond called “constructive paranoia”, is not appreciated at all in electoral preferences.
And then there is the factor that Henry Kissinger once referred to as “the problem of guesswork.” Leaders are judged not by the actions they took to prevent disaster, but by the inconvenience of the preventive measures they introduced.
So leadership cannot be fetishized, but the leader is always the last resort and should not run away from responsibility.
Whether society will honestly evaluate the leadership’s effort is, unfortunately, another matter. Churchill, who won the war, saved Britain from loss of honour and occupation, lost the election after the end of the war. It became a good illustration of Kissinger’s “guessing problem.” Trump, who has been widely criticized for his failure to manage the COVID crisis, won the support of the crowds again.
And there is no simple answer to which system copes better with disasters. One can instinctively look for advantages in autocracies. Because they can mobilize resources faster, implement discipline more easily, and control public moods. Ferguson tried to argue that all authoritarian systems respond to disasters in the same way. And the most important thing for them, more important than the balance of losses, is maintaining control over society. Sometimes they focus more on information transmission (censoring bad information, and initially even blocking all information about the disaster) than on mitigating the effects of the disaster. During COVID-19, China initially behaved like the USSR right after the Chernobyl disaster, i.e. it covered up the scale of the disaster (and even, for some time, its very fact). It introduced draconian restrictions. And after some time it had to give in to social rebellion.
And democracies? Sorry, but in this case it turned out once again that democratic institutions do not provide sufficient protection against the effects of disasters.
Are disasters a test of the efficiency of the political system? Even if so, political elites rarely draw appropriate conclusions from this test. The post-COVID world has become neither more democratic nor more authoritarian. The European Union has neither become more integrated nor fallen apart. COVID may have exposed the weakness of all big players, not only the US, China, but also the European Union.
Ferguson proves that the best performers were “compact” countries, well-organized, but also demonstrating a good level of solidarity and local discipline: South Korea, Singapore, Israel, New Zealand. But somehow we don’t hear of such a model of a state being promoted anywhere else as an idea for organizing the world.
What should always interest a political scientist is the impact of disasters on political changes in the world. Throughout history, several at least fundamental changes have been associated with disasters. Supposedly, the great plague of Thucydides’ era contributed to the collapse of Athenian democracy. And did the already mentioned Justinian plague ruin the chance to rebuild the Roman Empire? It was already in a state of decline. And after Justinian, Byzantium survived for almost a millennium, albeit in a state of stagnation. Did the Spanish flu determine the fate of Europe after World War I? Doubtful. Although Ferguson insists that President Wilson was a different man after suffering from the flu, at Versailles he agreed to proposals from Europeans that he would have previously rejected with disgust. But would it have such an impact on the parameters of European and world peace?
So maybe COVID-19 was too mild a cataclysm to initiate a big change?
Ferguson sees a greater local catalytic force in earthquakes. The great devastating earthquake of 1755 in Portugal served as an impulse to build a new post-imperial development formula for the country. Similarly, the earthquake in Japan in 1891 became a mobilizing factor for the Meiji reforms. However, these theses could be discussed for a long time.
A more obvious candidate for the role of catharsis is, of course, wars, especially those that have been miserably lost. In the history of many countries, a lost war was the trigger for tectonic political changes (in recent history: Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary in 1918, Germany and Japan in 1945). And the war defeat was treated many times as the need for a new beginning in the development of the country, not only among the defeated ones.
Can contemporary conflicts, even the most systemic one for Europe – the Russian-Ukrainian one, play the role of catharsis, in any form? Or just a major nuclear conflict, God forbid? After all, half a century ago we reached the potential for collective suicide. Or will catharsis emerge from the West’s new Cold War with Russia and China? Ferguson puts forward a risky thesis that a new Cold War is not only inevitable, but even desirable because it will shake the US out of complacency. Is there no other way to mobilize the West for civilizational renewal?
Maybe climate change, when it leads to mass migrations and the disappearance of entire areas from the map of the earth, will raise the awareness of elites and societies and push them to take decisive reform actions?
Ferguson recalls that Turchin and Nefedov once proposed four variables causing socio-political changes. First, it is the number of population in relation to the capacity of the system. Secondly, it is the power of the state. Thirdly, it is the social structure (the size of the elite and the size of its consumption). Fourth, it is socio-political stability.
Following their logic, we can risk the thesis that disasters as such do not cause socio-political upheavals. At most, they can be their trigger and catalyst.
COVID-19 didn’t turn out to be like that. It did not cause any major social divisions. It did not even provide any serious ideological or religious impulse, as happened with disasters in the past. It did not mobilize any more serious reforms in international cooperation. Kissinger himself once said that pandemics of this scale require a vision of global cooperation. It was missing again. Even the fact that the World Health Organization emerged from the crisis with its reputation greatly damaged, and sometimes even became the subject of accusations that it acted primarily to wash away any blame for the pandemic from China (the head of the WHO was commonly referred to as a Chinese appointee), had no effect. It did not result in any bold reforms.
There is a saying among people that what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. Unfortunately, COVID did not strengthen any institutions of global cooperation.
Western political commentators have produced a lot of depressing assessments. And Western forecasters wallow in dystopian descriptions. The world, in a word, is heading towards an inevitable catastrophe. We have plenty of Cassandras. But politicians stopped caring about them a long time ago. The syndrome of cyclical history haunts political thinking. If there are disasters, the perturbations associated with them are inevitable.
Ferguson asks: what next disaster awaits us? A new epidemic? Global warming and catastrophic weather phenomena? Sun fluctuations? An asteroid on a collision course with Earth? Black hole? Genetic engineering? Internet of Things? Artificial intelligence? Nuclear war?
We have too many apocalyptic visions. Some of them even smell of gnosticism.
How to counteract them? Ferguson speculates: create a national warning office, introduce restrictions on technological progress?
And besserwissers of various stripes warn that the countermeasures themselves may pose a threat to humanity. So it’s better to just wait. Don’t panic. Fight against ideas of revolution in world governance. Because all these countermeasures will end in the creation of a large global “high-tech prison” equipped with a ubiquitous system of surveillance and control.
The nightmare of besserwissers is the use of the spectre of global cataclysms to push the idea of world government and introduce the institution of global totalitarianism. So what if national fragmentation exposes us to the risk of ineffectiveness? Even if it gives rise to hope that networking is a way to be more creative and find the best solutions.
What remains? Relying on the leadership of the US or China? One thing that COVID has shown is that these actual or potential leader states have been poor at dealing with such challenges.
You already know my opinion: supranational structures of global governance need to be strengthened. Even without the participation of the US, China or Russia.
It won’t happen on its own. The world needs some catharsis? Hopefully without too many collateral costs.
