TRIGGERnometry - Niall Ferguson on COVID, Lockdowns and Authoritarianism

00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kissin.

00:00:08.960 And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.

00:00:14.080 Does not get any more fascinating than the guest we have for you today. He's an accomplished

00:00:18.460 historian and a prolific author, Neil Ferguson. Welcome to Trigonometry.

00:00:22.460 It's great to be here, but of course you had my much more interesting wife the other day, 0.96

00:00:26.520 So I'm, you know, I know when to bask in reflected glory.

00:00:30.920 Well, we had the better half.

00:00:32.420 Now we've gone for the other half.

00:00:33.680 So we've got you as well.

00:00:34.640 Thank you very much.

00:00:35.500 It's more like a third, actually.

00:00:37.040 It's good to have the other third on the show, Neil.

00:00:39.760 Of course, you're very gracious to your brilliant wife,

00:00:43.040 but you are, as I said, a very interesting man,

00:00:45.880 a very accomplished author.

00:00:47.040 Your latest book is called Doom,

00:00:48.540 The Politics of Catastrophe.

00:00:50.360 We've had a couple of those in the last year, I feel.

00:00:54.000 What made you want to write the book?

00:00:56.520 Well, I'd been thinking of writing something about the history of disaster and dystopia before COVID-19 came along.

00:01:03.760 And I was trying to persuade my publisher that I could write a book that would use science fiction as well as history to describe our strange relationship with disaster.

00:01:15.320 And he was kind of giving me funny looks.

00:01:17.980 And then a disaster happened.

00:01:19.900 And I think I was quite quick to see back in January last year that this was going to be a big pandemic.

00:01:25.640 and I thought well this is surely the way to frame the book if we can if we can locate this

00:01:32.440 disaster in a broader historical perspective comparing with all the disasters in history

00:01:38.200 that will help readers understand what they are going through so that was the reason for writing

00:01:44.160 and publishing before the disaster is over clearly COVID-19 is not over but I felt like a lot of

00:01:50.160 people were just disorientated and there was a tendency in the media last year particularly to

00:01:56.400 think that this was going to be comparable in its scale to the great influenza pandemic of 1918-19

00:02:03.600 or even to the Black Death some people mentioned that but it was it was obvious a year ago that it

00:02:09.140 wasn't going to be that bad it was going to be bad but not really really bad so there's the need I

00:02:14.660 think to put these kinds of event in historical perspective and that's really what the book tries

00:02:19.740 to do. And the opening sentence to your entire book, I found so powerful, Neil, and I'm going

00:02:27.300 to paraphrase it and butcher it, and I apologise in advance, but the sentence was something along

00:02:31.740 the lines of, we've never been more fearful of the future whilst knowing so little about the past.

00:02:39.060 Why did you write that sentence and why did you open your book with it?

00:02:42.400 Well, I think there is a great sense of fearfulness and uncertainty in our world today. And often that leads to great overreactions and extreme responses to challenges that previous generations would not have been so thrown by.

00:03:03.500 And part of the reason, I think, for that is that we are historically extraordinarily ignorant. 0.97

00:03:10.660 Now, of course, you could say we've always been historically ignorant. Nobody studies history. 0.98

00:03:14.580 But I do think something has happened to our relationship to history.

00:03:19.000 And it's particularly obvious when you look at young people because of the way history is taught.

00:03:24.180 And history has been decoupled from traditional ideas of what we should learn about the past.

00:03:31.060 and increasingly it embraces a sort of activist agenda so people are not in fact taught to think

00:03:37.340 about the past as anything other than a series of terrible lapses from political correctness which

00:03:42.620 we should all disapprove of this is not a great way of thinking about about human history uh just

00:03:48.360 going back in time and going terrible terrible racist i mean that's not how you should think

00:03:54.120 about the human past but it's how i'm afraid more and more our kids and indeed now young adults are

00:03:59.120 taught. So the idea I had was, let's try to locate what's happening in a proper historical

00:04:05.600 perspective, not condescending to past generations. And when you do that, you realize that it's not

00:04:11.480 the end of the world. Now, the media, especially the internet-driven media, have a tremendous

00:04:17.100 incentive to represent every crisis as the end of the world. So not only is COVID-19 the Black 0.92

00:04:23.420 death. But if a bunch of lunatics storm the US Capitol on January the 6th, it's the civil war. 0.95

00:04:30.900 And this kind of inflation of historical significance is what I'm trying to push

00:04:37.600 back against, because it allows a kind of hysteria to build about each breaking news event,

00:04:43.740 which is clearly not helpful to rational responses by voters and by politicians.

00:04:50.260 It's an interesting point you make, Neil, particularly about the media, because this

00:04:53.740 is something I've been thinking about quite a lot.

00:04:56.140 We have research here in the UK, which shows that when polled, British people on average

00:05:01.940 think that about 10% of the public have been killed by COVID-19, which would make about

00:05:06.500 6 million people.

00:05:07.760 The actual figure is 0.1%.

00:05:10.280 And in America, there's been some polling across different media platforms, CNN and

00:05:15.240 MSNBC.

00:05:15.820 I think people who regularly watch those think that you're 50 percent, 50 percent of people who get COVID are likely to be hospitalized when, again, the figures are nothing like that.

00:05:26.600 So you talk about the overreaction. Do you think that Western governments in particular overreacted to the pandemic?

00:05:35.140 Well, they first underreacted and then overreacted. I think that would be the right way to put it.

00:05:39.500 But there was a way to get this right that averted mass death and also averted lockdowns.

00:05:46.360 It was what they did in Taiwan. 0.69

00:05:48.060 The Taiwanese, who have every reason to be suspicious of their neighbours, the People's Republic of China,

00:05:53.900 very quickly realised that something wicked was coming their way from Wuhan, restricted travel,

00:06:00.140 but more importantly, actually, ramped up testing because it was quite easy to test for this virus early on.

00:06:05.880 sequencing the virus had proved to be very, very easy. They also had a system of integrated contact

00:06:12.500 tracing using phones. And so they were able to quickly identify who had it and who might have

00:06:17.840 spread it, and then to isolate people who were infected. And as a result of this very rapid

00:06:22.820 response, 12 people, a dozen, have died of COVID in Taiwan, which is right next door to where this

00:06:28.780 thing began. So we know there was a right way of doing this. The South Koreans also did very well.

00:06:33.520 There were a bunch of countries that were quick off the mark and were therefore able to avert lockdowns. Taiwan had the least stringent government measures of any country when you look at the Oxford Blavatnik School stringency index.

00:06:47.320 So that tells us that what happened in the UK and the US was clearly suboptimal. What happened was that the public health officials dithered around, and so did the politicians, but I think we should recognise that ultimately sounding the alarm about a pandemic is not the job of the Prime Minister, it's the job of the people whose job it is to worry about public health.

00:07:08.840 The public health officials dithered around at both sides of the Atlantic, January, February, first half of April, and then another Neil Ferguson, I want to make it clear that I'm not here, before the hate mail begins, the NEIL Ferguson at Imperial College London, the epidemiologist, published a paper mid-March saying, if we don't lock down, and he could have said, like the Chinese, who by that time had completely shut everything down,

00:07:38.840 If we don't lock down, we're going to have half a million dead people in Britain and we're going to have 2.2 million dead in the US.

00:07:44.440 And politicians read this and thought, oh, God, we better do this.

00:07:48.960 We better shut everything down.

00:07:50.540 So there were extraordinary measures taken from mid-March onwards, like shelter in place orders here in California, locking people in their homes because the initial opportunity to shut the virus down had been missed.

00:08:05.420 And then I think you can have a debate about whether the lockdowns were overkill.

00:08:11.560 And I think many respects they were.

00:08:14.580 But what you can't, I think, say is that we should have done nothing at that point, because

00:08:19.420 by that point, we really had got ourselves into a serious mess with the virus spreading

00:08:24.340 rapidly all across the US and all across Europe.

00:08:27.680 We had to do something.

00:08:28.540 I think we did more things than we needed to, because those lockdowns were a very, very

00:08:32.840 blunt instrument.

00:08:33.600 And we also, of course, couldn't really follow Neil Ferguson's advice because he said you have to do this until there are vaccines that nobody in their right mind could have locked down the US or UK economy for the entire period that it took to get the vaccines available.

00:08:54.480 and so what we did was we locked down and then we realized we'd completely created the economy and

00:08:59.160 we had to start lifting restrictions and then play whack-a-mole with reinfections so looking

00:09:05.260 back on it this was a pretty big public policy failure to say that it was going to be a failure

00:09:12.780 at the time was hard but i was writing a weekly column back in those days for the sunday times

00:09:17.620 And I do remember thinking that ultimately we'd gone from too little to too much, and that ensured we had lots of mortality, but also huge economic and social disruption. Definitely the worst of both worlds.

00:09:31.200 And you say it's the worst of both worlds. When I was reading your book, you were talking about

00:09:37.240 the relationship that we have as a society with death. Do you think part of the problem with

00:09:44.480 COVID-19 was we had a moral crisis surrounding this virus? I think part of the reason for

00:09:52.160 writing the book is to get people to think a little bit more realistically about death.

00:09:58.400 there were moments in the discussion last year when you'd have thought that the job of politicians

00:10:03.140 was to prevent anybody from dying and a single death is too many hang on a second people die

00:10:08.820 every day that's that's the nature of our species only 13 of deaths since the pandemic began in the

00:10:17.860 united states have been caused by i mean most people actually die of other things once they get

00:10:21.940 up above age around 70. Even in a pandemic, excess mortality was certainly significant,

00:10:29.800 probably 18% in the US and UK, if you just look at the whole period since this thing began. And

00:10:36.420 that's a bad outcome. I mean, clearly, it's a bad outcome for how over half a million Americans

00:10:41.260 to die and what 120, 130,000 Brits to die, but relative to the population,

00:10:46.720 We're not talking about the Black Death, just to be clear. In the Black Death, something around 40% of the population of most European countries died. The global shock of COVID so far, the percentage of the world's population killed by this disease is about 0.04%.

00:11:07.360 So the Black Death was three orders of magnitude bigger than this. And if you take the 1918-19 influenza, it was a huge calamity, something in the region of 40 million people died. I mean, for that number today, just adjusting for population, you'd be looking at 160 million deaths, as opposed to what we're looking at at the moment, which is three, and we might well get to five or maybe more by the time it's all over. But it's still not, it's not one of history's really big pandemics.

00:11:33.980 So one of the things that's striking, I think, is that in the face of excess mortality, we don't have a good way of calibrating.

00:11:44.000 And that's because we haven't got a good sense of what a bad year looks like.

00:11:47.820 Now, in Britain, there have been years as bad as 2020 for excess mortality.

00:11:57.140 I'll tell you what they've been in the recent past.

00:12:00.200 1918, 1940, and 1951. Now, your listeners will immediately get 1918, World War I, plus the big

00:12:10.360 Spanish influenza. 1940 is a no-brainer. Obviously, it's World War II and the catastrophic first 0.93

00:12:18.340 phase of the war. But what happened in 1951? 1951 was as bad a year as 2020 for excess mortality

00:12:27.360 in the uk and that's because there was a really bad outbreak of influenza it wasn't global but

00:12:33.280 it was very severe in england especially around liverpool for any scousers listening we've

00:12:39.160 forgotten it it's completely forgotten uh because people in the 1950s kind of expected there to be

00:12:46.140 bad years uh it'd been through world war ii uh there was a lot more still to come there were

00:12:52.140 many infectious diseases that we hadn't got under control polio for example uh and so people

00:12:58.400 accepted that there was in the nature of things going to be the odd very bad winter and by the

00:13:05.980 way if you just look at months of excess mortality yeah april 2020 was a very bad month in britain

00:13:12.020 but actually it's not even a top 10 bad month since 1970 and we got the data going back that

00:13:19.760 far. So actually, in my lifetime, there have been significantly worse months for excess mortality

00:13:26.800 than the worst month of COVID last year. Part of the point of doom is just to kind of get that

00:13:32.580 sense of perspective, because you have to know whether it's worth shutting everything down

00:13:38.560 in relation to the likely excess mortality that you face, because you don't want to

00:13:44.940 impose huge unintended costs on society for the sake of a bad winter. And in effect, I think we

00:13:53.900 may well have done that. We will never know quite what the death toll would have been if we hadn't

00:13:59.240 done lockdowns. And so Neil Ferguson's always going to say that he saved, I don't know how many

00:14:03.240 lives, maybe a quarter of a million or something like that. But my sense is that that's probably

00:14:09.320 not right and that in truth we could have got through this with significantly less restriction

00:14:17.080 on people's social and working lives and i'll never be able to prove that nor will he be able

00:14:22.780 to prove that he saved them that he saved england well the one thing that we do know though neil

00:14:27.780 don't we is that a lot of the the consequences of lockdown which no one wants to talk about

00:14:32.940 have actually been resulted in deaths as well uh that's suicides that's cancer that's missed heart

00:14:38.480 people not going to accident and emergency to get treatment for what then turns out to be a heart

00:14:43.680 attack. So yes, maybe we'll never know. But what troubles me is not necessarily what the numbers

00:14:49.820 end up being, but rather the fact that we seem to have made a decision on lockdown without any

00:14:55.300 regard for the unintended consequences whatsoever. No one, people are pretending that that side of

00:15:01.840 the formula just didn't exist. And obviously it did. Yeah. I mean, it's clear that a lot of the

00:15:06.360 excess mortality last year was not people dying of COVID. There were a lot of other things that

00:15:12.140 happened that would not otherwise have happened. We know, for example, in the US that there's been

00:15:16.560 a big increase in deaths from overdose. And then there are all the kind of not so obvious costs.

00:15:23.400 I mean, a year of education has been taken away from people in California public schools. That

00:15:28.060 is to say, broadly speaking, the poorer kids in California society. That will cost them

00:15:35.000 for the rest of their lives. So I do think you can fairly say that the Imperial College

00:15:40.700 epidemiologists said, here's what's going to happen if we don't lock down. And by the way,

00:15:45.540 we're epidemiologists, so don't bother us with the unintended consequences, especially not the

00:15:50.700 economic ones, because that's not what we do. But here's a kind of way of saving lives.

00:15:55.180 I think those calculations were very, very crudely done. And they were based on a couple

00:16:01.780 of assumptions that were wrong. One, the infection fatality rate, which I think they got wrong

00:16:06.820 because they said it's going to be 0.9% of the people who get it who die. But that actually was

00:16:12.480 a bit misleading because of the enormous variance in the infection mortality rate by age. 80% of

00:16:20.360 people who died of COVID in the US were 65 and older. And the older you get, the higher the rate.

00:16:27.660 So it's essentially very unusual in history to have a pandemic that is ageist.

00:16:32.340 Most pandemics kill the very young and the very old about the same amount.

00:16:38.120 And some actually go after people in the prime of life.

00:16:41.260 Interestingly, 1980, 19, that.

00:16:44.560 And 1957, 58, increased mortality amongst teenagers in the United States by something like a third.

00:16:52.000 So we had this kind of benign pandemic that was generous enough to leave young people alone. 0.96

00:16:57.180 mostly and and concentrate on killing people who were nearing the end of their lives so under those

00:17:04.440 circumstances and we knew that by the way in march because the chinese data were already there and

00:17:09.680 you see very clearly that this was the ageist virus knowing that we probably could have come

00:17:14.540 up with something smarter than shutting everybody in their homes and stopping them going to work

00:17:20.540 and i do remember long discussions with uh with people in different fields trying to figure out

00:17:26.760 what a smart plan would look like, because obviously a smart plan would have protected

00:17:31.040 the elderly. And that was one of the things we didn't do, because we let huge numbers of people 1.00

00:17:36.420 die in elderly care homes by not worrying about their vulnerability and actually shipping people 0.99

00:17:42.860 with the virus to elderly care homes, making sure that very large numbers of people there were

00:17:48.260 affected. So these are the little mistakes that end up having really, really large costs. Now,

00:17:54.740 So remember, my key point is that we should have been Taiwan. By the time we got to mid-March, we'd already kind of blown it. But I think having blown it, we could still have been smarter than we were in the way that we tried to deal with the pandemic. 0.97

00:18:08.180 And I sense that the costs, when we finally do a proper cost-benefit analysis, the costs of lockdown will turn out to be much higher than people thought at the beginning.

00:18:18.360 and you say that and i i'm in an agreement with you has it surprised you neil how we seem to have

00:18:25.900 politicized this virus you know both sides have done it it it's a bit it's been really shocking

00:18:32.820 to me and by the way just to add it didn't happen straight away there was about a month somewhere

00:18:37.680 around february march when it hadn't quite broken either way and people on both sides of the normal

00:18:43.960 political divide were not sort of there wasn't the same alignment whereas now it's very clear

00:18:49.160 if you're on the left you're pro-lockdown and on your right you're probably not um yeah so talk to

00:18:54.400 us about the politicization of this it's one of the striking differences between our time and the

00:19:00.400 1950s uh especially in the u.s because if you think it's politicized in britain you ain't seen

00:19:07.060 nothing. Here, every aspect of this public health crisis became politicised. Mask wearing,

00:19:14.920 potential remedies for the disease, and then of course the vaccine. And vaccine resistance is

00:19:21.000 much more stubborn in the US than it is in the UK, i.e. resistance to getting the vaccine. So

00:19:27.440 what went wrong? Back in the 1950s, it really wasn't controversial that getting a vaccine for

00:19:34.100 a contagious virus would be good. So when the Asian flu, as it was then called, struck, 0.99

00:19:40.320 the federal government in the US prioritised getting a vaccine. And that was really all they

00:19:45.040 did, because they recognised that they couldn't shut everything down. So schools stayed open,

00:19:49.080 workplaces stayed open. Yeah, there was excess mortality. But they got the vaccine done really

00:19:54.040 quickly, within a matter of a few months, from developing a vaccine to getting it into people's

00:20:00.260 arms faster, in other words, than we've done. And it wasn't controversial. Nobody was saying

00:20:05.200 that it was a Republican vaccine because Eisenhower was president. Here, I think you can see

00:20:12.000 he illustrated a theme of my last book. The last book, The Square and the Tower, said the way that

00:20:17.660 the internet has evolved as our new public sphere has exacerbated polarization because on the

00:20:25.780 internet you're incentivized to have extreme views and to disseminate fake news because the

00:20:31.960 internet platforms the facebooks and the googles um are incentivized by their business model

00:20:37.880 to basically promote clickbait that's how you get eyeballs to stay on the screen long enough to see

00:20:44.780 ads it wasn't like that in the 1950s there's a finite amount of terrestrial television there's

00:20:50.600 radio, there's local papers. The window, the spectrum of information in news is much more

00:20:57.480 limited. And the crazy stuff really doesn't get much beyond men with green ink writing letters.

00:21:04.620 The internet's created this entirely different news system where news and entertainment have

00:21:10.520 kind of fused. And the incentive is always to go out on the extreme to try to get those eyeballs

00:21:16.820 to linger just a bit longer on the screen. So you're right at the beginning, Constantine,

00:21:21.560 it's very true. At the beginning, it was actually liberal media who condemned Trump for wanting to

00:21:28.500 restrict travel from China. It was in the New York Times and the Washington Post that they

00:21:33.160 ran articles saying it's just the seasonal flu. The president's a terrible racist for wanting to 0.98

00:21:38.380 do this. And it took a while for that all to flip. It really took until March for the position to 0.99

00:21:44.940 become liberals like lockdowns and and conservatives like herd immunity so this was absurd it led to

00:21:52.320 absurd debates and the public health officials made matters worse by changing their story on masks

00:21:59.100 for reasons that were transparently transparently mendacious oh oh you don't need a mask because we

00:22:05.200 actually don't have enough and we need them for the doctors and then actually change a plan you

00:22:10.000 need to wear two, make it three. I mean, can you blame people for becoming sceptical about the

00:22:15.580 utterances of people like Anthony Fauci? So we've ended up in a terribly, I think, a suboptimal

00:22:22.900 situation in which the public is sceptical about official guidance. It goes to the internet in

00:22:30.620 search of better guidance, and it ends up down conspiracy theory wormholes that tell you the

00:22:36.440 vaccine is Bill Gates's plan for total mind control. I mean, the number of people who believe

00:22:41.880 that stuff is truly shocking. I knew the Americans had a weakness for conspiracy theories already.

00:22:47.300 I wrote about it in The Square and the Tower. Well, the pandemic was just a glorious opportunity

00:22:52.420 for the conspiracy theory networks to go crazy. And sure enough, that's why there's so much

00:22:58.780 reluctance to get the vaccine, especially amongst conservatives.

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00:24:10.120 Neil, do you think part of the problem is, and it's going to sound flippant, is that we've all been driven insane.

00:24:17.220 You know, we've been locked in our houses.

00:24:20.340 We've, you know, our movements have been curtailed and the ability to see family hooked up to social media for 24 hours a day.

00:24:28.000 it's driven us all mad hasn't it well it's not a frivolous point francis because actually

00:24:34.120 mental health has become its own pandemic you are doing things to people that are calculated

00:24:42.280 to put them under psychological strain and that the data uh on mental illness are really shocking

00:24:49.200 it's become far far more of a problem uh than it was before not surprisingly as you rightly say if

00:24:57.520 you lock people up in their homes, they are unfortunately deprived of things that are good

00:25:04.680 for sanity. We are a social species. We're not really designed to just be stuck in cells with

00:25:12.320 a very small number of people. That's why prison is punishment. But if you place the entire population

00:25:16.840 under house arrest, unless you're somebody with a large and spacious home with a decent garden,

00:25:23.720 um it's really rather stressful uh and i i do think that this is is one of those those costs

00:25:30.680 that will only gradually become obvious but i mean we already have pretty good evidence that

00:25:35.460 this has been a huge psychological strain on societies and and i you know spent much of

00:25:41.980 the pandemic in a in a pretty relaxed place montana uh listening to my kids and my mother

00:25:48.880 talked about life in england uh which i had to do over zoom made me realize that things really were

00:25:56.080 much more restricted in the uk so yeah i think i think this is a very important point and it means

00:26:02.780 that we we have to acknowledge that there were at least two pandemics going on simultaneously

00:26:09.280 one was the virus uh the other was let me call it the sort of pandemic of the mind

00:26:15.800 And this pandemic of the mind ranged from people who are pretty well adjusted in relatively comfortable circumstances feeling miserable to people in much more difficult circumstances with perhaps already some mental strain feeling really mentally ill.

00:26:34.140 And that second pandemic will have all kinds of lasting consequences.

00:26:39.400 Of course, it made people susceptible to crazy ideas.

00:26:42.780 If you're already under some stress and somebody tells you, here, did you know that this is actually a pandemic devised to put microchips into your bloodstream?

00:26:52.420 Under the circumstances of 2020, a surprisingly large number of people will believe that.

00:26:57.520 Now, rewind to the 1340s. Biggest, probably the biggest pandemic in all of history, the Black Death. Sure enough, what we find in the 1340s is not only that there's mass death, but there are also crazy ideas that spread amazingly fast.

00:27:13.580 For example, the flagellant orders are founded and people wander around, men exclusively wander around, whipping themselves to try to ward off the next contagion.

00:27:25.100 I was fascinated when I read about the flagellants many years ago in Norman Cone's great book, The Pursuit of the Millennium, because there was a certain amount of that kind of mood in the United States in 2020.

00:27:38.660 The Black Lives Matter protests ostensibly were about police brutality.

00:27:43.580 But if you looked at it with the detachment of the historian, it looked a lot like the flagellant orders processing through European cities in the 1340s in an act of expiation.

00:27:55.400 You know, if we can only punish ourselves for the racism of the past, somehow we'll ward off divine wrath.

00:28:02.900 There was something of that about 2020. So there was a pandemic of the mind in our time, just as it had been in the Middle Ages.

00:28:10.560 I did tweet recently that the only thing that surprises me about this pandemic is no one has decided to blame the Jews yet.

00:28:17.040 Give it time, because you're quite right that in the 1340s, there were terrible outbreaks of anti-Semitic violence in multiple European cities.

00:28:27.080 And these events are very shocking. Jewish communities in some German cities were kind of burnt to death or there was mass murder in some other form.

00:28:35.540 Now, what's interesting is that one manifestation of the plague of the mind, what we call wokeism for short, all that complex of radical left ideas that seems to flourish in American academia these days, I mean, that has its anti-Semitic side to it.

00:28:55.400 There's no question.

00:28:56.240 So I think the connection that you've just suggested, jokingly, is kind of already being made, I'm afraid.

00:29:03.260 Great news.

00:29:04.460 But Neil, let's move on a little bit.

00:29:06.980 I want to talk about China.

00:29:09.500 And the reason I want to talk about it is,

00:29:11.620 can you as a historian, first of all, just very briefly,

00:29:14.980 are lockdowns something that we've inherited from the past?

00:29:18.440 In other words, this is something that people have done prior?

00:29:21.420 Or is it the Chinese came up with it and now everyone's doing it? 0.99

00:29:26.660 There's never been anything like this.

00:29:28.460 In the great influenza pandemics of the 20th century,

00:29:31.460 nobody thought about shutting everybody up in their homes it wasn't an option because you

00:29:35.300 couldn't work from home in 1957 uh and nor in 1918 that just wasn't an option for most people

00:29:42.060 whereas now something like a third of jobs in the u.s can be done at home that's because the internet

00:29:46.940 has made it possible basically sorry to interrupt so what we've done and just uh i'm a layman on

00:29:53.900 this but what we've done is we've taken the response of an authoritarian communist dictatorship

00:30:00.440 halfway around the world and imported it into Western liberal democracy entirely.

00:30:08.160 Yeah, we didn't weld people into their apartments,

00:30:10.220 but we might as well have done, with no precedent for this whatsoever.

00:30:15.900 Yeah, but they've got good food, so.

00:30:17.720 Well, Neil Ferguson, the other Neil Ferguson,

00:30:21.960 admitted this in an interview in The Times the other day.

00:30:24.580 I mean, he said the Chinese kind of gave us permission to do this

00:30:27.920 and we weren't sure that we could do it, not being a communist regime. And it turned out that we

00:30:32.380 could. That's the really remarkable thing about what happened last year. I think it's right to

00:30:38.900 say that we copied the Chinese model. Because if you look back at the debates of March 2020,

00:30:47.520 there weren't really many examples of lockdowns to go on. All you could see was that things were

00:30:53.300 going horribly wrong in North Italy. It was a terror that the same thing was going to happen

00:30:58.480 in England. And there was a Chinese model for repressing the virus that was getting a lot of

00:31:05.200 publicity, because the Chinese were rather proud of the fact that they'd been able to impose such 1.00

00:31:10.120 draconian restrictions on their people. Now, it's actually impossible for us to replicate what the

00:31:15.620 Chinese did, because the Chinese Communist Party has an active member in every apartment block,

00:31:22.460 in every chinese city whose job it is to report on on his or her neighbors and that we don't yet

00:31:29.180 have certainly have lots of nosy parkers that's that's part of english life since time immemorial

00:31:35.100 but they're not members of the communist party and they don't report to big brother so what about

00:31:39.940 covid marshals well of course we have a certain tradition in british life of of restricting

00:31:47.080 freedom in an emergency, which goes back to World War II. We can all remember, even if it's only

00:31:54.500 from watching Dad's Army, that there was a certain kind of person who quite enjoyed enforcing the

00:31:59.800 blackout regulations. And those same people or their grandchildren suddenly had a wonderful

00:32:03.840 opportunity to be busybodies about COVID. But I think you're right to identify that we basically

00:32:11.600 copied the Chinese lockdown model. But that was the wrong China to copy. The right China was the 0.86

00:32:18.400 Republic of China, Taiwan, which had done the winning combination of mass testing very early

00:32:24.740 on, contact tracing, and isolation of the infected. But the Taiwanese were basically ignored by the

00:32:31.540 World Health Organization, because it's so much enthralled to Beijing. And so nobody paid much

00:32:36.540 attention to what the Taiwanese were doing. It was actually brilliant. And it worked really, 0.88

00:32:39.940 really well. So we copied the wrong China, unfortunately. Let me just follow up on this,

00:32:44.760 Francis. So if this is what we've done, and I care passionately about civil liberties. I come

00:32:49.920 from the Soviet Union, where we had very few of them. I know how precious they are and what

00:32:55.080 happens when they're not protected by society. As a historian, what is the impact of adopting

00:33:04.600 wholesale and authoritarian methodology into a liberal society? Because it strikes me that in

00:33:10.640 the context of China, this may not have even been seen particularly by the people as something

00:33:16.160 vastly different from their day-to-day lives. But in the West, this is unprecedented. And it worries

00:33:22.800 me that we may have broken something. The contract that the public have with government

00:33:27.420 may be affected for a very long time by this. What do you think about that?

00:33:31.560 A hugely important question. At the end of the book, I say the biggest danger that we face is not actually climate change. I take that seriously, but it's not the biggest danger. The biggest danger that we face is totalitarianism, because totalitarianism was responsible for more avoidable death in the 20th century than anything else.

00:33:53.020 The totalitarian regimes killed their own people and they killed other people, and they did it on a massive scale.

00:33:57.740 Whether you're talking about Stalin, Hitler or Mao, those regimes were responsible for an insane amount of avoidable death.

00:34:08.320 Unfortunately, we did not kill off totalitarianism at the end of the first Cold War because it survived to fight another day in China.

00:34:17.260 And not only did it survive, but it then flourished, has gone from strength to strength by exploiting the benefits of the market economy without sacrificing dominance of the one party state.

00:34:31.580 And unfortunately, copying China is a way of importing into free societies the kind of software of the unfree society. I dread to see any more articles of the form, we should learn from China, it's going to be the Chinese century, look how smart they are. 0.96

00:34:52.940 because that's just an invitation to import totalitarian ways of doing things.

00:35:00.060 Yes, in the past, in time of emergency, we have restricted civil liberties.

00:35:04.980 We did it in both world wars, quite drastically, actually.

00:35:08.420 But everybody understood in the world wars that it was a temporary state of emergency

00:35:13.640 that would be ended as soon as the war was over.

00:35:16.860 The problem with doing it in a pandemic is that it's quite easy to argue that,

00:35:21.900 In fact, it's never going to be over because the virus will always be out there.

00:35:26.800 And this is one of the typically totalitarian sounding slogans you hear.

00:35:32.580 There's no safety. It's not over until there are no cases at all anywhere in the world.

00:35:37.980 Now, if you make that argument, you will be able to justify COVID restrictions forever.

00:35:42.720 And I do think this has been an opportunity for a power grab by state bureaucracies,

00:35:49.220 even in countries that are nominally under conservative leadership. In the US, it's very

00:35:54.840 obvious. In the US, the Democratic Party at the state level sees the opportunity to expand its

00:36:01.500 control over citizens. California is a strange place. It's a one-party state, oddly enough, here.

00:36:07.060 And the Californian Democrats really do quite like locking people up in their homes. They seem to

00:36:11.940 enjoy it, rather as I think the Scottish National Party do. And this is a very disturbing tendency

00:36:18.200 to me because it suggests that it's possible to have totalitarian behavior without a big brother

00:36:25.320 like dictatorship because there are people who actually enjoy it if that's the case there are

00:36:31.220 two ways in which we're threatened by totalitarianism one if china becomes the world 0.99

00:36:35.220 power if china becomes dominant we're threatened by it but we're also threatened by totalitarianism 0.98

00:36:41.140 from within because there do seem to be people who quite enjoy informing on their neighbors or

00:36:46.400 their colleagues. And there do seem to be bureaucrats for whom there's no greater pleasure

00:36:51.520 than to impose new restrictions on individual liberty. And has that surprised you, Neil,

00:36:56.240 that there's some people who grew up in the tolerant liberal West who've got a real thirst

00:37:01.820 for authoritarianism? I wish I could say that I'd seen this coming and it doesn't surprise me,

00:37:08.860 because obviously we love to be prescient. But I did not anticipate, particularly when I went

00:37:15.120 into academic life back in the 1980s that universities would become the places where

00:37:20.660 free speech was most limited in in our societies that i did not see coming and i didn't see it

00:37:27.320 coming even even 10 years ago so i i think one of the things i've learned in the last few years

00:37:33.680 really i think it began to dawn on me in about 2016 is that you can have totalitarianism from

00:37:40.420 the grassroots up. It's not necessary to have a Stalin for people to start to engage in the

00:37:48.320 behavior we associate with Stalin's Soviet Union, that culture where you inform on people and

00:37:54.540 officials then use non-due process to cancel people. Cancellation is a little like being

00:38:03.280 purged in the Soviet Union. The more I think about it, the more it seems to me there are

00:38:08.300 totalitarian behaviors which kind of originated in academic life that are spreading outwards into

00:38:14.320 the rest of society you know there's there are aspects of of university life that one sees

00:38:19.840 which are very reminiscent of the cultural revolution in china where professors are sort

00:38:24.560 of accused by their students and have to humiliate themselves with apologies and then are struggled

00:38:30.140 with uh and then purged cancelled from the internet all of this is going on without there being big

00:38:36.860 brother. And that I don't think I would have predicted, even as recently as the 2015.

00:38:42.740 And Neil, since you bring it up, it's slightly aside from the subject of your book, but we'd

00:38:47.580 be remiss not to ask you about this. Depending on who you talk to, we recently had Mary Eberstadt

00:38:54.400 on the show who talked about identity politics stemming from the sexual revolution, the breakdown

00:38:59.860 of the family, the breakdown of community. You get atomized individuals. As a result,

00:39:06.080 people look for belonging and they look to their identity. Other people would argue it's the long

00:39:11.780 march through the institutions, the neo-Marxist invade and infiltrate the university and education

00:39:19.240 system and indoctrinate young people with that. Where does this woke culture come from, in your

00:39:25.380 opinion, as a historian? I think there's some truth in both those hypotheses, but I'm strongly

00:39:30.860 attracted to a phrase that a left-wing but left liberal writer came up with, this is Mati Iglesias's

00:39:38.940 Great Awokening. Awokism has a religious quality to it, and in some ways it's part of a long 0.96

00:39:45.400 American tradition of periodic religious revivals when the country's Puritan roots manifest

00:39:51.600 themselves. And there is a sort of part of American culture that does yearn to ostracize

00:40:00.360 people if not to actually burn witches and i think one of the ironies of all of this is that

00:40:07.040 what margaret atwood envisaged in the handmaid's tale which was a kind of right-wing uh dystopia

00:40:16.200 has actually happened or begun to happen on the left instead uh and i i think i think that's

00:40:23.520 That's really the crux of the matter. This has a quasi-religious quality to it. And one of the signs of this is that the belief system involves various strange uses of language and strange rituals that are designed really to separate the elect, the true believers in wokeism, from everybody else.

00:40:49.000 Now, you said this was a little bit of a sideline, but it's not actually. If you're talking about the history of disaster as doom does, it's clear that one of the most disastrous periods in modern history was, in fact, in the 17th century when the Thirty Years' War happened.

00:41:09.180 And the Thirty Years' War was a kind of culmination of about 130 years of deep religious division, beginning with Martin Luther's Reformation.

00:41:19.960 And there's a sense in which we're kind of in that world today, even if it's not religion so much as the secular religions of politics that are really being fought over.

00:41:31.320 But we've left behind that period that I feel I belong to, the period in which you could have free speech and you debated, and you debated pretty aggressively. But there was a sort of argument plus evidence approach to resolving differences.

00:41:48.640 When you go back to the 17th century, that's not possible because you just say that the other side are heretics. And what do you do with heretics? You burn them. So we are in a kind of much more religious moment than we perhaps realise because we assume that we're talking about politics. Actually, the way people talk about politics in an American university is much more like the way they talked about religion in the 17th century.

00:42:14.980 And doesn't it also give voice to the lie that we tell ourselves

00:42:18.780 that we live in a post-religious society?

00:42:21.100 We don't need religion. We have science.

00:42:23.520 But this embrace of wokeism shows us that we actually do.

00:42:27.720 We need a belief system in order to adhere to it, to give us meaning.

00:42:32.120 It is not the case, sadly, that G.K. Chesterton said

00:42:35.780 the trouble with atheism is not that men believe in nothing,

00:42:40.520 it's that they believe in anything.

00:42:41.880 He didn't actually say that.

00:42:42.920 That's one of these quotes attributed to him that nobody can quite claim to have authored.

00:42:48.940 But it's a very good insight. And Chesterton thought something along these lines.

00:42:54.380 Post-Christian Europe and increasingly post-Christian America, sadly for Richard Dawkins and other militant atheists,

00:43:03.660 is not a place where the principles of the Enlightenment are universally embraced.

00:43:09.640 uh quite the opposite um in fact these these post-christian uh societies seem to be amenable

00:43:17.820 to all kinds of uh wild superstitious belief we talked a little bit about conspiracy theories

00:43:24.900 uh before but it's sort of broader than that and people who think that they're invoking

00:43:30.760 the science and this is a dreadful uh term actually because there is no such thing as

00:43:37.560 the science, are very often, in fact, enthralled to some legacy religious belief, of which the

00:43:45.500 best example is clearly the millenarianism, the belief in the imminent end of the world,

00:43:51.080 which has found a new home in radical environmentalism. So it's impossible not to

00:43:56.540 see as an historian the religious undertone of much that someone like Greta Thunberg says,

00:44:02.380 And indeed, at times, she seems like some child saint from the Middle Ages sent to warn of the impending apocalypse.

00:44:11.120 So, yeah, I think one of the odder things that the pandemic revealed was that the people who talk most about the science are, in fact, anything but scientific in their approach, are, in fact, I think enthralled to some version of religion without even being aware of it.

00:44:28.700 But where do we go from here, Neil? Because you invoke the example of the 30-year war, as you say, the culmination of a longer religious struggle. You make the parallel with our modern society now. Where are we going?

00:44:43.640 one of the conclusions of the book is that we nearly always are well prepared for the wrong

00:44:48.960 disaster and one can sense that enormous efforts are going to go in over the next 10 years to

00:44:55.440 discussing climate change again which was what we were doing back in January 2020 when a pandemic

00:45:01.800 was actually beginning I think we've decided that that's going to be our disaster and we're going

00:45:07.260 to spend a lot of time and energy preparing for it. And history warns us that you don't get the

00:45:13.980 disaster that you prepare for. So where do we go from here? I think the biggest, nearest, most likely

00:45:21.560 danger is some kind of major conflict. And it can take a number of different forms, but I'd put my

00:45:28.360 money on a US-China conflict because all the ingredients are there now for a superpower

00:45:33.520 showdown, which nobody will quite intend to escalate, but which will nevertheless do so.

00:45:39.100 I think that that's a disaster we're not giving nearly enough thought to, partly because we've

00:45:45.280 got used to wars being small things that don't really affect us directly. We've forgotten what

00:45:49.960 a really big war looks like. But I worry about what would happen if there were an escalation

00:45:55.740 over, let's say, Taiwan. And we had full-blown cyber warfare. Now, what we don't know is just

00:46:02.220 how much the other side could disrupt our own critical infrastructure. But my guess is way

00:46:10.540 more than we assume. And the worry is that in the case of a US-China conflict, there would be really

00:46:17.760 significant disruption of our internet capabilities. There would also be a massive dissemination of

00:46:27.600 disinformation and misinformation because the Russians already know how to do that well and 1.00

00:46:31.460 the Chinese are getting better at it. I think in the short run, while we're having our conferences

00:46:36.400 about climate change, which is a relatively slow-moving problem, there is a near-term

00:46:41.760 and very disruptive scenario of conflict with China. And that's why I said earlier that

00:46:47.000 totalitarianism is really the big worry, because this is a very, very well-armed totalitarian

00:46:52.600 regime now, and it's much richer than the Soviet Union ever was, much closer to us in terms of 0.76

00:46:58.140 gross domestic product. So you ask what's next? I think that's the kind of crisis that is pretty

00:47:03.480 imminent. Of course, it might not escalate. The Biden administration might just fold if the choice

00:47:09.000 is between fighting for Taiwan or not fighting. And they may just decide that the midterms are

00:47:14.380 more important. But that would be a major seismic shift in the geopolitical order. And China would 0.90

00:47:20.140 really, at that point, have become the dominant global power, as surely as the US was after the

00:47:25.180 sewers crisis. So I worry a bit about an American sewers crisis over Taiwan. That wouldn't necessarily

00:47:31.300 lead to enormous numbers of deaths. But I think the loss of American dominance would have all

00:47:36.360 kinds of unforeseeable consequences if the winner was China. And Neil, understandably, this interview 0.69

00:47:44.700 has been, I wouldn't say doom and gloom, but let's say a pessimistic appraisal of what's

00:47:51.460 been happening but look they have when there's pandemics there's always things that happen

00:47:56.620 afterwards positives that happen are there any particular positives that you could look to see

00:48:02.720 looking back at history that could come out of this pandemic i'd love if you just said no

00:48:07.100 well it's a bit like a joke isn't it a russian and englishman and a scotsman went into a

00:48:13.580 into a chat room and and of course the scotsman's going to be like private fraser from dad's army

00:48:19.780 oh, we're doomed. Part of the point of calling the book Doom was to make a bit of fun of myself

00:48:26.840 and of world history, because really the major point of the book is we're not doomed. The end

00:48:30.860 of the world has been predicted countless times, and it has not happened. And even the worst

00:48:35.920 disasters don't kill everyone. Even the Black Death couldn't even get to half of humanity.

00:48:40.760 It probably managed about a third at most. So we survive. We're remarkably resilient,

00:48:46.360 even despite our own stupidity and when we come out of a disaster as we we will come out of this 0.99

00:48:52.600 disaster we're coming out of it now I mean look at the UK deaths are in the low double digits pretty 0.99

00:48:57.940 pretty soon we'll be in the single digits and as you come out of the disaster you do have the right

00:49:03.160 to have a most terrific party this is something that I think uh has already kind of begun you can

00:49:08.920 feel it happening it's going to be the most uh tremendously enjoyable summer as long as it

00:49:14.900 doesn't rain the whole time in england and and that that will extend i think until really the

00:49:20.580 the autumn and if we're lucky and there isn't some kind of recurrence of the the pandemic in

00:49:26.680 the winter uh we're going to feel really quite cheerful uh because we're going to get back all

00:49:32.340 that was taken away from us uh including above all else that the opportunity to be gregarious

00:49:38.080 won't it feel great when we can actually go to the footy and sing again because singing and hurling

00:49:43.660 abuse that the other team's fans are great sources of pleasure in British life that we've been

00:49:49.860 deprived of. I hate football without fans. It is a deeply unmoving spectacle, even although I

00:49:56.200 dutifully watch. So there's a lot that's going to feel great, just in the same way as when you stop

00:50:01.260 beating your head against a brick wall. It's really, it's quite a relief. The question is,

00:50:05.720 how long will it last? I mean, my friend Nicholas Christakis talked about the roaring 20s coming

00:50:10.160 back. And I think that's wishful thinking, because I think the economy will roar for the second half

00:50:15.580 of 2021. And then we'll start realising that it's actually a little prickier than it looks to come

00:50:21.020 back from a pandemic. But yeah, I'm definitely going to have a very, very fun summer, see my

00:50:26.840 kids and my mum and my friends whom I haven't seen for a year and a half. And I think this is the

00:50:31.420 thing to, this is the note to end on. I mean, the great thing about doom is you worry about it a lot.

00:50:37.420 sometimes you kind of read about it almost for pleasure uh but then you survive and there's a

00:50:42.240 kind of spring in your step thinking no i was one of the lucky ones well there you go uh most of you

00:50:48.460 are going to die but some of you will be fine and that is the message of this interview uh neil all

00:50:52.860 of us are going to die apart maybe from peter but it's just a question of when and ideally not not

00:51:00.660 today not today um neil thank you so much we're going to ask you a couple of questions for locals

00:51:06.000 But before we do, we have our usual last question for you.

00:51:11.020 Which is, what's the one thing we're not talking about, but we really should be?

00:51:15.460 I learned in writing Doom that there have been periods in history in which volcanic activity has had a huge impact on human life.

00:51:25.840 The late 1100s to the late 1200s, there was a time of extraordinary global cooling because of huge numbers of volcanoes going off.

00:51:33.060 And we haven't had a big volcanic eruption since 1815. So, you know, 200 plus years ago, which was Mount Tambora. So I'm kind of every time I see a volcano story in the papers, I sort of sit up wondering if it's going to be a real big one.

00:51:47.760 But, yeah, that's something we don't think nearly enough about.

00:51:51.000 But I spent the pandemic right next to the Yellowstone supervolcano location.

00:51:56.840 If that thing went off, which it hasn't done for a very, very long time, then, I mean, you'd have to cancel the conferences on global warming because that would no longer be the problem.

00:52:07.380 Excellent. You can look forward to the Earth exploding as well.

00:52:10.640 Fantastic stuff.

00:52:11.800 Well, Neil, thank you so much for coming on.

00:52:14.040 The book is called Doom.

00:52:15.220 I thoroughly recommend it.

00:52:16.440 and thank you all for watching we will see you very soon with another brilliant interview like

00:52:21.180 this one or all show all of them go out at 7 p.m uk time take care and see you soon guys

TRIGGERnometry - May 16, 2021

Niall Ferguson on COVID, Lockdowns and Authoritarianism

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