00:00:56.520Well, I'd been thinking of writing something about the history of disaster and dystopia before COVID-19 came along.
00:01:03.760And 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.
00:01:15.320And he was kind of giving me funny looks.
00:01:19.900And I think I was quite quick to see back in January last year that this was going to be a big pandemic.
00:01:25.640and I thought well this is surely the way to frame the book if we can if we can locate this
00:01:32.440disaster in a broader historical perspective comparing with all the disasters in history
00:01:38.200that will help readers understand what they are going through so that was the reason for writing
00:01:44.160and publishing before the disaster is over clearly COVID-19 is not over but I felt like a lot of
00:01:50.160people were just disorientated and there was a tendency in the media last year particularly to
00:01:56.400think that this was going to be comparable in its scale to the great influenza pandemic of 1918-19
00:02:03.600or even to the Black Death some people mentioned that but it was it was obvious a year ago that it
00:02:09.140wasn't going to be that bad it was going to be bad but not really really bad so there's the need I
00:02:14.660think to put these kinds of event in historical perspective and that's really what the book tries
00:02:19.740to do. And the opening sentence to your entire book, I found so powerful, Neil, and I'm going
00:02:27.300to paraphrase it and butcher it, and I apologise in advance, but the sentence was something along
00:02:31.740the lines of, we've never been more fearful of the future whilst knowing so little about the past.
00:02:39.060Why did you write that sentence and why did you open your book with it?
00:02:42.400Well, 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.
00:03:03.500And part of the reason, I think, for that is that we are historically extraordinarily ignorant.
00:03:10.660Now, of course, you could say we've always been historically ignorant. Nobody studies history.
00:03:14.580But I do think something has happened to our relationship to history.
00:03:19.000And it's particularly obvious when you look at young people because of the way history is taught.
00:03:24.180And history has been decoupled from traditional ideas of what we should learn about the past.
00:03:31.060and increasingly it embraces a sort of activist agenda so people are not in fact taught to think
00:03:37.340about the past as anything other than a series of terrible lapses from political correctness which
00:03:42.620we should all disapprove of this is not a great way of thinking about about human history uh just
00:03:48.360going back in time and going terrible terrible racist i mean that's not how you should think
00:03:54.120about the human past but it's how i'm afraid more and more our kids and indeed now young adults are
00:03:59.120taught. So the idea I had was, let's try to locate what's happening in a proper historical
00:04:05.600perspective, not condescending to past generations. And when you do that, you realize that it's not
00:04:11.480the end of the world. Now, the media, especially the internet-driven media, have a tremendous
00:04:17.100incentive to represent every crisis as the end of the world. So not only is COVID-19 the Black
00:04:23.420death. But if a bunch of lunatics storm the US Capitol on January the 6th, it's the civil war.
00:04:30.900And this kind of inflation of historical significance is what I'm trying to push
00:04:37.600back against, because it allows a kind of hysteria to build about each breaking news event,
00:04:43.740which is clearly not helpful to rational responses by voters and by politicians.
00:04:50.260It's an interesting point you make, Neil, particularly about the media, because this
00:04:53.740is something I've been thinking about quite a lot.
00:04:56.140We have research here in the UK, which shows that when polled, British people on average
00:05:01.940think that about 10% of the public have been killed by COVID-19, which would make about
00:05:15.820I 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.
00:05:26.600So you talk about the overreaction. Do you think that Western governments in particular overreacted to the pandemic?
00:05:35.140Well, they first underreacted and then overreacted. I think that would be the right way to put it.
00:05:39.500But there was a way to get this right that averted mass death and also averted lockdowns.
00:05:48.060The Taiwanese, who have every reason to be suspicious of their neighbours, the People's Republic of China,
00:05:53.900very quickly realised that something wicked was coming their way from Wuhan, restricted travel,
00:06:00.140but more importantly, actually, ramped up testing because it was quite easy to test for this virus early on.
00:06:05.880sequencing the virus had proved to be very, very easy. They also had a system of integrated contact
00:06:12.500tracing using phones. And so they were able to quickly identify who had it and who might have
00:06:17.840spread it, and then to isolate people who were infected. And as a result of this very rapid
00:06:22.820response, 12 people, a dozen, have died of COVID in Taiwan, which is right next door to where this
00:06:28.780thing began. So we know there was a right way of doing this. The South Koreans also did very well.
00:06:33.520There 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.
00:06:47.320So 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.
00:07:08.840The 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,
00:07:38.840If 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.
00:07:44.440And politicians read this and thought, oh, God, we better do this.
00:07:50.540So 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.
00:08:05.420And then I think you can have a debate about whether the lockdowns were overkill.
00:08:33.600And 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.
00:08:54.480and so what we did was we locked down and then we realized we'd completely created the economy and
00:08:59.160we had to start lifting restrictions and then play whack-a-mole with reinfections so looking
00:09:05.260back on it this was a pretty big public policy failure to say that it was going to be a failure
00:09:12.780at the time was hard but i was writing a weekly column back in those days for the sunday times
00:09:17.620And 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.
00:09:31.200And you say it's the worst of both worlds. When I was reading your book, you were talking about
00:09:37.240the relationship that we have as a society with death. Do you think part of the problem with
00:09:44.480COVID-19 was we had a moral crisis surrounding this virus? I think part of the reason for
00:09:52.160writing the book is to get people to think a little bit more realistically about death.
00:09:58.400there were moments in the discussion last year when you'd have thought that the job of politicians
00:10:03.140was to prevent anybody from dying and a single death is too many hang on a second people die
00:10:08.820every day that's that's the nature of our species only 13 of deaths since the pandemic began in the
00:10:17.860united states have been caused by i mean most people actually die of other things once they get
00:10:21.940up above age around 70. Even in a pandemic, excess mortality was certainly significant,
00:10:29.800probably 18% in the US and UK, if you just look at the whole period since this thing began. And
00:10:36.420that's a bad outcome. I mean, clearly, it's a bad outcome for how over half a million Americans
00:10:41.260to die and what 120, 130,000 Brits to die, but relative to the population,
00:10:46.720We'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%.
00:11:07.360So 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.
00:11:33.980So 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.
00:11:44.000And that's because we haven't got a good sense of what a bad year looks like.
00:11:47.820Now, in Britain, there have been years as bad as 2020 for excess mortality.
00:11:57.140I'll tell you what they've been in the recent past.
00:12:00.2001918, 1940, and 1951. Now, your listeners will immediately get 1918, World War I, plus the big
00:12:10.360Spanish influenza. 1940 is a no-brainer. Obviously, it's World War II and the catastrophic first
00:12:18.340phase of the war. But what happened in 1951? 1951 was as bad a year as 2020 for excess mortality
00:12:27.360in the uk and that's because there was a really bad outbreak of influenza it wasn't global but
00:12:33.280it was very severe in england especially around liverpool for any scousers listening we've
00:12:39.160forgotten it it's completely forgotten uh because people in the 1950s kind of expected there to be
00:12:46.140bad years uh it'd been through world war ii uh there was a lot more still to come there were
00:12:52.140many infectious diseases that we hadn't got under control polio for example uh and so people
00:12:58.400accepted that there was in the nature of things going to be the odd very bad winter and by the
00:13:05.980way if you just look at months of excess mortality yeah april 2020 was a very bad month in britain
00:13:12.020but actually it's not even a top 10 bad month since 1970 and we got the data going back that
00:13:19.760far. So actually, in my lifetime, there have been significantly worse months for excess mortality
00:13:26.800than the worst month of COVID last year. Part of the point of doom is just to kind of get that
00:13:32.580sense of perspective, because you have to know whether it's worth shutting everything down
00:13:38.560in relation to the likely excess mortality that you face, because you don't want to
00:13:44.940impose huge unintended costs on society for the sake of a bad winter. And in effect, I think we
00:13:53.900may well have done that. We will never know quite what the death toll would have been if we hadn't
00:13:59.240done lockdowns. And so Neil Ferguson's always going to say that he saved, I don't know how many
00:14:03.240lives, maybe a quarter of a million or something like that. But my sense is that that's probably
00:14:09.320not right and that in truth we could have got through this with significantly less restriction
00:14:17.080on people's social and working lives and i'll never be able to prove that nor will he be able
00:14:22.780to prove that he saved them that he saved england well the one thing that we do know though neil
00:14:27.780don't we is that a lot of the the consequences of lockdown which no one wants to talk about
00:14:32.940have actually been resulted in deaths as well uh that's suicides that's cancer that's missed heart
00:14:38.480people not going to accident and emergency to get treatment for what then turns out to be a heart
00:14:43.680attack. So yes, maybe we'll never know. But what troubles me is not necessarily what the numbers
00:14:49.820end up being, but rather the fact that we seem to have made a decision on lockdown without any
00:14:55.300regard for the unintended consequences whatsoever. No one, people are pretending that that side of
00:15:01.840the formula just didn't exist. And obviously it did. Yeah. I mean, it's clear that a lot of the
00:15:06.360excess mortality last year was not people dying of COVID. There were a lot of other things that
00:15:12.140happened that would not otherwise have happened. We know, for example, in the US that there's been
00:15:16.560a big increase in deaths from overdose. And then there are all the kind of not so obvious costs.
00:15:23.400I mean, a year of education has been taken away from people in California public schools. That
00:15:28.060is to say, broadly speaking, the poorer kids in California society. That will cost them
00:15:35.000for the rest of their lives. So I do think you can fairly say that the Imperial College
00:15:40.700epidemiologists said, here's what's going to happen if we don't lock down. And by the way,
00:15:45.540we're epidemiologists, so don't bother us with the unintended consequences, especially not the
00:15:50.700economic ones, because that's not what we do. But here's a kind of way of saving lives.
00:15:55.180I think those calculations were very, very crudely done. And they were based on a couple
00:16:01.780of assumptions that were wrong. One, the infection fatality rate, which I think they got wrong
00:16:06.820because they said it's going to be 0.9% of the people who get it who die. But that actually was
00:16:12.480a bit misleading because of the enormous variance in the infection mortality rate by age. 80% of
00:16:20.360people who died of COVID in the US were 65 and older. And the older you get, the higher the rate.
00:16:27.660So it's essentially very unusual in history to have a pandemic that is ageist.
00:16:32.340Most pandemics kill the very young and the very old about the same amount.
00:16:38.120And some actually go after people in the prime of life.
00:16:44.560And 1957, 58, increased mortality amongst teenagers in the United States by something like a third.
00:16:52.000So we had this kind of benign pandemic that was generous enough to leave young people alone.
00:16:57.180mostly and and concentrate on killing people who were nearing the end of their lives so under those
00:17:04.440circumstances and we knew that by the way in march because the chinese data were already there and
00:17:09.680you see very clearly that this was the ageist virus knowing that we probably could have come
00:17:14.540up with something smarter than shutting everybody in their homes and stopping them going to work
00:17:20.540and i do remember long discussions with uh with people in different fields trying to figure out
00:17:26.760what a smart plan would look like, because obviously a smart plan would have protected
00:17:31.040the elderly. And that was one of the things we didn't do, because we let huge numbers of people
00:17:36.420die in elderly care homes by not worrying about their vulnerability and actually shipping people
00:17:42.860with the virus to elderly care homes, making sure that very large numbers of people there were
00:17:48.260affected. So these are the little mistakes that end up having really, really large costs. Now,
00:17:54.740So 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.
00:18:08.180And 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.
00:18:18.360and you say that and i i'm in an agreement with you has it surprised you neil how we seem to have
00:18:25.900politicized this virus you know both sides have done it it it's a bit it's been really shocking
00:18:32.820to me and by the way just to add it didn't happen straight away there was about a month somewhere
00:18:37.680around february march when it hadn't quite broken either way and people on both sides of the normal
00:18:43.960political divide were not sort of there wasn't the same alignment whereas now it's very clear
00:18:49.160if you're on the left you're pro-lockdown and on your right you're probably not um yeah so talk to
00:18:54.400us about the politicization of this it's one of the striking differences between our time and the
00:19:00.4001950s uh especially in the u.s because if you think it's politicized in britain you ain't seen
00:19:07.060nothing. Here, every aspect of this public health crisis became politicised. Mask wearing,
00:19:14.920potential remedies for the disease, and then of course the vaccine. And vaccine resistance is
00:19:21.000much more stubborn in the US than it is in the UK, i.e. resistance to getting the vaccine. So
00:19:27.440what went wrong? Back in the 1950s, it really wasn't controversial that getting a vaccine for
00:19:34.100a contagious virus would be good. So when the Asian flu, as it was then called, struck,
00:19:40.320the federal government in the US prioritised getting a vaccine. And that was really all they
00:19:45.040did, because they recognised that they couldn't shut everything down. So schools stayed open,
00:19:49.080workplaces stayed open. Yeah, there was excess mortality. But they got the vaccine done really
00:19:54.040quickly, within a matter of a few months, from developing a vaccine to getting it into people's
00:20:00.260arms faster, in other words, than we've done. And it wasn't controversial. Nobody was saying
00:20:05.200that it was a Republican vaccine because Eisenhower was president. Here, I think you can see
00:20:12.000he illustrated a theme of my last book. The last book, The Square and the Tower, said the way that
00:20:17.660the internet has evolved as our new public sphere has exacerbated polarization because on the
00:20:25.780internet you're incentivized to have extreme views and to disseminate fake news because the
00:20:31.960internet platforms the facebooks and the googles um are incentivized by their business model
00:20:37.880to basically promote clickbait that's how you get eyeballs to stay on the screen long enough to see
00:20:44.780ads it wasn't like that in the 1950s there's a finite amount of terrestrial television there's
00:20:50.600radio, there's local papers. The window, the spectrum of information in news is much more
00:20:57.480limited. And the crazy stuff really doesn't get much beyond men with green ink writing letters.
00:21:04.620The internet's created this entirely different news system where news and entertainment have
00:21:10.520kind of fused. And the incentive is always to go out on the extreme to try to get those eyeballs
00:21:16.820to linger just a bit longer on the screen. So you're right at the beginning, Constantine,
00:21:21.560it's very true. At the beginning, it was actually liberal media who condemned Trump for wanting to
00:21:28.500restrict travel from China. It was in the New York Times and the Washington Post that they
00:21:33.160ran articles saying it's just the seasonal flu. The president's a terrible racist for wanting to
00:21:38.380do this. And it took a while for that all to flip. It really took until March for the position to
00:21:44.940become liberals like lockdowns and and conservatives like herd immunity so this was absurd it led to
00:21:52.320absurd debates and the public health officials made matters worse by changing their story on masks
00:21:59.100for reasons that were transparently transparently mendacious oh oh you don't need a mask because we
00:22:05.200actually don't have enough and we need them for the doctors and then actually change a plan you
00:22:10.000need to wear two, make it three. I mean, can you blame people for becoming sceptical about the
00:22:15.580utterances of people like Anthony Fauci? So we've ended up in a terribly, I think, a suboptimal
00:22:22.900situation in which the public is sceptical about official guidance. It goes to the internet in
00:22:30.620search of better guidance, and it ends up down conspiracy theory wormholes that tell you the
00:22:36.440vaccine is Bill Gates's plan for total mind control. I mean, the number of people who believe
00:22:41.880that stuff is truly shocking. I knew the Americans had a weakness for conspiracy theories already.
00:22:47.300I wrote about it in The Square and the Tower. Well, the pandemic was just a glorious opportunity
00:22:52.420for the conspiracy theory networks to go crazy. And sure enough, that's why there's so much
00:22:58.780reluctance to get the vaccine, especially amongst conservatives.
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00:24:10.120Neil, do you think part of the problem is, and it's going to sound flippant, is that we've all been driven insane.
00:24:17.220You know, we've been locked in our houses.
00:24:20.340We've, you know, our movements have been curtailed and the ability to see family hooked up to social media for 24 hours a day.
00:24:28.000it's driven us all mad hasn't it well it's not a frivolous point francis because actually
00:24:34.120mental health has become its own pandemic you are doing things to people that are calculated
00:24:42.280to put them under psychological strain and that the data uh on mental illness are really shocking
00:24:49.200it's become far far more of a problem uh than it was before not surprisingly as you rightly say if
00:24:57.520you lock people up in their homes, they are unfortunately deprived of things that are good
00:25:04.680for sanity. We are a social species. We're not really designed to just be stuck in cells with
00:25:12.320a very small number of people. That's why prison is punishment. But if you place the entire population
00:25:16.840under house arrest, unless you're somebody with a large and spacious home with a decent garden,
00:25:23.720um it's really rather stressful uh and i i do think that this is is one of those those costs
00:25:30.680that will only gradually become obvious but i mean we already have pretty good evidence that
00:25:35.460this has been a huge psychological strain on societies and and i you know spent much of
00:25:41.980the pandemic in a in a pretty relaxed place montana uh listening to my kids and my mother
00:25:48.880talked about life in england uh which i had to do over zoom made me realize that things really were
00:25:56.080much more restricted in the uk so yeah i think i think this is a very important point and it means
00:26:02.780that we we have to acknowledge that there were at least two pandemics going on simultaneously
00:26:09.280one was the virus uh the other was let me call it the sort of pandemic of the mind
00:26:15.800And 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.
00:26:34.140And that second pandemic will have all kinds of lasting consequences.
00:26:39.400Of course, it made people susceptible to crazy ideas.
00:26:42.780If 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?
00:26:52.420Under the circumstances of 2020, a surprisingly large number of people will believe that.
00:26:57.520Now, 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.
00:27:13.580For example, the flagellant orders are founded and people wander around, men exclusively wander around, whipping themselves to try to ward off the next contagion.
00:27:25.100I 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.
00:27:38.660The Black Lives Matter protests ostensibly were about police brutality.
00:27:43.580But 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.
00:27:55.400You know, if we can only punish ourselves for the racism of the past, somehow we'll ward off divine wrath.
00:28:02.900There 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.
00:28:10.560I did tweet recently that the only thing that surprises me about this pandemic is no one has decided to blame the Jews yet.
00:28:17.040Give it time, because you're quite right that in the 1340s, there were terrible outbreaks of anti-Semitic violence in multiple European cities.
00:28:27.080And 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.
00:28:35.540Now, 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.
00:30:17.720Well, Neil Ferguson, the other Neil Ferguson,
00:30:21.960admitted this in an interview in The Times the other day.
00:30:24.580I mean, he said the Chinese kind of gave us permission to do this
00:30:27.920and we weren't sure that we could do it, not being a communist regime. And it turned out that we
00:30:32.380could. That's the really remarkable thing about what happened last year. I think it's right to
00:30:38.900say that we copied the Chinese model. Because if you look back at the debates of March 2020,
00:30:47.520there weren't really many examples of lockdowns to go on. All you could see was that things were
00:30:53.300going horribly wrong in North Italy. It was a terror that the same thing was going to happen
00:30:58.480in England. And there was a Chinese model for repressing the virus that was getting a lot of
00:31:05.200publicity, because the Chinese were rather proud of the fact that they'd been able to impose such
00:31:10.120draconian restrictions on their people. Now, it's actually impossible for us to replicate what the
00:31:15.620Chinese did, because the Chinese Communist Party has an active member in every apartment block,
00:31:22.460in every chinese city whose job it is to report on on his or her neighbors and that we don't yet
00:31:29.180have certainly have lots of nosy parkers that's that's part of english life since time immemorial
00:31:35.100but they're not members of the communist party and they don't report to big brother so what about
00:31:39.940covid marshals well of course we have a certain tradition in british life of of restricting
00:31:47.080freedom in an emergency, which goes back to World War II. We can all remember, even if it's only
00:31:54.500from watching Dad's Army, that there was a certain kind of person who quite enjoyed enforcing the
00:31:59.800blackout regulations. And those same people or their grandchildren suddenly had a wonderful
00:32:03.840opportunity to be busybodies about COVID. But I think you're right to identify that we basically
00:32:11.600copied the Chinese lockdown model. But that was the wrong China to copy. The right China was the
00:32:18.400Republic of China, Taiwan, which had done the winning combination of mass testing very early
00:32:24.740on, contact tracing, and isolation of the infected. But the Taiwanese were basically ignored by the
00:32:31.540World Health Organization, because it's so much enthralled to Beijing. And so nobody paid much
00:32:36.540attention to what the Taiwanese were doing. It was actually brilliant. And it worked really,
00:32:39.940really well. So we copied the wrong China, unfortunately. Let me just follow up on this,
00:32:44.760Francis. So if this is what we've done, and I care passionately about civil liberties. I come
00:32:49.920from the Soviet Union, where we had very few of them. I know how precious they are and what
00:32:55.080happens when they're not protected by society. As a historian, what is the impact of adopting
00:33:04.600wholesale and authoritarian methodology into a liberal society? Because it strikes me that in
00:33:10.640the context of China, this may not have even been seen particularly by the people as something
00:33:16.160vastly different from their day-to-day lives. But in the West, this is unprecedented. And it worries
00:33:22.800me that we may have broken something. The contract that the public have with government
00:33:27.420may be affected for a very long time by this. What do you think about that?
00:33:31.560A 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.
00:33:53.020The totalitarian regimes killed their own people and they killed other people, and they did it on a massive scale.
00:33:57.740Whether you're talking about Stalin, Hitler or Mao, those regimes were responsible for an insane amount of avoidable death.
00:34:08.320Unfortunately, we did not kill off totalitarianism at the end of the first Cold War because it survived to fight another day in China.
00:34:17.260And 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.
00:34:31.580And 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.
00:34:52.940because that's just an invitation to import totalitarian ways of doing things.
00:35:00.060Yes, in the past, in time of emergency, we have restricted civil liberties.
00:35:04.980We did it in both world wars, quite drastically, actually.
00:35:08.420But everybody understood in the world wars that it was a temporary state of emergency
00:35:13.640that would be ended as soon as the war was over.
00:35:16.860The problem with doing it in a pandemic is that it's quite easy to argue that,
00:35:21.900In fact, it's never going to be over because the virus will always be out there.
00:35:26.800And this is one of the typically totalitarian sounding slogans you hear.
00:35:32.580There's no safety. It's not over until there are no cases at all anywhere in the world.
00:35:37.980Now, if you make that argument, you will be able to justify COVID restrictions forever.
00:35:42.720And I do think this has been an opportunity for a power grab by state bureaucracies,
00:35:49.220even in countries that are nominally under conservative leadership. In the US, it's very
00:35:54.840obvious. In the US, the Democratic Party at the state level sees the opportunity to expand its
00:36:01.500control over citizens. California is a strange place. It's a one-party state, oddly enough, here.
00:36:07.060And the Californian Democrats really do quite like locking people up in their homes. They seem to
00:36:11.940enjoy it, rather as I think the Scottish National Party do. And this is a very disturbing tendency
00:36:18.200to me because it suggests that it's possible to have totalitarian behavior without a big brother
00:36:25.320like dictatorship because there are people who actually enjoy it if that's the case there are
00:36:31.220two ways in which we're threatened by totalitarianism one if china becomes the world
00:36:35.220power if china becomes dominant we're threatened by it but we're also threatened by totalitarianism
00:36:41.140from within because there do seem to be people who quite enjoy informing on their neighbors or
00:36:46.400their colleagues. And there do seem to be bureaucrats for whom there's no greater pleasure
00:36:51.520than to impose new restrictions on individual liberty. And has that surprised you, Neil,
00:36:56.240that there's some people who grew up in the tolerant liberal West who've got a real thirst
00:37:01.820for authoritarianism? I wish I could say that I'd seen this coming and it doesn't surprise me,
00:37:08.860because obviously we love to be prescient. But I did not anticipate, particularly when I went
00:37:15.120into academic life back in the 1980s that universities would become the places where
00:37:20.660free speech was most limited in in our societies that i did not see coming and i didn't see it
00:37:27.320coming even even 10 years ago so i i think one of the things i've learned in the last few years
00:37:33.680really i think it began to dawn on me in about 2016 is that you can have totalitarianism from
00:37:40.420the grassroots up. It's not necessary to have a Stalin for people to start to engage in the
00:37:48.320behavior we associate with Stalin's Soviet Union, that culture where you inform on people and
00:37:54.540officials then use non-due process to cancel people. Cancellation is a little like being
00:38:03.280purged in the Soviet Union. The more I think about it, the more it seems to me there are
00:38:08.300totalitarian behaviors which kind of originated in academic life that are spreading outwards into
00:38:14.320the rest of society you know there's there are aspects of of university life that one sees
00:38:19.840which are very reminiscent of the cultural revolution in china where professors are sort
00:38:24.560of accused by their students and have to humiliate themselves with apologies and then are struggled
00:38:30.140with uh and then purged cancelled from the internet all of this is going on without there being big
00:38:36.860brother. And that I don't think I would have predicted, even as recently as the 2015.
00:38:42.740And Neil, since you bring it up, it's slightly aside from the subject of your book, but we'd
00:38:47.580be remiss not to ask you about this. Depending on who you talk to, we recently had Mary Eberstadt
00:38:54.400on the show who talked about identity politics stemming from the sexual revolution, the breakdown
00:38:59.860of the family, the breakdown of community. You get atomized individuals. As a result,
00:39:06.080people look for belonging and they look to their identity. Other people would argue it's the long
00:39:11.780march through the institutions, the neo-Marxist invade and infiltrate the university and education
00:39:19.240system and indoctrinate young people with that. Where does this woke culture come from, in your
00:39:25.380opinion, as a historian? I think there's some truth in both those hypotheses, but I'm strongly
00:39:30.860attracted to a phrase that a left-wing but left liberal writer came up with, this is Mati Iglesias's
00:39:38.940Great Awokening. Awokism has a religious quality to it, and in some ways it's part of a long
00:39:45.400American tradition of periodic religious revivals when the country's Puritan roots manifest
00:39:51.600themselves. And there is a sort of part of American culture that does yearn to ostracize
00:40:00.360people if not to actually burn witches and i think one of the ironies of all of this is that
00:40:07.040what margaret atwood envisaged in the handmaid's tale which was a kind of right-wing uh dystopia
00:40:16.200has actually happened or begun to happen on the left instead uh and i i think i think that's
00:40:23.520That'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.
00:40:49.000Now, 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.
00:41:09.180And the Thirty Years' War was a kind of culmination of about 130 years of deep religious division, beginning with Martin Luther's Reformation.
00:41:19.960And 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.
00:41:31.320But 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.
00:41:48.640When 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.
00:42:14.980And doesn't it also give voice to the lie that we tell ourselves
00:42:18.780that we live in a post-religious society?
00:42:21.100We don't need religion. We have science.
00:42:23.520But this embrace of wokeism shows us that we actually do.
00:42:27.720We need a belief system in order to adhere to it, to give us meaning.
00:42:32.120It is not the case, sadly, that G.K. Chesterton said
00:42:35.780the trouble with atheism is not that men believe in nothing,
00:42:42.920That's one of these quotes attributed to him that nobody can quite claim to have authored.
00:42:48.940But it's a very good insight. And Chesterton thought something along these lines.
00:42:54.380Post-Christian Europe and increasingly post-Christian America, sadly for Richard Dawkins and other militant atheists,
00:43:03.660is not a place where the principles of the Enlightenment are universally embraced.
00:43:09.640uh quite the opposite um in fact these these post-christian uh societies seem to be amenable
00:43:17.820to all kinds of uh wild superstitious belief we talked a little bit about conspiracy theories
00:43:24.900uh before but it's sort of broader than that and people who think that they're invoking
00:43:30.760the science and this is a dreadful uh term actually because there is no such thing as
00:43:37.560the science, are very often, in fact, enthralled to some legacy religious belief, of which the
00:43:45.500best example is clearly the millenarianism, the belief in the imminent end of the world,
00:43:51.080which has found a new home in radical environmentalism. So it's impossible not to
00:43:56.540see as an historian the religious undertone of much that someone like Greta Thunberg says,
00:44:02.380And indeed, at times, she seems like some child saint from the Middle Ages sent to warn of the impending apocalypse.
00:44:11.120So, 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.
00:44:28.700But 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?
00:44:43.640one of the conclusions of the book is that we nearly always are well prepared for the wrong
00:44:48.960disaster and one can sense that enormous efforts are going to go in over the next 10 years to
00:44:55.440discussing climate change again which was what we were doing back in January 2020 when a pandemic
00:45:01.800was actually beginning I think we've decided that that's going to be our disaster and we're going
00:45:07.260to spend a lot of time and energy preparing for it. And history warns us that you don't get the
00:45:13.980disaster that you prepare for. So where do we go from here? I think the biggest, nearest, most likely
00:45:21.560danger is some kind of major conflict. And it can take a number of different forms, but I'd put my
00:45:28.360money on a US-China conflict because all the ingredients are there now for a superpower
00:45:33.520showdown, which nobody will quite intend to escalate, but which will nevertheless do so.
00:45:39.100I think that that's a disaster we're not giving nearly enough thought to, partly because we've
00:45:45.280got used to wars being small things that don't really affect us directly. We've forgotten what
00:45:49.960a really big war looks like. But I worry about what would happen if there were an escalation
00:45:55.740over, let's say, Taiwan. And we had full-blown cyber warfare. Now, what we don't know is just
00:46:02.220how much the other side could disrupt our own critical infrastructure. But my guess is way
00:46:10.540more than we assume. And the worry is that in the case of a US-China conflict, there would be really
00:46:17.760significant disruption of our internet capabilities. There would also be a massive dissemination of
00:46:27.600disinformation and misinformation because the Russians already know how to do that well and
00:46:31.460the Chinese are getting better at it. I think in the short run, while we're having our conferences
00:46:36.400about climate change, which is a relatively slow-moving problem, there is a near-term
00:46:41.760and very disruptive scenario of conflict with China. And that's why I said earlier that
00:46:47.000totalitarianism is really the big worry, because this is a very, very well-armed totalitarian
00:46:52.600regime now, and it's much richer than the Soviet Union ever was, much closer to us in terms of
00:46:58.140gross domestic product. So you ask what's next? I think that's the kind of crisis that is pretty
00:47:03.480imminent. Of course, it might not escalate. The Biden administration might just fold if the choice
00:47:09.000is between fighting for Taiwan or not fighting. And they may just decide that the midterms are
00:47:14.380more important. But that would be a major seismic shift in the geopolitical order. And China would
00:47:20.140really, at that point, have become the dominant global power, as surely as the US was after the
00:47:25.180sewers crisis. So I worry a bit about an American sewers crisis over Taiwan. That wouldn't necessarily
00:47:31.300lead to enormous numbers of deaths. But I think the loss of American dominance would have all
00:47:36.360kinds of unforeseeable consequences if the winner was China. And Neil, understandably, this interview
00:47:44.700has been, I wouldn't say doom and gloom, but let's say a pessimistic appraisal of what's
00:47:51.460been happening but look they have when there's pandemics there's always things that happen
00:47:56.620afterwards positives that happen are there any particular positives that you could look to see
00:48:02.720looking back at history that could come out of this pandemic i'd love if you just said no
00:48:07.100well it's a bit like a joke isn't it a russian and englishman and a scotsman went into a
00:48:13.580into a chat room and and of course the scotsman's going to be like private fraser from dad's army
00:48:19.780oh, we're doomed. Part of the point of calling the book Doom was to make a bit of fun of myself
00:48:26.840and of world history, because really the major point of the book is we're not doomed. The end
00:48:30.860of the world has been predicted countless times, and it has not happened. And even the worst
00:48:35.920disasters don't kill everyone. Even the Black Death couldn't even get to half of humanity.
00:48:40.760It probably managed about a third at most. So we survive. We're remarkably resilient,
00:48:46.360even despite our own stupidity and when we come out of a disaster as we we will come out of this
00:48:52.600disaster we're coming out of it now I mean look at the UK deaths are in the low double digits pretty
00:48:57.940pretty soon we'll be in the single digits and as you come out of the disaster you do have the right
00:49:03.160to have a most terrific party this is something that I think uh has already kind of begun you can
00:49:08.920feel it happening it's going to be the most uh tremendously enjoyable summer as long as it
00:49:14.900doesn't rain the whole time in england and and that that will extend i think until really the
00:49:20.580the autumn and if we're lucky and there isn't some kind of recurrence of the the pandemic in
00:49:26.680the winter uh we're going to feel really quite cheerful uh because we're going to get back all
00:49:32.340that was taken away from us uh including above all else that the opportunity to be gregarious
00:49:38.080won't it feel great when we can actually go to the footy and sing again because singing and hurling
00:49:43.660abuse that the other team's fans are great sources of pleasure in British life that we've been
00:49:49.860deprived of. I hate football without fans. It is a deeply unmoving spectacle, even although I
00:49:56.200dutifully watch. So there's a lot that's going to feel great, just in the same way as when you stop
00:50:01.260beating your head against a brick wall. It's really, it's quite a relief. The question is,
00:50:05.720how long will it last? I mean, my friend Nicholas Christakis talked about the roaring 20s coming
00:50:10.160back. And I think that's wishful thinking, because I think the economy will roar for the second half
00:50:15.580of 2021. And then we'll start realising that it's actually a little prickier than it looks to come
00:50:21.020back from a pandemic. But yeah, I'm definitely going to have a very, very fun summer, see my
00:50:26.840kids and my mum and my friends whom I haven't seen for a year and a half. And I think this is the
00:50:31.420thing to, this is the note to end on. I mean, the great thing about doom is you worry about it a lot.
00:50:37.420sometimes you kind of read about it almost for pleasure uh but then you survive and there's a
00:50:42.240kind of spring in your step thinking no i was one of the lucky ones well there you go uh most of you
00:50:48.460are going to die but some of you will be fine and that is the message of this interview uh neil all
00:50:52.860of us are going to die apart maybe from peter but it's just a question of when and ideally not not
00:51:00.660today not today um neil thank you so much we're going to ask you a couple of questions for locals
00:51:06.000But before we do, we have our usual last question for you.
00:51:11.020Which is, what's the one thing we're not talking about, but we really should be?
00:51:15.460I learned in writing Doom that there have been periods in history in which volcanic activity has had a huge impact on human life.
00:51:25.840The late 1100s to the late 1200s, there was a time of extraordinary global cooling because of huge numbers of volcanoes going off.
00:51:33.060And 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.
00:51:47.760But, yeah, that's something we don't think nearly enough about.
00:51:51.000But I spent the pandemic right next to the Yellowstone supervolcano location.
00:51:56.840If 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.
00:52:07.380Excellent. You can look forward to the Earth exploding as well.