![]() It is not a gloomy book, although it dwells often on our collective failure to learn from past mistakes. What began as a taxonomy of doom evolves into a hawkish foreign policy treatise on the coming cold war with China That tension is the subject of Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe, Niall Ferguson’s excursion into the history of horrible afflictions. The march of progress gives cause for optimism the certain recurrence of disaster less so. But that minor skirmish is far from the frontline in a battle that science is winning, at least until the next disaster strikes. There is something medieval about paranoid mobs felling mobile phone masts in the belief that 5G signals are responsible for the disease. ![]() The Covid-19 pandemic has brought its share of irrational fanaticism. The medical treatments they needed were nearly 600 years away. They saw the disease as divine punishment and prayed fervently for release from its clutches, all the while aiding its dispersal across the land. When the Black Death ravaged Europe in the 14th century, troupes of flagellants proceeded from town to town, surrounding local churches, beating themselves with spiky, iron-tipped leather scourges. The good news is that we are getting better at explaining their causes and treating them without recourse to superstition. The bad news is that plagues are a constant companion to human civilisation. ![]()
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