A Psychologist and Historian Discuss the End of the World | Dr. Niall Ferguson | EP 404

The more people, uh, refer to the science, the more you should suspect that they are engaged in some crazy religious activity. This kind of wrongheadedness leads to all kinds of policy errors because people have focused on the satisfaction of asceticism. It's very significant that in our lifetimes, governments have got worse at dealing with disasters, not better, despite the accumulation of scientific knowledge. We seem somehow, uh, collectively to be worse at scientific thinking.

Hello everyone watching and listening. Today, I'm speaking with historian and author Neil Ferguson. We haven't spoken before, although I've wanted to for a long time. We discussed the historical and deeply mythological precedent of world-ending narratives, how the global doomsday ethos abdicates local responsibility while empowering the Elite Class, the out-of-control gigantism plaguing our administrative states today, and how we might strive as individuals to deal with the genuine tragedy of life morally, humbly, and religiously.

So I was reviewing your book "Doom" this morning, and I've been wanting to talk to you about it for a long time. I'm very interested in the apocalyptic vision and its implications for political organization and psychological organization as well. I thought I'd just start with a couple of comments to get us going.

The Apocalypse, in some ways, is always upon us, and you write about that in your book. I mean, because people might ask, well, why has mankind always been consumed at the narrative level with notions of the end of the world? The answer to that is, at least in part, because we always inhabit demarcated conceptual worlds and even embodied worlds. All of those worlds do come to an end, and so the idea that there's a universal end is built into the fabric of reality. It's something that we have to permanently contend with, and so it's there as a lurking existential abyss, but it's also there as a practical problem that we have to contend with.

The grand apocalyptic visions, the Book of Revelation, for example, are in part attempts to structure our apprehension of the, what would you say, the Eternal apocalypse, and to also help us determine practically and politically how that might be at least staved off, although perhaps even managed more comprehensively. So I guess I'm curious, like, why did you, why did your interests, do you think, coalesce around the conception of Doom? It's been a couple of years now since this book was published. How have your conceptions changed, and what did you learn as a consequence of investigating this narrative trope so deeply?

There's a great sketch, uh, in the Beyond The Fringe album which goes right back to Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, uh, Jonathan Miller and Alan Bennett in the 1960s. Uh, and the sketch is the end of the world, and it's essentially a sect of millenarians who gather on a hill to anticipate the end of the world. Uh, they have a long and quite amusing discussion about what it's likely to involve: will the veil of the temple be rent asunder? And the time comes; they count down to the end of the world, and nothing happens. Peter Cook, who's the leader of the sect, ends the sketch by, "Well, never mind, lad, same time next week."

And I always thought that was very funny, U, because the end of the world has been consistently overpredicted by human beings for millennia. Uh, we're fascinated by the idea of the end of the world, and I think it's for a slightly different reason from the one that you hypothesized. We have the reality, uh, that we as individuals end to contend with. Uh, that's just, uh, one of the givens of, of human life. Uh, even for billionaires in Silicon Valley right now, the end of, uh, their individual lives is inevitable, and that's really the hardest thing to deal with about life—that it ends.

We also know how it ends; we know what that's like because sometime or another in our lives, we encounter death—the death of a grandparent, a parent, or a friend. We also see things being destroyed; we see buildings, uh, collapse, or bridges. Uh, we see fires consume areas of woodland. So we know what dissolution looks like, not just for us as individuals, but we know what it looks like for expanses of land or edifices. I think we therefore infer the consoling thought that it's all going to go down in flames at some, uh, future date.

And the great monotheistic religions have, as one of their centerpieces, the end of the world. It's there in Islam as well as in, uh, Christianity. Uh, and I think it's also exciting. I think we find the end of the world, uh, kind of in cinematic prospect, which is why there are so many movies about it, as well as works of science fiction.

So, we're fascinated by the end of the world because it's clearly a spectacular prospect, but it's also consoling to us: we may die as individuals, but everything's going down at some point, and the issue is when. So, uh, many, uh, Christians at successive periods in the history of Christianity have anticipated quite an imminent end of the world, um, and, and of course, they're always disappointed, like Peter Cook and Dudley Moore.

So the consoling issue, I mean, the easy read on that, I suppose, is that the end of the world is the precondition for the establishment of an ever more glorious paradise, and you can understand a consolation in that. But you're pointing to a different kind of consolation, I suppose, which is, it seems to me—correct me if I'm wrong—that something like Schopenhauer and Freud is that the fact that we end is easier to swallow if we understand it in relationship to the potential end of everything.

So, I don't exactly understand why you highlighted consolation. I can see it in the heavenly vision, let's say, post-apocalypse, but you're, you seem to be pointing to something else. Well, of course, uh, religion, uh, offers an afterlife, uh, that will be better, and resurrection, in, uh, in the case of, uh, the, the great monotheistic religions. But don't think that's always what's in people's minds when they contemplate, uh, the end of the world.

I was very struck, as I was researching the book, how many times, in the midst of a localized disaster, uh, individuals said it felt like the end of the world. So when you're in the midst of a massive conflagration, uh, the biggest wildfire in US history, or when you're, uh, in London during the Blitz, when you're in the midst of some localized disaster, it seems somehow consoling to say, "Oh, it's clearly the end of the world."

So I don't think it's just that people say, "And therefore I can look forward to being reunited with my ancestors in some happy afterlife." I think there's just a sense that if everybody's going down, that doesn't make it quite so bad as if it's just me.

Well, you know, that there might be another element to it as well. I mean, I'm think—the Terminator movie series came to mind when you were walking through your discussion, I suppose, in reference to the science fiction representations of the end of the world. And all of our conceptual schemes, when they encounter an obstacle, undergo a collapse into a kind of chaos and then a potential regeneration. And that's the same as a stage transition in Piagetian child development, and it's the same as the scientific revolution.

Every act of learning is simultaneously the death of some set of preconceptions, and there's pain in that, which is partly why we don't like to have our ideas challenged. But, you know, there's also adventure in it. And part of the reason that people do go to watch movies like The Terminator and the plethora of end-of-the-world movies that do make themselves manifest is because I think we can see in the confrontation with cataclysm, um, an adventure.

I mean, that's what people are doing in a theater when they're watching the Terminator series. I mean, it's a dreadful adventure, but it's a total adventure; it's completely engrossing. And it might be that you could imagine—and I think that this is part of the emphasis of the Judeo-Christian notion of ultimate sacrifice—you could imagine welcoming the apocalyptic reality of the world with open arms, being willing to undergo that adventure of continual death and transformation, and that transforming that entire death and rebirth process into something like the most exciting possible adventure.

I mean, you know, what you do see in the biblical corpus, there's always a wrestling with the apocalyptic reality of existence socially and individually, and there is the insistence throughout the text that the appropriate way to deal with that is not to run from it or deny it, but to really, to the degree that it's possible, to welcome it with open arms.

Now that's a very tricky thing to manage, obviously—the death. How do you welcome the death of everything with open arms? But in some ways, it doesn't matter because it's a reality that people have to face. I think what's fascinating about the Book of Revelation is that it, it's so spectacular. Uh, it's an extraordinary visualization of, of a cataclysm, and it's really very elaborate. It's worth reading and trying to picture it in your mind, and you realize that you would need the most advanced, uh, computer graphics to realize it on a screen.

I think it's partly that you need a spectacular prelude for the kingdom of God to be plausible because the terrible truth about the kingdom of God is that it does sound quite dull. I mean, the reality about the saints and angels and God himself is that they don't really know how to throw a party, and we need more than, uh, than that to excite us.

So I think that the apocalypse is attractive because it's so much more exciting than the ultimate outcome, the utopian outcome of heaven. Now what's interesting about science fiction is that it really discards utopia. There's some utopia in science fiction, but most of it's dystopian. And you gave the example of the Terminator movie series. That's part of a long tradition of visualizing an end of the world which is dystopian, where an apocalyptic event occurs, and all you're really left with, in the case of the Terminator movies, is a pile of rubble in which a few surviving humans are picked off by killer robots.

The interesting thing to me about science fiction is that from its birth in the early 19th century as a genre, it provides the apocalypse without the prospect of some ultimate reign, uh, of God and the saints, and we find that hugely exciting. So the paradox at the heart of the book is that we spend a lot of time thinking about the end of the world. Of course, environmentalists are the latest heirs to the millenarian tradition. They love to say that the world is about to end; it's in 12 years—it must be now—eight years and counting.

That's part of a long tradition where secular movements embrace, often unwittingly, religious ideas about the impending, uh, apocalypse, and that's exciting to people. So they're drawn to it. Greta Thunberg is just the latest prophet of the millennium, and I think that's a very important reason to be skeptical about stories about the end of the world because while we spend a lot of time discussing the end of the world in its latest incarnation—a catastrophic climate scenario—we kind of miss the much more likely smaller scale, medium-sized disasters.

The key point the book makes is we're getting worse at handling those. So we spend ages talking about the end of the world, endless conferences on climate change and the apocalypse, and we utterly bungle what was in fact not a particularly disastrous pandemic. And we're going to bungle our way through some geopolitical disasters. We're doing that right now. I think that's the critical argument of the book, and that's why the subtitle of the book is so important: The Politics of Catastrophe.

The key argument the book makes is that most disasters shouldn't be thought of as either natural or man-made. Disasters happen, and then we, as a species, collectively bungle them or not. And that's the critical point. Disasters are, in many ways, politically determined, even if their origins are natural. So that's the argument of the book.

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Okay, so there are three themes there that I'd like to, to expound upon. So, the first is you—you interestingly pointed out that the dystopia and the apocalypse is more interesting than the, the subsequent heaven. And that's the problem with socialist visions of utopia that people like Dostoevsky laid out in the late 1800s.

No, in "Notes from Underground," Dostoevsky famously pointed out that if we did bring about the socialist utopia—and he described that as the endless opportunity to sit in pools of bubbling water, busy ourselves with the continuation of the species, and eat nothing but cake—that human beings would break it all into a chaotic mess at the first opportunity just so that something exciting could happen. And so there's the problem with a satiation vision of heaven.

So, that would be a vision where everyone has everything they need all the time, is that precisely when you do that with an infant or when you enter that state after Thanksgiving dinner or Christmas dinner, all you do is go to sleep. There's no reason to be conscious. Consciousness demands something like an adventure. And the classic vision of heaven does seem lacking in that it isn't obvious what you would do there.

So that's something we could delve into. Then you pointed out that one of the additional underground advantages to being an apocalyptic doomsayer is that you can, I'm modifying your argument slightly, but that you can present yourself as the ultimate virtue-seeking redeemer by claiming to be obsessed by nothing but large-scale disaster. You can construe yourself as virtuous because of the depth of your concern, and you can abdicate your responsibility to actually deal with less self-dramatizing problems—the less self-dramatizing problems that actually constitute problems you could solve and address if you put your mind to it in the real world.

You know, and there's psychological reasons for assuming. One of the things you see when people's lives go seriously astray is that they don't—generally, people generally don't run off a cliff immediately after doing brilliantly. What happens is they make one error, and then they make a more serious error, and then they repeat that 10,000 times, and then they're in hell. And it was their failure to rectify the mini-crisis all along the way that brings upon the apocalypse in their life.

And I do see a lot of that political posturing characterizing the modern world. You know, that people act out the role of world-redeeming savior, but they're not actually attending to genuine problems that are right in front of them that they could address if they acted responsibly. And then the final theme you developed—you said, this is very interesting—you said that there's—that the notion of natural disaster, in some sense, is ill-conceptualized because there's an ambiguity about whether when a disaster occurs, it's a consequence of the hand of God, say, in the earthquake or the flood, or the utter failure of the authorities to have prepared properly for a foreseeable disaster.

Now, I thought this very clearly when Katrina hit New Orleans because a hue and cry went up about the catastrophe of the natural disaster. But you didn't have to dig very far before you realized that the reason that that hurricane was so devastating in New Orleans was because, well, the dikes hadn't been maintained, and they'd only been built to withstand a one-in-one-century flood, and that the entire infrastructure of the society was corrupt.

And so, you know, in mythological representations, in deep narratives, there is an identity between the evil king and the wicked queen of nature. They're the same thing. And so if the king gets wicked enough, the evil queen of nature arises, and that's a representation of the fact that if your state is corrupt, natural disaster will definitely make itself shown, and that you actually can't distinguish—there's no distinction between lack of preparation and a natural disaster in the final analysis.

Corruption and blindness facilitate that nexus. So the Egyptians had a story—it's the story upon which their whole culture was founded—that the state corrupted, that's Osiris, the state corrupted and became willfully blind as it aged, and then it was overthrown by—that's Osiris is overthrown by Seth, who's the precursor of Satan, and then he rules. So now the tyrant rules, and then Isis, who's the queen of the underworld, she's nature. She makes herself known, again, chaos, right?

With enough disintegration at the sociological level, then chaos makes itself manifest again. It's one of the most ancient stories of mankind playing out that dichotomy between the tyrant and natural disaster that you just described. Let me take those points in order, if I can. I think the most interesting thing to me about, uh, fantasies about the end of the world, uh, about the various millenarian cults throughout history is that, uh, they are often accompanied by certain forms of, of behavior that one might characterize as ascetic.

So the asceticism is an important part of, uh, many religious and secular movements. So the end is approaching, uh, the apocalypse is nearing, and therefore we should fast or perhaps even flog ourselves, uh, like the flagellant orders at the time of the Black Death. And it seemed to me very interesting, uh, how many similar patterns one could see in our time. Whether you are preoccupied with, uh, climate change or systemic racism, it doesn't matter; you should engage in some kind of athetic atonement in advance of the great reckoning.

And, and this, I think, infests a lot of contemporary progressivism—the desire to eat, uh, rabbit food, uh, to be constantly, uh, trying to eliminate things from one's, uh, diet. The desire to, uh, engage in, uh, abstention from reproduction. We mustn't have children because climate change is so cataclysmic. And so you have these sorts of aesthetic behaviors which you can find in medieval and ancient religion.

So I think that's an important first point. The second point is that mythology, uh, of the sort you described in the case of the ancient Egyptian myths, uh, makes a lot of sense if you imagine yourself, uh, living in the, uh, prehistoric or very ancient world. Life expectancy was very short. Individuals were extraordinary at risk from a whole variety of premature, uh, forms of mortality, and the natural world was deeply mysterious because there was no scientific framework for understanding, uh, anything.

The fluctuations in the level of the River Nile, uh, the periodic droughts, uh, that afflicted, uh, early agricultural societies. And so you end up with ways of, of making sense of an extraordinarily cruel and capricious world. Uh, so I think that's an important reason why myths, uh, persist. They're deeply rooted in our, in our premodern, uh, experience.

And I think that, uh, if one tries to think about our present predicament, uh, it's odd that such things have such enduring power over us because since the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment, we, we have a much better handle, uh, on the challenges, uh, that a species like ours faces, uh, on a planet like ours. So what's odd is that despite having really quite a good understanding of, say, infectious disease or the, the ways that hurricanes, uh, strike the Eastern Seaboard of the United States, we seem to be getting worse at handling pandemics and hurricanes.

And that's a really important argument that the book makes. Compared with the generation of the 1950s, the generation of the 2010s and 2020s seems really quite bad at disaster management in most Western societies, not only the United States. And it's explaining that that takes us into new territory because I don't think you can explain the diminishing competence of the modern state without having a theory of its degeneration, and that's something that is a really important part of the book.

Okay, so I want to pick up on two of those topics. So the first is, you point out that as the apocalyptic vision predominates, there's a turn to asceticism. And then you describe, we could say veganism and vegetarianism, and, well, and the insistence by the environmentalists that we must engage in degrowth and that we must reduce our standard of living. And, and yes, okay, but there's a very interesting psychological rationale for that as well, which is that if the old state of being has become corrupt—that's the old king—and now we're threatened by its collapse, then the proper thing to do is to engage in repentance and atonement.

Because what you want to do is you want to offer up your stupid preconceptions to be destroyed so that you can rectify the corruption, so that you can stave off the disaster. And so now it's interesting, because with the millenarian and apocalyptic movements on the left, you have a simultaneous insistence that all sorts of impulsive pleasure-seeking, licentious behavior should be centered and prioritized and celebrated. But at the same time, you have this insistence that there's a certain kind of aestheticism that's also necessary, and I see in that—as a psychologist—I see that as a proper mechanism of repair gone astray.

Right? Is that, well, you should always be cutting back in this ascetic way on your idiot excesses locally to improve the manner in which you conceptualize the world. That's the continual sacrificial offering of your own insufficiency and your own stupidity, and that does renew the world. And so, but now we've got this dynamic where we globalize the apocalypse, we view the end of the world, we assume that nothing but a kind of universal asceticism and atonement will suffice.

That enables us to set local concerns aside, as we already discussed, and to act irresponsibly. And maybe that's part of what's producing this inability to actually respond, you know, locally and effectively to genuine problems. You know, in the Old Testament, the second commandment is to not use God's name in vain, and what that means, as far as I can tell, is that you shouldn't claim divine motivation for doing things that are actually self-serving, right? You shouldn't attribute sacred motivations to your own, to your own instrumental, impulsive, and self-serving behavior.

And then that's echoed in the New Testament with the insistence that you shouldn't pray in public. Now, if you take on the apocalyptic burden and you're virtuous only in consequence of your compassionate concern, it gives you a perfect excuse to dispense with local responsibility. And if you dispense with local responsibility, then you're no longer able to engage in the concrete problem-solving activities of the sort that you described.

I mean, what did you conclude when you're—I mean, you have a chapter on developing political incompetence and also one on, you know, a sort of belief in scientism, and that seems to me to be part of your attempt to assess the local failure while we're concentrating on the global apocalypse. And so what do you make of that, that concatenation of causal forces?

There are two things that are going on, I think. One is, is that, uh, the more people, uh, refer to the science, the more you should suspect that they are engaged in some quasi-religious activity. Uh, because the notion of some settled body of knowledge called the science is at odds with the reality of the scientific method, which is a constant struggle, uh, to falsify hypotheses through experimentation.

Uh, during the Covid-19 pandemic, but I think predates it, it was already going on in debates about climate. There was a lot of spurious invocation of the science, and one might as well have been saying the gods or the deity because it was in fact quite unscientific thinking that was going on. I'll give you an illustration of this: a great delusion is to imagine that we can prevent the rise of average temperatures by large-scale asceticism in the West.

Uh, we must give up internal combustion engines, uh, we should give up eating meat, and so on. If we end up buying electric vehicles and solar cells manufactured in China with electricity generated by burning ever larger quantities of coal, the probability of reducing average temperatures is zero, uh, because that is in fact the perfect illustration of wrong-headedness in action.

If one accepts the premises of the debates on the causes of rising temperatures, it makes no sense at all for us to behave this way. Our asceticism will make no difference if it manifests itself as increased burning of coal in China. So that's the first thing that's going on. I mean, like, well, or increased burning in coal in Germany, because that's what's happened with the Green Revolution in Germany. They shut off the nuclear plants and started up the lignite.

So this kind of wrongheadedness leads to all kinds of policy errors because people have focused on the satisfaction of asceticism. The virtue signaling that comes with getting rid of, uh, nuclear power stations or internal combustion engines. So there's a kind of generalized failure which embraces the policy elite to think rationally about the problems that we're trying to address.

The second problem, which I think is just as important, is the way the administrative state functions. If you compare central governments today with their counterparts of half a century or 70 years ago, they've become much larger; they bloated in terms of the numbers of people employed. Uh, they intervene in many more ways that—an enormous, uh, there's an enormous corpus of regulation in all, uh, Western countries. And this administrative state, unwieldy, uh, regulatory, is very inefficient.

It's very bad at achieving intended goals, and that has to do with the way that bureaucracy works and the sclerotic tendencies that the modern state suffers from. So between the science as a quasi-religious way of thinking and the administrative state, we have a very, very dysfunctional approach to nearly all the problems that confront us. And that is really the central argument of "Doom." It's very significant that in our lifetimes, governments have got worse at dealing with disasters, not better, despite the accumulation of scientific knowledge. We seem somehow, uh, collectively to be worse at scientific thinking.

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Okay, so imagine this: you magnify the size of the Apocalypse, right? So it becomes a world-ending Ragnarok. Then you magnify the size of the bureaucratic state because you have to in order to deal with that apocalypse. Okay? Then, because the state is so global and large and so central, it loses its connection with the real world; it has no subsidiary organization, and then it flails about pointlessly.

Now I'm going to walk through a couple of narrative representations of that, and it'll tie it back to the imagery of Revelation. You might find this interesting. So you see that dynamic play out in the opening chapters of Genesis because what you have is the descendants of Cain. So Cain makes improper sacrifices, and he becomes bitter and resentful, and he turns to technology.

It's Cain's descendants that turn to technology first; they build the first cities, and then the city becomes corrupt. It becomes corrupt in the direction of the Tower of Babel. Now, the Tower of Babel is a ziggurat, right? It's a stepped pyramid, and at that time, the potentates of the Middle East were competing to build the largest ziggurats. They were trying to build towers to heaven to glorify themselves, and that's the subtext of the Tower of Babel story.

So what happens is that an—the ultimate Tower of Babel is erected to reach to the sky, and that's a challenge to the supremacy of God. And the consequence of that is that the cosmos, the spirit of the cosmos, the creator and producer of the cosmos makes all those who inhabit the tower unable to communicate with one another. So they start to lose even the ability to share concepts, and this structure collapses, and it's because that Tower of Babel is too large; it reaches too high, it's too uniform, and it's destined to failure.

Of course, that begs the question: you know, what's the alternative to that? But I would say the entire remaining biblical corpus is actually an attempt to answer that question. But it's very germane. Now, that imagery is picked up again in the Book of Revelation. So one of the central images in the book that I think is very relevant: imagine that the Book of Revelation is trying to conceptualize the apocalypse as such, the manner in which things deteriorate before the ultimate disaster.

And so one of the main images is of a seven-headed beast, and on the back of the beast is the whore of Babylon. And what it—it's an image of a centralizing state, a centralizing, monstrous centralizing state—that's a good way of thinking about it—with multiple heads with something like disinhibition as its partner. That's the image. And so the notion there is that when things deteriorate to the point where apocalypse is likely, you have the construction of monstrous state-like apparatuses aligned with individual fragmentation down to the point of loss or atomization.

That's a good way of thinking about it. So, you know, you're striving towards, it seems to me, in your argument, you're striving towards the hypothesis that there's something like an out-of-control gigantism that's a causal—that's causally related to the inability of these bureaucratic organizations to actually respond to actual occurrences in the world.

So two thoughts: there's only one law of history—I'm a historian—and that's the law of unintended consequences. And so what typically happens is that well-intentioned people come to power, identify a problem which they feel they must address, and they undertake measures to address the problem which have unintended consequences. This was true when back in the 1960s and '70s people persuaded themselves that there was a terrible problem of overpopulation, that Malthus was going to be vindicated.

And therefore there had to be drastic population control, especially in Asia, and that turned out to have all kinds of unintended consequences. In our time, fears not just of climate change but of dangerous technological developments have given rise to a view which my friend Nick Bostrom at Oxford exemplifies: that we need to have very, very powerful surveillance powers to prevent bad things from happening.

Whether it's to prevent CO2 emissions in breaching the levels of the Net Zero program, or whether it's to stop dangerous research being done with artificial intelligence, we need to empower the state to have even greater powers of surveillance than the mid-20th century totalitarian regimes had. And so one of the key arguments in the book "Doom" is that actually totalitarianism is the thing most to be feared in the 20th century. Totalitarian regimes cause way more premature death than anything else.

And so the last thing we should want to do in the 21st century is to create new forms of totalitarianism out of a belief that only an all-seeing state can prevent disaster. So this is a really, really important argument that the book makes, and I think it's become even more relevant with the major breakthroughs we've seen in artificial intelligence in the two years since the book was published.

The other thing that I would say is we want the universe to be moral. Uh, we are very strongly inclined to think when bad things happen to us that they may in fact be retribution for sins that we committed in the past. And, uh, even the most rational, uh, individuals are susceptible to this idea. I know this because my parents did the very best they could to raise me as a product of the Scottish Enlightenment, uh, an atheist and a devoted believer in the scientific method.

But when bad things happen, I have this uneasy sense that I may have brought it upon myself by transgressing in some way, illustrating that, uh, you can't really escape the Christian legacy unless you, uh, travel a very long, long way away from post-Christian civilizations. Now, it's not in fact a moral universe—this is the bad news. Uh, it's really not. I mean, a lot of the bad things that happen are random. Uh, they're governed by power laws; they're extremely difficult to predict.

Uh, wars are, in fact, pretty randomly distributed; there's no cycle of history that tells you when a war is coming. The same applies to financial crises, wildfires, and earthquakes; they are not normally distributed. They can't really be thought of in probabilistic terms. And so much of the terrible stuff that happens to us has nothing to do with there being a moral universe. Cancer may strike one of us down in a much shorter time frame than we are both totally assuming we have.

And, and if we are diagnosed with a terminal cancer, uh, how will we react to that news? What if I hear this tomorrow? Uh, it’ll be a tremendous shock to me, mainly because, uh, it will render my younger children much more vulnerable in my absence. But will I be able to resist the temptation that I brought it upon myself? It'll be there in the back of my mind because I've just inherited, uh, from generations that way of thinking.

And it's worth adding one little footnote to this: my friend, the historian Tom Holland, wrote a nice book recently, "Dominion," arguing that Christian ways of thinking about the world have outlived Christianity in these secular, uh, times that we inhabit. A very good illustration of this point is how much Calvinism is still out there. The belief that you belong to the elect, uh, the people—because of predestination—who are insured of salvation is a very powerful one, and it persists long after people have ceased to attend Calvinist, uh, church services.

I'm always impressed by, uh, the presence of the self-appointed elect in academic life—people who have a sense that they are morally superior to those around them; they do belong to an elite, and their behavior should be, uh, as it were, fitting to that preeminence. Uh, now, I am a kind of Calvinist atheist. I come from the west of Scotland where that kind of thinking was very well established.

And now I can see the people who think they belong, uh, to the elect all around me, uh, in American academic life. And of course, the critical idea which Robert Louis Stevenson gets at in "The Master of Ballantrae" and, uh, James Hogg gets in "The Confessions of a Justified Sinner" is that the elect are the worst people. It's the people who think that they belong to the elite who turn out to be capable of the most diabolical acts.

So you know, if you have that feeling that you might belong to the elect, disabuse yourself of that notion because it often empowers dreadful acts of cruelty. Starting a business can be tough, especially knowing how to run your online storefront. But thanks to Shopify, it's easier than ever. Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business—from the launch your online shop stage all the way to the "Did we just hit a million orders?" stage.

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I presume that's why the gospel enjoins that the last will be first, right? And the first will be last. It's pointing to something like that. There's a couple of themes you developed. So you pointed out that it's often the reaction to a crisis that's worse than the crisis, and you pointed to the law of unintended consequences as the cause of that. And, and that's—I think there's something technically true about that in that there is a very large number of possible consequences of any given act, and the probability that you can specify the consequence you want and only that consequence diminishes with the complexity of the action.

Okay, so—and you know, you can see even systems as sophisticated as the immune system falling prey to the law of unintended consequences because sometimes people die when they're infected by an organism because the immune system overreacts. And the COVID overreaction was a generalized social immune system overreaction, and it was much worse than the hypothetical crisis itself.

Now, but what I wanted to focus on was the reason that that overreach occurs. Now I'm going to—I’ve been writing a book about biblical narratives so they're very much on my mind, and that's partly why I'm bringing them up. But I talked to a good friend of mine and his brother, Jonathan Peio, and Matthew Peio about the first cataclysm—the first apocalyptic cataclysm as it's laid out in the Book of Genesis, and that's the sin of Eve and the consequent sin of Adam.

And their view is that the sin of Eve is one of pride, is that she encounters the serpent, who turns out to be Satan. So it's, it's the possibility of predation and natural catastrophe allied with the possibility of evil—that's a good way of thinking about it, so symbolically. And her first presumption is that she can encompass that and hearken to it and listen to its voice and integrate it, and that's what produces the fall. And Adam's consequent sin is he agrees with Eve, and I would say mostly to try to impress her, which speaks very deeply to the motivation of men.

And so there's this notion—it's a very, very interesting notion, and I'd like to know what you make of it—is that the fundamental reason that cataclysms occur—and I guess this is an objection to your theory of an amoral world, so we'll see where this goes—is that it's people's overreaching pride that is the eternal precursor to the fall. You know, pride goes before a fall, but it's this notion that we can bite off more than we can chew; that we can encapsulate and control more than than we’re really competent to.

We have an over-expansion vision of our competence; we trumpet that to parade our moral virtue. It motivates us to overextend ourselves in places we shouldn't, and the constant consequence of that is systemic collapse, you know, at different scales. And so it begs the question, you know, I've really wondered about this, and you know, if you—I think it's something to meditate on—if you didn't overreach in your life, you know, if you were properly humble in your claims of mastery, if you only dealt with what was—what was with what was local, and that was within your bounds of competence, you know, maybe extending yourself a bit to learn—maybe you wouldn't bring on yourself a continual sequence of relatively apocalyptic catastrophes, right?

It's like—and, and you pointed to that at the end of your last sequence of comments. You know, you said, well, the universe is full of random events and it's not essentially moral, but you also said, but we overreach constantly, and that does produce, you know, various forms of cataclysm. So I would say—see, there's a paradox in those two viewpoints because how about this: is how about our immorality makes us more susceptible to the random fluctuations of the world, right? That joins those two visions together.

I think it's rather different from the way you've put it. It's often people with a strong sense of morality who overreach. Humility is important. We need to be humble about our ability to predict the consequences of our actions. It's a nonlinear world, but we are quite linear thinkers. And we love to say, other things being equal, this act will have the following consequence. Uh, but of course, other things are not equal in a complex system.

Let me give you an illustration of this point, uh, which is currently, uh, in people's minds because of the success of the movie "Oppenheimer." Uh, Oppenheimer was a very moral individual; at least he felt himself to be, uh, rooted in, in an ethical education that he'd had at an elite school in New York, drawn out of, uh, those ethical, uh, those ethical premises towards, uh, communism in the 1930s.

Uh, but when given the challenge to build an atomic bomb in order to win World War II, uh, he embraced that challenge and achieved it with astonishing brilliance, both as a scientist and, as it turned out, as a leader of scientists. But he quickly began to see, after the bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that there were unintended consequences.

Uh, he was unable to prevent the arms race that soon, uh, broke out between the United States and the Soviet Union. He was unable to prevent the invention of the thermonuclear bomb, the super. Uh, he lost the arguments, uh, about the development of, of nuclear weapons. And if one looks back at that era, the single most amazing thing to me about that breakthrough is that we have subsequently made so much more use of the destructive potential of nuclear fish than of its productive potential.

We've built many, many more nuclear warheads than nuclear reactors. That illustrates, I think, very powerfully the law of unintended consequences. But it began with an individual, uh, Oppenheimer, who was filled with a sense of his own morality and took that sense with him to the grave.

Right, okay. But maybe that—okay, but, but you're pointing to something there that, that is akin to a point you made earlier, is that you said, you know, that he was filled with a sense of his own morality, and that—and I can understand why that might be associated with the totalitarian temptation of religious dogmatism and Calvinism, let's say.

But I could say, perhaps I could say in response, he should have been filled instead with a sense of his own potential sinfulness. Right? And I would also say that—and you can tell me what you think about this because these are ideas that I'm just, you know, trying to develop—is that you already told me that as far as you're concerned, it's the very people who regard themselves as the elect and the saved and the already moral who are most likely to overreach.

And who present the biggest danger. You follow that up with the description of Oppenheimer, right—this incredible Luciferean intellect—and that's the proper symbolic representation, who engaged in this world-destroying scheme and then was potentially world-destroying scheme and was unable to control it. But you characterized him as convinced of his own moral virtue.

So I would say, okay, well if that's the problem, maybe he should have been convinced of the opposite of that, which would be his intrinsic insufficiency and sinfulness. Now, there is a continual injunction throughout the biblical corpus to do precisely that.

And the reason I'm bringing that up, too, is because something else that you said begs a question: you know, if the law of unintended consequence rules, then under what conditions is action—any action—not overreach, right? Because you could say this is combinatorial explosion. You can't predict the consequence of any action, and yet you have to act. And so then the question emerges, well, since you have to act, but there's the danger of exponentially cascading unintended consequences, in what spirit should you act?

And you've already pointed out, well, it shouldn't be in the spirit of smug, self-satisfied Calvinistic dogmatic certainty in your moral right. Well then, what should it be? Well, hopefully, it should be the opposite of that, you know? And that is a kind of radical humility, right? It's an openness to the possibility of error.

I mean, I don't know exactly how those things should be calibrated, but because we do have to act and it does seem to me that there is a domain of action—like what do you think it was that Oppenheimer did wrong fundamentally? I mean, I characterize his intellect as Luciferean, right? He's reaching—he's reaching for a power that in principle, I don't know if it should have been forever off-limits. I have no idea how to adjudicate that.

But you have a sense that Oppenheimer himself recognized that he had—was it that he had too much faith in the comprehensiveness of his intellect? That he was too tempted by the power that was offered to him as a consequence of being developer of the—of this immense weapon? Where do you think he went wrong?

I haven't—that's key to the question of where science itself goes wrong. I should be clear, I haven't watched the movie, but I read the book "American Prometheus." I prefer books to movies, and the book, uh, makes it clear that what Oppenheimer got wrong was to flirt with communism.

And that was wrong because it was the moment when he set aside his scientific judgment and drank at least some of the snake oil that the Soviet regime was successfully exporting in the 1930s. This was a terrible mistake that ultimately undermined his credibility and limited his power to steer the course of the nuclear race.

What he got right was to develop a bomb that could end World War II without the need for a large-scale conventional forces invasion of Japan, which would have cost untold numbers of American soldiers' lives.

And I think it's very important to emphasize that if Oppenheimer had said to himself, “I must be humble and resist the temptation to win this”—this race— and of course, a number of physicists did take that view and refused to participate in the Manhattan Project, it might have been disastrous.

I constantly try to remind people in the work I've done on the Second World War that the Axis powers, the totalitarian powers, nearly won that war, and it took tremendous creativity by a whole range of scientists—not only Oppenheimer, but think of Turing—those, uh, cryptographers who did such a crucial job of making sure that the Allied powers cracked the Axis powers' codes.

It took a huge effort to win that war. The critical thing I think comes from another, uh, secular Jewish intellect, uh, Henry Kissinger, whose biography I've spent a large part of my career writing. In the 1950s and '60s, Kissinger, before he entered the realm of power, came up with the idea of the problem of conjecture.

Uh, it's an extremely important idea that should be communicated to any decision maker, whether they're in the private sector or the public sector. And the problem of conjecture says that at any given moment when one must take a decision, there is a kind of asymmetry, and the asymmetry arises from the fact that if you act—let's say if you had acted in 1938 to prevent, uh, Hitler's takeover of Czechoslovakia—that would have been a cost.

The war would have begun earlier, and, uh, even if you had successfully prevented a much larger war, the world war that broke out in 1939, you would have got no real gratitude for that. You get no payoffs for the averted catastrophe. Your preemptive action has a cost, and you're held responsible for the tempting thing, particularly in a democratic system, is to do nothing, hope for the best, because that has a low cost.

And if disaster nevertheless happens, if you're unlucky, then you say to yourself, "Well, anybody in my position would have made the same error." So the cost of preemption is high, and you have to take a decision conjecturally because you can't know that in acting in 1938, you avert a much larger and more dangerous war.

You cannot have that certainty, and there are no data that will tell you so. I think decision-making under uncertainty is the hardest thing of all, but it has to be done. And I think what I've learned from Kissinger is that you will be held responsible and judged very harshly for those actions you take even if they avert disaster.

You won't get thanked. Nobody ever will thank Henry Kissinger for avoiding World War III. Uh, no, nobody will. I think that, um, most choices in the realm of power are between evils. You just have to decide which is the greater and which is the lesser. There are very frequently no good options.

I think that's very clear today in the Middle East, since, uh, we're talking at a time of fresh disaster in that region. There are no good choices facing the Israeli government or even the government of the United States, but there's no option to do nothing. I think that must be clear.

Let me take apart what you just said. So the first thing you brought up is that Oppenheimer flirted with, let's call it radical left utopianism. Now that's very interesting because I would say that's true of intellectuals across the West and has been since the, what, I don't know, the last 100 years. And it's certainly something that characterizes the academia at the moment.

I mean, Larry Summers came out two days ago, the former president of Harvard, savaging Harvard as a consequence of its descent into this radical leftist statist utopian vision. So there's something key to the presumptive presumption of the intellect and belief in a state-imposed utopia, so that's one thing.

Then you said—a sequence of things that were very complicated. The first was, well, in inaction also produces a combinatorial explosion, so we're stuck with the necessity of action. So that's a big problem that brings up the issue again, is then under what conditions is action appropriate?

Then you said you're also not rewarded for preventative action because in part because nobody can tell what you prevented if it doesn't happen, right? And so there's no public virtue in that, and that entices the leaders of modern states to forestall action because they'll be blamed for action, and then maybe to react precipitously once it's too late.

So then again, we're back to the—the central question here, at least in part, which is how do you how do you organize your attention and sequence your action so that overreach is least likely? Now, you discussed Kissinger in that regard and said that, you know, he was constantly choosing between evils and regarded that as a necessity of statescraft.

You have to conduct yourself—we talked earlier about this idea that, you know, that there's a tremendous moral hazard in praying in public and signaling virtue to yourself and demanding recognition for your positive actions. And you said that prevention doesn't produce public claim, that what that has to mean at least in part is that you have to be oriented to act properly despite its reputational advantage or cost.

Right? See, that's exactly it. Is that something other than reputation has to motivate your action? If it's not status, power, and reputation, right? That's exactly right. That's where that should—Eno Paeno said all political careers end in failure. I think that any leader should reconcile himself or herself to ultimate failure because doing the right thing, averting disaster, will not get you rewarded.

Uh, and I think this is just to—so then why bother? Why bother doing the right thing, and how do you even determine what the right thing is if it's not associated with public acclaim? What would right be? Because it must have ultimately been right for Churchill to speak out against Nazism as he did throughout the 1930s to take the helm in 1940 when all his predictions had been fulfilled and Britain had been brought to the brink of catastrophe—to lead Britain, uh, to an ultimate victory in 1945 and then suffer a massive electoral defeat.

This is a noble story, and, uh, I think that's—that's what any leader should aspire to. To be right on the basis of historical judgment, to accept that there will not necessarily be triumphal processions, that there may in fact be ignon at the end of the road, but to have done the right thing to save your nation and get no thanks for it, that seems to be the most that any leader can aspire to.

Okay, okay, okay. Well, I've got, I've got two comments about that, and then we'll wrap this part of the interview out. I understand that you have a hard out. You described Churchill's actions in terms of ultimate right, and so you made reference to a concept of ultimate right and then you turn to a particular concept of ultimate right, which was a form of extreme self-sacrifice with no public acclaim.

I got to say those are strange things for someone who also said during the same discussion who proclaimed a kind of central atheism because I can't help seeing echoes in that of, well, the Christian passion, for example, is that you're called upon to do right at your own expense, even your own ultimate expense, with no hope of public acclaim. And you do that in the service of something that's ultimately right.

And so let me—well, that's a parallel that that occurred to me when you made the shry observation. I'm a lapsed atheist, Jordan. I go to church every Sunday, uh, precisely because having been brought up an atheist, I came to realize in my career as an historian not only that atheism is a disastrous basis for a society. Atheist societies have probably committed more violations of human rights than any others, but also because I don't think it can be a basis for individual ethical decision-making.

Uh, Churchill was a Christian, and I think has to be understood as such. So I—I am a lapsed atheist and proud of it. Ah, okay. Well, you know, it turns out I wanted to talk to you for the additional half an hour that I usually use, but that's actually just a perfectly fine place to bring this part of the conversation to an end.

And I would be more than happy to talk to you again in some greater detail—there's obviously many other things that we could explore. For everyone watching and listening, most of you know that I'm going to continue to talk to Dr. Ferguson on The Daily Wire. I want to understand more deeply where his interest in such topics arose during the course of his life.

I usually use an autobiographical approach in that half an hour. So if those of you who are watching and listening would like to join us on the Daily Wire side, that would be great. Otherwise, Neil, thank you very much for a very stimulating conversation. Thank you to everyone who's paid attention and devoted some time to walking through this podcast with us. Thanks.