Books

Fears of an imminent apocalypse have haunted our imaginations for millennia, finds Peter Frankopan

Everyone loves a good disaster. As Niall Ferguson writes in this sparkling, provocative and entertaining book, “the end of the world… has been a remarkably recurrent feature of recorded history.” Religions teach us that we are all doomed. For Jews, Christians and Muslims, the end of times will be upon us all—and woe betide us if we are not ready to meet our maker. Other faiths, like Buddhism and Hinduism, offer a little more hope, promising that although we are all doomed, we’ll go back to the beginning and start again. And then there are secular belief systems like Marxism, says Ferguson, that offer their own prophecies and visions of apocalyptic fulfilment. As the wheels of the Russian Revolution began to turn, some automatically likened Lenin to the Antichrist: ideas about the end of the world are ubiquitous.

Expectations of disaster, however, are more based on fears than on realities. It depends how one conceptualises time. It is true that from a geological and cosmological perspective we are running out of time on Earth. The good news, though, is that the planet has around a billion years or so to run. Whether humans will be around to see the end is another matter for, as Ferguson reminds us, in the grand scheme of things our species has not been around for very long.

Ferguson is intrigued by the question of how to reconcile fears of doom with the very real problems, challenges and disasters we regularly face. He sorts all of these into typologies such as “grey rhinos,” “black swans,” or “dragon kings” that some readers might find simplistic, annoying or both. Forget economists talking “with increasing absurdity” about V-shaped, W-shaped, K-shaped or “Nike swoosh-shaped” recoveries, says the author; the slow recovery will instead “be shaped more like a giant tortoise.” Historians flagellate themselves and each other often enough about labels, and one person’s jargon is another’s catnip. But this is Ferguson’s style, and there is surely nothing wrong with trying to differentiate between how and why devastating events and episodes take place.