Read the full transcript of a conversation between interviewers Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster of TRIGGERnometry and historian Niall Ferguson on “The 4 Key Threats Facing The West” at ARC Off-Stage Conversation [May 31, 2024].
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
Challenging Cyclical Theories of History
KONSTANTIN KISIN: There are people who say that we are in the last days of Western civilization. There are people like Ray Dalio who talk about how there are six stages of the collapse of empire. We’re in five and a half or whatever. As a historian, what do you make of this and everything that’s been happening recently?
NIALL FERGUSON: Well, I agree that it’s not a particularly cheerful moment in world history. But in my most recent book, Doom, the Politics of Catastrophe, I try to argue that cyclical theories of history should be regarded with a great deal of skepticism because history isn’t cyclical. We would love it to be because, of course, that would make it so much easier to understand and indeed to predict. And we would like it to be cyclical because we as individuals have a life cycle. But history doesn’t have a life cycle. Empires, civilizations, great powers, they don’t. And it’s obvious when you actually look at them seriously rather than massaging the data to find the cycle.
If you look at historical, long-run historical data, the characteristic feature is a lot of randomness. And that is because disasters, upheavals are not normally distributed. They’re actually often either completely random like the incidents of major wars or they are parallel-driven, pandemics, earthquakes, that kind of thing. So I’m a big skeptic about cyclical theories of history.
Empires rise and fall, yes, sure. But some empires rise and fall really fast. Just try Hitler’s empire, which doesn’t really get going until ’36 and is done and rubble by ’45. That’s nine years. Whereas other empires, think of Rome, you can measure in a millennium. So I don’t think it’s plausible to say, oh, Western civilization has reached the fifth stage and decline and fall are just around the corner. It’s fun and it sells books. And there’s always a market in the United States, especially for the impending end of the republic. But it just doesn’t seem to me that history is like that.
Comparing Today’s Challenges to the 1970s
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Okay, well, interesting. Let me try from a different angle then, because I think a lot of people might say, look at where we are. The West has accumulated huge debts. The West’s authority around the world is being challenged very robustly now, to put it mildly. We seem to have lost a moral will here in the West. There are many other indicators that we may be trending in the wrong direction. Would you agree with that? Or are you more optimistic about the future?
NIALL FERGUSON: A lot of what you just said is true, but you could also have said that in 1973. So 50 years ago, didn’t look great, did it? Because the United States seemed to be losing the Cold War, basically had bailed on South Vietnam, which two years later was gone, poof. And it wasn’t exactly going swimmingly in the Middle East. In October 1973, the Soviet Union, we know, was going to decline and fall with great speed in the 1980s. That wasn’t obvious in 1973.
The inflation problem of ’73 was going to get a lot worse. It’s plausibly not going to be as bad this decade. And I could go on. In 1973, America was already in the early phases of the Watergate disaster, which would bring Richard Nixon to resignation to avoid impeachment.
If you had asked people 50 years ago, how is it going? There would have been a lot who would have agreed with the declinists who really thought the game was up. There was a huge amount of division in the United States. And not only in the United States, I’m old enough to remember the ’70s. It wasn’t a particularly good time in the United Kingdom either. In fact, the UK was the sort of poster child of stagflation at that time.
So what am I telling you? I’m not convinced that there’s some great cycle at work here. It was pretty bad 50 years ago, too. And seven years later, Ronald Reagan’s elected. Nine years later, the Berlin Wall comes down. And two years after that, the Soviet Union is gone. So the lesson I would like to draw from history is there’s a lot of non-linearity. And you have to be, I think, making a more precise argument than you just did to get me properly worried.
The Real Concerns Facing the West Today
NIALL FERGUSON: So let me try. So what is worrying today is not that we feel terribly divided or so polarized. It’s not particularly, I think, that there’s a major economic problem, actually. The United States economy is shockingly strong under the circumstances.
I think the things that are concerning to me are, number one, China, Russia, Iran, North Korea are working with increasing cooperation and coordination in ways that are threatening to a number of democracies that the United States and its allies have been backing. Ukraine is one. Israel is another. Taiwan is probably next.
And secondly, China’s really much bigger economically. It has much greater resources technologically, too, than any previous rival that the United States and its allies faced. Soviet Union, economically, was never more than about 42% of GDP relative to the US. Well, China’s a lot bigger than that, certainly in the 80% range. It’s above 100% if you do a purchasing power parity calculation.
The third thing that is, I think, concerning is that the United States feels less able to cope with these geopolitical challenges than it was, say, 50 years ago. I’ll give you one specific example of that. It cannot be right that with the economy more or less full employment, there’s a deficit of 7% of gross domestic product.
And that is going to lead very quickly into some nasty fiscal arithmetic. And to be specific, debt service costs are about to overtake defense spending. And that trend line is really not pretty with interest rates rising and the deficits in excess of 5% of GDP, as far as the eye can see. So I think the fiscal situation of the US is a lot worse than it was in 1973. And that means that the US isn’t actually able to cope with three military crises at once.
Lastly, the military industrial complex ain’t what it was. God, I miss it. I mean, there was a time when the US really was the arsenal of democracy. I made this point some time ago in a Bloomberg column. It’s quite a bit behind China, which is now the arsenal of autocracy with manufacturing value added roughly 2x that of the United States. You don’t have to go back very far for it to be the other way around. Back in, I think, around 2002, 2004, the US was a manufacturing power much greater than China. So in the space of two decades, there’s been a real role reversal.
In the event of a hot war with China, the US would run out of precision missiles in about five days, more or less. That’s a much worse situation than anything 50 years ago. So there are reasons to be worried. But I need to be quite precise about what you’re worried about, and that’s what I’m worried about.
How Civilizations Fall
FRANCIS FOSTER: Niall, let’s broaden this topic out a little bit. How do civilizations actually fall?
NIALL FERGUSON: Well, that’s a good question. I think most people imagine, in a Toynbee-esque way, some kind of inner crisis of will, of morale, of self-belief. They think of it as perhaps a sort of aging process, or maybe it’s just entropy at work.
If one looks at the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, in Gibbon’s telling, it’s really a very protracted process, so protracted as to have been imperceptible, I think, for most contemporaries. But in more recent tellings – Brian Ward Perkins, for example – actually, the Roman Empire fell apart quite fast, especially the Roman Empire in the West. And I think it was perceptible that civilization had sort of come unstuck.
And I think we can understand similar processes if one looks, for example, in Chinese history. The Ming fell apart in the mid-17th century in a way that was very perceptible with very meaningful impact on quality of life. So we know what it’s like when a civilization falls apart, the infrastructure stops working, public health gets much worse. It can be caused by war, it
can be caused by plague, it can be caused by other forces that are perhaps less discernible. For example, a civilization can fail fiscally, it can fail because its monetary system doesn’t work, and it stops being able to deliver surpluses to the population. So I think we understand a little bit how that process works. And when you look at the work of someone like Peter Turchin, there is an attempt through his cliodynamics to construct models of civilizational breakdown and then look for a contemporary analogy.
And in his most recent book, Peter argues that the United States is in this kind of a cycle. He emphasizes the overproduction of elites, too many people with university degrees, not enough for them to do. He, I thought, quite brilliantly forecast a sort of peak in organized violence in 2020, which I guess he got lucky with the pandemic and George Floyd and the subsequent mayhem, but it kind of looks quite good as a prediction right now.
I guess when you look at all his variables, however, you could make a similar argument about China. In fact, one of the variables, demographics, looks worse for China. Another of the variables, overproduction of educated people looks worse for China. So in my review of his book, which I like, I mean, I respect his work very much, I said might be true, but it might turn out to be true of China more.
A bit like Paul Kennedy’s book, you might remember The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, which came out in 1987 and said there is a kind of law of decline where if you’re spending too much on one thing and not enough on defense, then your industrial capacity declines. And all of that was supposed to apply to the United States, but it turned out to be more true of the Soviet Union.
So we can look for these signs of unraveling, but I think we have to be quite careful not to be so sure that it’s a U.S. problem that we miss other worse problems elsewhere. I think the U.S. also has a kind of interesting track record of worrying about its own decline. I think it’s a feature, not a bug of the United States to worry about decline or to worry that the republic is somehow going to enter a terminal crisis or that American power is going to wane. America’s love worrying about that. It’s one of the things that sells books and gets op-eds printed. And then it happens to the other guy and Americans are like, gee, we won. And then there’s the kind of euphoric decade before it’s time to start worrying about decline again.
Young People, Ideology, and Economic Reality
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Neil, you talk about Gen Z and their education. I grew up in a crumbling empire in the Soviet Union, which also attempted to indoctrinate its children. But I don’t remember. I remember my parents warning me, you know, you’re going to go to school and you’re going to be taught all this crazy stuff. So get ready. They’re going to tell you about Pavlik Morozov and they’re going to tell you about this and that and whatever. And by the time I arrived at school, I was rather inoculated and many young people were.
And as comedians, we know that I think ideas are like jokes in that in order for them to really land with the listener, there has to be something about their experience that matches what they’re being told. And I wonder if you think that the economic circumstances facing young people, the extraordinary price of housing, for example, the inability, therefore, to pair up and have families, the sense that many people now have that they’re almost certainly not going to benefit from the sort of liberal, democratic, capitalistic promise, which is that we will live better than our parents. Is that why these ideas are as persuasive as they are to young people today?
NIALL FERGUSON: It’s possible, though. I think one has to be a bit careful about inferring that young people are protesting in support of Hamas because they can’t get onto the housing ladder in London.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: You’ve made my argument sound ridiculous, which I think is slightly unfair.
NIALL FERGUSON: No, I didn’t mean to do that. What I meant to say was that the radicalism of the young extends along quite a broad front. What’s interesting is that it doesn’t really focus terribly much on the economic issue that you mentioned. If young people really were concerned about the cost of housing in, say, the southeast of England, then you’d have thought that they’d spend a lot of time researching housing policy and campaigning for reductions in the Green Belt and the construction of more housing.
But they do the exact opposite. They oppose that because the radical support for environmental movements, Extinction Rebellion, et cetera, actually points them in the opposite direction. You’ll find young people tying themselves to trees to stop further development in the Green Belt.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: No, they’re not. But let me make the connection that I was trying to make and perhaps you can address where the nihilism is therefore coming from because the argument I would make is if you don’t have a bright future as you perceive it, it is quite natural to retreat into some kind of cope as people now say on the internet. The cope might be that we care about things that we can’t control because we can’t control the things that we care about, i.e. housing.
I mean I can tell you even for our generation, the housing issue is massive and no amount of researching green belt policy is going to get someone my age on a housing ladder if they’re not already at this point. We know obviously as you do and I do that becoming a parent for example massively changes how you see the world. So does actually getting on a property ladder. Young people to whom that’s not available are quite likely to tend towards nihilism I would argue. You disagree perhaps. So where is the nihilism coming from if not from there?
NIALL FERGUSON: Rupert Murdoch.
Well, I think there is a couple of points that are worth making. First is if young people are suffering from the consequences of policies that have essentially rigged the property market or the economy more broadly in favor of older generations, then they ought to be attracted to the more radical proposals, not just to reform the housing situation but also to reform the welfare state because the main problem that young people face is that the intergenerational balance is simply not being maintained.
The liabilities of welfare states in most Western countries are hugely skewed in favor of the elderly. It’s the young who will pick up the tab for the very generous forms of welfare that the baby boomers essentially voted for themselves. And so if it were about economics, you’d have thought that more young people would be as Hayek wrongly predicted arguing for radical reform of entitlements.
I mean, Hayek even says in the Constitution of Liberty that the young will finally get so impatient with the elderly that they’ll kind of herd them into camps. None of that has happened. The young defer unwittingly, I think, but they defer to the logic of the welfare state.
Young are overwhelming on the left. They support Labour over the Conservatives, Democrats over Republicans massively. But that’s bizarre because actually Labour and the Democrats are the people most committed to preserving the welfare state with its current transfers from the relatively young to the elderly. So I don’t think young people understand their economic interests at all well.
Now, you may be right, but faced with this problem, they retreat into nihilism because they can’t bring themselves to do what would be rational, which would be to support the Centre for Policy Studies position on housing or the position of Republicans or older position of Republicans for entitlement reform. They may just retreat into nihilism because embracing those conservative solutions is just too odious to them.
There is another possibility, though, which is that they are, as I was trying to argue, drawn into a series of ideological positions through their education. And these ideological positions lead to what used to be called on the left false consciousness. They think the problem is big oil. They think the problem is capitalism. They think the problem is settler colonialism because they get given these phrases from school and in university. And the net effect is that they don’t pursue their interests as a generation at all rationally.
I made this point in The Great Degeneration back in 2012 that if the young really understood their self-interest, in the U.S., they would all have been in favor of Paul Ryan’s program of entitlement reform. But almost no young people voted for Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Niall, do you think part of the problem is as well is that these narratives that they’re fed, particularly when it comes to history, are so incredibly powerful and they’re so simplistic that they’re far easier to ingest, then actually what is a very unpleasant truth is, as my dad always likes to tell me, there’s no black and white, lad, there’s only a murky shade of grey.
NIALL FERGUSON: Well, I do think…
FRANCIS FOSTER: You can see why you came out the way you did now.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: It’s a good point. My soul is from Wigan.
NIALL FERGUSON: Yeah, I mean, the thing, having grown up in Glasgow, I was receptive to that kind of argument. When the entire city is grey, it seems quite plausible and there aren’t that many moments in history when you can say unequivocally, good guys, bad guys. I made this point in “The War of the World” that we end up winning World War II with Stalin doing a huge amount of the fighting. I hardly need to tell you this, but the Soviet Union is as brutal a totalitarian regime as Nazi Germany. And so even that’s a tainted victory and that’s one of the things that an older generation have long clung to as the one thing we did that was absolutely right. From the vantage point of people in Eastern Europe, it was anything but that.
Climate Alarmism as Secular Religion
NIALL FERGUSON: So I think it’s partly that the stories are attractive. The story of the imminent end of the world is one of the most attractive there is. That’s been a part of the great monotheistic religions. People are drawn to disastrous outcomes. It’s why science fiction is a popular genre. And so if you tell people that there is this imminent extinction event and the day after tomorrow everything is just going to be on fire and we’ll be dying from climate change, people are very receptive to that kind of argument.
And it’s quite hard to argue against it because it’s approached in a quasi-religious spirit. So if you offer any kind of criticism, you’re a denier, a heretic, a blasphemer. So people are drawn into what is in fact a kind of secular religion, the impending end of days and we must prepare for it. How should we prepare for it? By fasting so we become vegans. We should be celibate so we shouldn’t have children. And so you essentially have a kind of secular religion.
And this is something that Voegelin and others saw as the problem in the 20th century, that in the wake of the predominance of Christianity, people didn’t believe in nothing, they believed in anything. And so the new religions of the secular sphere turned out to be in some ways a good deal worse than the religions they displaced. Well, we’re here again with the kind of strange religion of the impending end of the world.
And I think it is much more appealing than “it’s complicated,” which is, you know, the least exciting combination of words and the thing that historians are compulsively driven to say at the beginning of almost any answer they give to a question.
The Value of Freedom
NIALL FERGUSON: I do think there is black and white, though, and here I’m going to come back at Wigan. I think there is a very profound difference between a free society in which one can speak freely and write what one thinks and meet and form associations with whomever one likes and an unfree society in which those things are highly dangerous and indeed prohibited and may lead you into a jail, even a labor camp. That’s a really big difference.
What is wrong with kids today, and I do sound like the old fart that I’ve become, is that they have no very clear idea of what an unfree society is like. “Queers for Palestine,” you know, when radical proposals…
KONSTANTIN KISIN: We’re doing a fundraiser, by the way. We’re going to send them all over.
FRANCIS FOSTER: We’ve got a T-shirt for you now.
NIALL FERGUSON: It’s kind of bizarre. I remember saying to my wife when we lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, wouldn’t it be funny if all the people who hate me and all the people who hate you simultaneously protested outside our house and the Islamists found themselves right next to the trans activists? How would that go? We’d be able to sneak out the back as they fell on one another.
It’s a curious thing that people don’t understand what it’s like to live under Hamas, and they don’t really understand what the Iranian revolution aspires to do. They don’t understand what it’s like to live in the Stalin Soviet Union or in Mao’s China. If they understood that, then they might be more reluctant to do the kind of things that many students are tempted to do these days, like write letters of denunciation, call for people to be fired for things that they’ve said.
It’s amazing how totalitarian behaviors can creep into a free society. And I think we’ve just failed to communicate on freedom as a phenomenon to this generation. And maybe that’s just our bad as a generation that we didn’t get across to the Generation Z kids what it was like. I kind of used to toy with the idea of trips to North Korea, because I don’t think you ever feel quite the same about freedom once you’ve been in an unfree society.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Exactly. And this is, I think, why we started Trigonometry and been talking to so many people about it, because we both know what that’s like from our various experiences.
Historical Amnesia and Cycles
FRANCIS FOSTER: I was going to ask you, as you were talking right at the end about this, because do you think this maybe is a cyclical element of history? It seems that these ideas, mutated as they are, are essentially what we had in the Soviet Union, but along slightly different lines. And it just takes a couple of generations for us to forget. And then we’re back to square one. And then the power of these ideas is they sound so good. All things to all men, equality, blah, blah, blah. Is it just, you know, three generations and bam, we’re back to square one?
NIALL FERGUSON: Well, I think the kind of amnesia cycle of history that, you know, your grandfather actually fought, my grandfather’s fought in the World Wars, and my father and my mother very clearly remembered being children in that time. I grew up in the 1960s and 1970s with the war as this sort of ubiquitous collective memory, which even constructed how we played in the playground. And after a certain point, it just sort of wears off.
And you know, I’ll give you an example. I don’t think anybody watches black and white movies anymore, whereas I did. I can’t get my children to watch them. And if you don’t watch black and white movies, it’s really quite hard to properly to connect with the Second World War because so much of the great World War II movies are black and white. So that may be true.
I think the role of the historian, the role, as I understand it, is to counter that amnesia by as vividly as possible conveying what the experience of the Bolshevik Revolution and its aftermath were like. And I think those of us who do the job seriously, I’m thinking here of Frank Dikötter’s work on China under Mao or Orlando Figes and before him Richard Pipes on the Russian Revolution, the people who do the job well can transcend the amnesia of the fourth generation by saying, yeah, I know it’s a long time ago and you never even met your great grandfather who was fighting the Germans or fighting the Japanese, but you need to know this.
I don’t quite know why we failed so miserably when for a time it felt as if Hitler and Henry the Eighth were what kids in British schools were taught. Somehow all that teaching about the Holocaust has failed if there are Generation Z students chanting “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” apparently oblivious to the fact that that implies a second Holocaust. So you kind of find yourself asking, where did all that Holocaust history get us? We clearly didn’t get the message across about why Hitler was bad. That somehow got lost in translation.
