The Globe and Mail's Ian Brown takes a somewhat snarky look at the Cassandras of our time.
I'll focus on his remarks about celebrity doomsayer Niall Ferguson, who was in top form in Tuesday's Globe.
The financial headlines can make your eyeballs bleed. William Burroughs, the great Beat writer, could have fashioned one of his cut-up poems out of a single day's fare:
Markets tumble as bank fears linger
Will invoking the Great Depression bring it on?
Manulife needs to confront its reality
There will be blood ...The boom in doom reached a new peak Tuesday. That was the day Harvard financial historian Niall Ferguson declared, in this newspaper, that the global recession is about to produce blood in the streets, "civil wars" and toppled governments. By Friday it was the No. 1 all-time best-read story on globeandmail.com, and a global Internet tizzy as well. ...
... as frightening as the future looks, we seem to enjoy being told how much it's going to hurt. Dire news makes us feel like grown-ups, serious once more. We might consider seeing a collective psychiatrist. At the very least, we should take a close look at what we're afraid of.
Niall Ferguson wields the whip of shame the way we like it. "Niall is a self-publicist and a controversialist," one of his fellow Cassandras on the global lecture circuit says. "That's his stock in trade."
The Scottish-born, Oxford-trained, Harvard-seated professor's fourth book, The Ascent of Money, is currently No. 4 on the New York Times's business bestseller list. His website is stacked with his latest pronouncements. They range from a discussion of pre-First World War central bank incompetence, which led to the rise of fascism and Hitler (his ever-ready theme), to an imaginary economic retrospective of 2009 (predictions include an assassination attempt on Barack Obama by al-Qaeda next Thanksgiving).
He works the rhetoric of doom like a master. Is violence inevitable because of this crisis? "There will be blood, in the sense that a crisis of this magnitude is bound to increase political as well as economic [conflict]"— but we already knew that, where's the evidence? "It will cause civil wars to break out that were dormant" — again, where, and were they about to break out anyway?
Prof. Ferguson's best stroke is to nuzzle up to the Direst Prediction of All, without touching it. "I don't see it producing anything comparable with 1914 or 1939." By then, of course, the war horse is out of the barn.
Most of all, he's a good storyteller. His prose style is as brisk as his speeches are lucrative, at $50,000 per. Don't complain: You deserve it. ...
Why do we hunger for their dark predictions? It's an interesting question. Maybe Tolstoy was right: Unhappiness tells us more about ourselves than optimism. Maybe the prospect of a sharp cleansing purge makes us feel better about our languid lust for pleasure: ow trumps oooh. Maybe, as Martin Wolf, the renowned chief economic pundit for the Financial Times (and no stranger to the international doom circuit) says, "This is a shock. And in periods of shock, people get real. They ask big questions about their lives."
"There is a peculiar human need to contemplate disaster," Vivian Rakoff, professor emeritus in the department of psychiatry at the University of Toronto, says. "Because there is the sense that if it gets bad enough, we can start over again."
Things are different here in Canada. When I telephoned Wendy Dobson, a former director of the C. D. Howe Institute who now teaches at the University of Toronto, she said "Calm down!" before I even said hello. Dr. Dobson takes Niall Ferguson's alarms with a grain of the old salt: "Predictions of civil war and depression?" she says. "He's right — in some small, badly governed country."