January 17th 2024

Niall Ferguson happens to be a Professor of History at Stanford and has written some book about the End of the World- or rather the human being's obsession with this concept- as can be seen from the fact that we seem to have consistently over-predicted the armageddon or doomsday since time immemorial. It is almost a pastime of at least a certain segment of humanity. He argues that we all ineluctably know that our lives will end- and this is the worst thing that there is to deal with- even for billionaires. They know they will go. And so it is somehow less of an encumbrance if we also know that it is not just us, but rather the whole world that will also go. This makes the bitter pill somewhat easier to swallow- much like the fabled spoonful of sugar, in the film Mary Poppins. 

As I heard him speak, I also reflected on my own ideas on the end of the world. And I realized I had none- nor did I ever spend any time in consideration of it. And this is where something struck me. All of the content around future dystopia , eventually culminating in the absolute end of existence is a feature common on two different levers. One is economic- wherein we see literature and cinema showcasing such subjects typically in developed economies. The poor are too busy trying to survive and have no bandwidth to dream dark dreams.  They whose present is darkness can only dream of light- so to speak. Additionally, I can't be sure but it seems to me that the end of the world is a concept far more in tune with the somewhat linear Abrahamic faiths as opposed to the circular Non-Abrahamic ones. For Hindus, there was never a beginning and there is thus no end. Even our own lives do not end- we are simply reborn. And this goes on and on until we attain freedom from this cycle. And not much has been said about what this really means but I suspect this is as close to the end for Hindus as they can fathom.

I was half-expecting a more exploratory trespass into  the reasons for the obsession with the end of the world as a matter of philosophy. Therefore my reference to potential religious antecedents. However, what I ended up hearing is a treatment of the subject on political lines.  A key idea that was put forth, and there were a few parallel ideas as the conversation was a bit all over the place, as it sometimes is when you are having an unrehearsed discussion, is that there is also a tendency for people to virtue-signal about their concern for the end of the world. In the context, the reference was to the specific apocalypse to be allegedly caused by climate change. They want to show people their grave concern about a very big potential problem- which ofcourse simultaneously absolves them from any responsibility to focus on a smaller real problem, closer to home, that they could actually potentially do something about. It is overreach, but also wrongheaded. It is characterized by a kind of espousal of asceticism, especially by the western world. It requires people to stop eating meat, flying business class, use internal combustion engines , take shorter showers and so on. As expected, Ferguson, pointed out that this was wrong headed by giving the example of electric cars being more environmentally unfriendly than regular cars because the electricity generated for them came from coal-fired power plants, which are inherently much dirtier than gasoline. So the "end of the world" discussion, I would say, degenerated a bit into bashing the Greta Thunberg archetype. Not that I am a fan of the whole left-wing bluster that was fed like a fire-hose from the channel of a puerile teen to the world at large- and for years. But that is a different subject.

Another idea proposed, which was indeed more philosophical or rather rational in nature, was that people's obsession with the end of the world was caused by the fact that it represented something exciting, and the human condition is such that it always veers towards seeking excitement. Ferguson says that the Saints in heaven did not how to throw a party- so the idea of the "happy" life after death was not engaging enough for people. They'd be bored- they much prefer the excitement of dystopia than utopia. Science fiction, therefore, is rife with motifs centered around dystopia- rather than utopia.  Apparently, Dostoevsky also had said in some of his work, speaking of the utopia as conceived by Russian socialists at the time, that if humans lived in such an idyllic paradise where everyone had everything they needed and spent their life in a perfumed bubble-bath forever, and ate nothing but cake...well then, they would find a way to destroy all of this- just because of boredom. I could relate to this argument.

There was also some oblique references to morality and overreach- Oppenheimer was mentioned in this context wherein he developed a killing device because of a high sense of morality rather  than of evil. While the bombs were dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and killed and maimed loads of people- it was equally true that nuclear deterrence kept the world largely peaceful ( well, not quite but those were skirmishes when compared to World War 2). So in a sense, reference was made to the "Theory of Conjecture"- which was something Kissinger had come up with. It said that it if you were to pre-empt a negative scenario and act out something what you therefore thought was a lesser evil, you could never get any acclaim or kudos for it. You would only get blamed for the immediate and seemingly uncalled for evil that you had perpetrated. It would be very hard to prove that it indeed had a positive consequence and had prevented something even deadlier. All politicians ( and perhaps humans at large) had to choose not between good and evil but between two evils- and they needed always to choose the lesser evil. The same idea was mentioned by Tom Sowell- who said there were only trade-offs in life. ( As a side note, I cannot help but wonder how this line of thinking is so much more in tune with the Vedic and Vedantic schools of thought than anything you would find in the "biblical corpus")

Policy decisions therefore had to be well calculated, rational and such that they chose the lesser evil. Yet evil it would usually be, and cause unpopularity. Modi's demonetization is a case that comes to mind. In his case though, he somehow managed to spin it in his favor at least with the people who mattered- the electorate. The opposite political acton is populism- which is disastrous and there is enough data across space and time to demonstrate this. The other political action is governed by virtue -signalling- also disastrous because by definition it has not been subjected to rational consideration. Whenever anything is, all you end up bumping into over and over again- is the color grey.