The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
It seems as if celebrity intellectuals have been with us forever. Back in the day, the likes of Paul Ehrlich would show up on television talk shows to expound on how population growth was giving rise to imminent famine. Human nature being as it is, catastrophism has always been a sure attention grabber. Several components are critical to making the celebrity intellectual gig work. You need a big idea, catchy sound bites, and a high level of certainty. On top of that, it doesn't go amiss to have an interviewer who is either an ideological soul mate or just respectfully deferential. But sometimes the big idea doesn't pan out, which can be a good thing. For instance, we can all be happy that Ehrlich's doomster prognosis didn't come to pass. Among today's crop of celebrity intellectuals, Niall Ferguson is in the first rank. Indeed, no less an arbiter than Conrad Black has described him as being 'virtually an itinerant industry of opinion and scholarly advocacy unto himself.' Born in Scotland and educated at Oxford, Ferguson is prodigiously prolific. In addition to his academic career, he writes books and articles, presents television programs, makes speeches, and so forth. At last count, the book tally was well up in the double digits _ and this from a guy who won't be 50 until next year. See 'Intell...' on pg. Continued from pg. And true to the spirit of the genre, Ferguson doesn't do self-doubt, or at least not when he's in performer mode. In a 2011 interview with the Guardian's Decca Aikenhead, he talked about his media style this way: 'When you are on Newsnight or Question Time, they want combative polarization; they want a strong case, strongly put. And I do that _ I can do that _ because a certain intellectual discipline is involved.' It's a characteristic that invariably ruffles feathers. Last year, the American liberal blogging fraternity descended on him ferociously after his Newsweek article arguing against U.S. President Barack Obama's re-election. There was even a suggestion that his Harvard status should be reviewed on the grounds of purported dishonesty. When it comes to certain subjects, the hallowed concept of academic freedom does seem to have its limits! For his most recent book, The Great Degeneration, Ferguson draws on a series of BBC lectures he delivered last year. And although it's a short work, these origins show. Reading it, you have the sense of a stream of consciousness that's perhaps not as well organized, or as tightly edited, as it could be. Examining the broad theme of what he sees as the degeneration of Western institutions, the focus is on four topics: democracy, capitalism, the rule of law, and civil society. As Ferguson puts it, 'it is these institutions that make the gadget work.' For democracy, he laments that 'public debt allows the current generation of voters to live at the expense of those as yet too young to vote or as yet unborn.' The culprit here is not merely the size of the official debt, but rather the far larger unfunded liabilities of various entitlement programs. On capitalism, he believes that the popular diagnosis holding deregulation to blame for the 2008 financial meltdown is fundamentally wrongheaded. Instead, the root of the problem lay in overly-complex regulation that, in effect, constitutes 'the disease of which it pretends to be the cure.' After all, it was the most regulated institutions, not the freebooting hedge funds, which proved to be the most disaster-prone. With regard to the rule of law, he worries that it's being supplanted by the rule of lawyers. And in a world of unintended consequences, the 'growing complexity (and sloppiness) of statute law' is a major threat. As for civil society, it's being hollowed out. Voluntary organizations, like the Elks and the Rotarians, are in decline, while new technology-facilitated networks are an inadequate substitute. Whereas the Elks brought people of different classes together, Facebook is merely a 'tool enabling like-minded people to exchange like-minded opinions about, well, what they like.' True to form, Ferguson remains deliberately provocative. But interestingly, his suggested remedies _ such as public sector balance sheets that accurately reflect future liabilities _ would have only incremental impact, if even that. Although we may hunger for certainty and sweeping solutions, they're not in the cards. In the real world, it's always been thus. Troy Media columnist Pat Murphy worked in the Canadian financial services industry for over 30 years. Originally from Ireland, he has a degree in history and economics. Troy Media distributed this column.
