Niall Ferguson: evaluation

Transcript context

…Does the philosophy of history in Bond movies embody too much extreme contingency, just the right amount, or not enough? Because if the villain would just kill James Bond and dispense with the unnecessarily slow dipping mechanism, the villain would then go on to destroy or rule the world. [mimicking the characters] “You don’t expect me to talk, do you, Goldfinger?” “No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to die.” But how is he going to die? An incredibly slow-moving laser is going finally to reach his private parts and slice him in two, but it’s just too slow. Yes, I think even as a child, I recognized that there was something implausible about Sean Connery’s un-killability. This is amusingly mocked in Mike Myers’s Austin Powers films. But the plot twists — if you think back to the early Fleming novels and the early movies — the plot twists that matter are rather relevant to our own time because the people who are the villains are not clearly direct employees of the Soviet Union, of the Russians. They’re semi-freelancing organized criminals, whether it’s Dr. No or Goldfinger. That’s actually quite appropriate in our time because that’s how cyber warfare is waged. Criminal gangs who are semi-officially working with the Kremlin are already quite a major threat to our political and economic stability. I hope that somewhere out there, there is a 007-like figure who bumps off the ringleaders of the Moldovan hacking or malware organization that’s behind the Colonial Pipeline attack. Actually, this makes Bond feel quite relevant, and the plot twists are absurd, of course. Fleming was a bit like John Buchan. These books are the direct lineal descendants, as you probably know, Tyler, of the great Richard Hannay books that John Buchan wrote, beginning with The Thirty-Nine Steps. It’s a tradition, I think, that can be traced all the way back to the period before the First World War. You read these books, I think, with a certain suspension of disbelief because the authors are signaling to you that there’s something slightly camp going on here, that it’s not to be taken too seriously. Buchan regarded the Hannay novels as ripping yarns. I think he called them shockers. He would refer to them as shockers. Fleming was equally disdainful, really, of the Bond novels, but they capture a truth about the Cold War, the Bond novels. That is the Cold War isn’t actually cold. It involves quite a lot of violence, just small-scale, precision violence rather than the large-scale violence of world war. Here’s a very simple question. What is the nature of the epistemic crisis faced by modernity at its most fundamental level? Why are we screwed up? Nothing proximate. Something ultimate or fundamental.…

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