The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Public knowledge of my capture had another major benefit: it allowed me to avoid the usual outward signs of teenage rebellion. I discovered that it is much more effective to act like a nice guy and be “reasonable” if you prove willing to go beyond just verbiage. You can afford to be compassionate, lax, and courteous if, once in a while, when it is least expected of you, but completely justified, you sue someone, or savage an enemy, just to show that you can walk the walk.

“Paradise” Evaporated

The Lebanese “paradise” suddenly evaporated, after a few bullets and mortar shells. A few months after my jail episode, after close to thirteen centuries of remarkable ethnic coexistence, a Black Swan, coming out of nowhere, transformed the place from heaven to hell. A fierce civil war began between Christians and Moslems, including the Palestinian refugees who took the Moslem side. It was brutal, since the combat zones were in the center of the town and most of the fighting took place in residential areas (my high school was only a few hundred feet from the war zone). The conflict lasted more than a decade and a half. I will not get too descriptive. It may be that the invention of gunfire and powerful weapons turned what, in the age of the sword, would have been just tense conditions into a spiral of uncontrollable tit-for-tat warfare.

Aside from the physical destruction (which turned out to be easy to reverse with a few motivated contractors, bribed politicians, and naïve bondholders), the war removed much of the crust of sophistication that had made the Levantine cities a continuous center of great intellectual refinement for three thousand years. Christians had been leaving the area since Ottoman times—those who moved to the West took Western first names and melded in. Their exodus accelerated. The number of cultured people dropped below some critical level. Suddenly the place became a vacuum. Brain drain is hard to reverse, and some of the old refinement may be lost forever.

The Starred Night

The next time you experience a blackout, take some solace by looking at the sky. You will not recognize it. Beirut had frequent power shutdowns during the war. Before people bought their own generators, one side of the sky was clear at night, owing to the absence of light pollution. That was the side of town farthest from the combat zone. People deprived of television drove to watch the erupting lights of nighttime battles. They appeared to prefer the risk of being blown up by mortar shells to the boredom of a dull evening.

So you could see the stars with great clarity. I had been told in high school that the planets are in something called equilibrium, so we did not have to worry about the stars hitting us unexpectedly. To me, that eerily resembled the stories we were also told about the “unique historical stability” of Lebanon. The very idea of assumed equilibrium bothered me. I looked at the constellations in the sky and did not know what to believe.

HISTORY AND THE TRIPLET OF OPACITY

History is opaque. You see what comes out, not the script that produces events, the generator of history. There is a fundamental incompleteness in your grasp of such events, since you do not see what’s inside the box, how the mechanisms work. What I call the generator of historical events is different from the events themselves, much as the minds of the gods cannot be read just by witnessing their deeds. You are very likely to be fooled about their intentions.

This disconnect is similar to the difference between the food you see on the table at the restaurant and the process you can observe in the kitchen. (The last time I brunched at a certain Chinese restaurant on Canal Street in downtown Manhattan, I saw a rat coming out of the kitchen.)

The human mind suffers from three ailments as it comes into contact with history, what I call the triplet of opacity. They are:

a. the illusion of understanding, or how everyone thinks he knows what is going on in a world that is more complicated (or random) than they realize;

b. the retrospective distortion, or how we can assess matters only after the fact, as if they were in a rearview mirror (history seems clearer and more organized in history books than in empirical reality); and

c. the overvaluation of factual information and the handicap of authoritative and learned people, particularly when they create categories—when they “Platonify.”

Nobody Knows What’s Going On

The first leg of the triplet is the pathology of thinking that the world in which we live is more understandable, more explainable, and therefore more predictable than it actually is.