The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Anatomy of a Black Swan—The triplet of opacity—Reading books backward—The rearview mirror—Everything becomes explainable—Always talk to the driver (with caution)—History doesn’t crawl; it jumps—“It was so unexpected”—Sleeping for twelve hours

This is not an autobiography, so I will skip the scenes of war. Actually, even if it were an autobiography, I would still skip the scenes of war. I cannot compete with action movies or memoirs of adventurers more accomplished than myself, so I will stick to my specialties of chance and uncertainty.

ANATOMY OF A BLACK SWAN

For more than a millennium the eastern Mediterranean seaboard called Syria Libanensis, or Mount Lebanon, had been able to accommodate at least a dozen different sects, ethnicities, and beliefs—it worked like magic. The place resembled major cities of the eastern Mediterranean (called the Levant) more than it did the other parts in the interior of the Near East (it was easier to move by ship than by land through the mountainous terrain). The Levantine cities were mercantile in nature; people dealt with one another according to a clear protocol, preserving a peace conducive to commerce, and they socialized quite a bit across communities. This millennium of peace was interrupted only by small occasional friction within Moslem and Christian communities, rarely between Christians and Moslems. While the cities were mercantile and mostly Hellenistic, the mountains had been settled by all manner of religious minorities who claimed to have fled both the Byzantine and Moslem orthodoxies. A mountainous terrain is an ideal refuge from the mainstream, except that your enemy is the other refugee competing for the same type of rugged real estate. The mosaic of cultures and religions there was deemed an example of coexistence: Christians of all varieties (Maronites, Armenians, Greco-Syrian Byzantine Orthodox, even Byzantine Catholic, in addition to the few Roman Catholics left over from the Crusades); Moslems (Shiite and Sunni); Druzes; and a few Jews. It was taken for granted that people learned to be tolerant there; I recall how we were taught in school how far more civilized and wiser we were than those in the Balkan communities, where not only did the locals refrain from bathing but also fell prey to fractious righting. Things appeared to be in a state of stable equilibrium, evolving out of a historical tendency for betterment and tolerance. The terms balance and equilibrium were often used.

Both sides of my family came from the Greco-Syrian community, the last Byzantine outpost in northern Syria, which included what is now called Lebanon. Note that the Byzantines called themselves “Romans”—Roumi (plural Roum) in the local languages. We originate from the olive-growing area at the base of Mount Lebanon—we chased the Maronite Christians into the mountains in the famous battle of Amioun, my ancestral village. Since the Arab invasion in the seventh century, we had been living in mercantile peace with the Moslems, with only some occasional harassment by the Lebanese Maronite Christians from the mountains. By some (literally) Byzantine arrangement between the Arab rulers and the Byzantine emperors, we managed to pay taxes to both sides and get protection from both. We thus managed to live in peace for more than a millennium almost devoid of bloodshed: our last true problem was the later troublemaking crusaders, not the Moslem Arabs. The Arabs, who seemed interested only in warfare (and poetry) and, later, the Ottoman Turks, who seemed only concerned with warfare (and pleasure), left to us the uninteresting pursuit of commerce and the less dangerous one of scholarship (like the translation of Aramaic and Greek texts).