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 ¿ghting. 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).
By any standard the country called Lebanon, to which we found ourselves suddenly incorporated after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, in the early twentieth century, appeared to be a stable paradise; it was also cut in a way to be predominantly Christian. People were suddenly brainwashed to believe in the nation-state as an entity.* The Christians convinced themselves that they were at the origin and center of what is loosely called Western culture yet with a window on the East. In a classical case of static thinking, nobody took into account the differentials in birthrate between communities and it was assumed that a slight Christian majority would remain permanent. Levantines had been granted Roman citizenship, which allowed Saint Paul, a Syrian, to travel freely through the ancient world. People felt connected to everything they felt was worth connecting to; the place was exceedingly open to the world, with a vastly sophisticated lifestyle, a prosperous economy, and temperate weather just like California, with snow-covered mountains jutting above the Mediterranean. It attracted a collection of spies (both Soviet and Western), prostitutes (blondes), writers, poets, drug dealers, adventurers, compulsive gamblers, tennis players, après-skiers, and merchants—all professions that complement one another. Many people acted as if they were in an old James Bond movie, or the days when playboys smoked, drank, and, instead of going to the gym, cultivated relationships with good tailors.
The main attribute of paradise was there: cabdrivers were said to be polite (though, from what I remember, they were not polite to me). True, with hindsight, the place may appear more Elysian in the memory of people than it actually was.
I was too young to taste the pleasures of the place, as I became a rebellious idealist and, very early on, developed an ascetic taste, averse to the ostentatious signaling of wealth, allergic to Levantine culture's overt pursuit of luxury and its obsession with things monetary.
As a teenager, I could not wait to go settle in a metropolis with fewer James Bond types around. Yet I recall something that felt special in the intellectual air. I attended the French lycée that had one of the highest success rates for the French baccalaurzat (the high school degree), even in the subject of the French language. French was spoken there with some purity: as in prerevolutionary Russia, the Levantine Christian and Jewish patrician class (from Istanbul to Alexandria) spoke and wrote formal French as a language of distinction. The most privileged were sent to school in
* It is remarkable how fast and how effectively you can construct a nationality with a flag, a few speeches, and a national anthem; to this day I avoid the label "Lebanese," preferring the less restrictive "Levantine" designation.
France, as both my grandfathers were—my paternal namesake in 1912 and my mother's father in 1929. Two thousand years earlier, by the same instinct of linguistic distinction, the snobbish Levantine patricians wrote in Greek, not the vernacular Aramaic. (The New Testament was written in the bad local patrician Greek of our capital, Antioch, prompting Nietzsche to shout that "God spoke bad Greek.") And, after Hellenism declined, they took up Arabic. So in addition to being called a "paradise," the place was also said to be a miraculous crossroads of what are superficially tagged "Eastern" and "Western" cultures.
On Walking Walks
My ethos was shaped when, at fifteen, I was put in jail for (allegedly) attacking a policeman with a slab of concrete during a student riot—an incident with strange ramifications since my grandfather was then the minister of the interior, and the person who signed the order to crush our revolt. One of the rioters was shot dead when a policeman who had been hit on the head with a stone panicked and randomly opened fire on us. I recall being at the center of the riot, and feeling a huge satisfaction upon my capture while my friends were scared of both prison and their parents. We frightened the government so much that we were granted amnesty.
There were some obvious benefits in showing one's ability to act on one's opinions, and not compromising an inch to avoid "offending" or bothering others. I was in a state of rage and didn't care what my parents (and grandfather) thought of me. This made them quite scared of me, so I could not afford to back down, or even blink. Had I concealed my participation in the riot (as many friends did) and been discovered, instead of being openly defiant, I am certain that I would have been treated as a black sheep. It is one thing to be cosmetically defiant of authority by wearing unconventional clothes—what social scientists and economists call "cheap signaling"—and another to prove willingness to translate belief into action.
My paternal uncle was not too bothered by my political ideas (these come and go); he was outraged that I used them as an excuse to dress sloppily. To him, inelegance on the part of a close family member was the mortal offense.
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.
Excerpted from The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Copyright © 2007. Excerpted by permission of Random House, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved.
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