The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

So I left the place called Lebanon as a teenager, but, since a large number of my relatives and friends remained there, I kept coming back to visit, especially during the hostilities. The war was not continuous: there were periods of fighting interrupted by “permanent” solutions. I felt closer to my roots during times of trouble and experienced the urge to come back and show support to those left behind who were often demoralized by the departures—and envious of the fair-weather friends who could seek economic and personal safety only to return for vacations during these occasional lulls in the conflict. I was unable to work or read when I was outside Lebanon while people were dying, but, paradoxically, I was less concerned by the events and able to pursue my intellectual interests guilt-free when I was inside Lebanon. Interestingly, people partied quite heavily during the war and developed an even bigger taste for luxuries, making the visits quite attractive in spite of the fighting.

There were a few difficult questions. How could one have predicted that people who seemed a model of tolerance could become the purest of barbarians overnight? Why was the change so abrupt? I initially thought that perhaps the Lebanese war was truly not possible to predict, unlike other conflicts, and that the Levantines were too complicated a race to figure out. Later I slowly realized, as I started to consider all the big events in history, that their irregularity was not a local property.

The Levant has been something of a mass producer of consequential events nobody saw coming. Who predicted the rise of Christianity as a dominant religion in the Mediterranean basin, and later in the Western world? The Roman chroniclers of that period did not even take note of the new religion—historians of Christianity are baffled by the absence of contemporary mentions. Apparently, few of the big guns took the ideas of a seemingly heretical Jew seriously enough to think that he would leave traces for posterity. We only have a single contemporary reference to Jesus of Nazareth—in The Jewish Wars of Josephus—which itself may have been added later by a devout copyist. How about the competing religion that emerged seven centuries later; who forecast that a collection of horsemen would spread their empire and Islamic law from the Indian subcontinent to Spain in just a few years? Even more than the rise of Christianity, it was the spread of Islam (the third edition, so to speak) that carried full unpredictability; many historians looking at the record have been taken aback by the swiftness of the change. Georges Duby, for one, expressed his amazement about how quickly close to ten centuries of Levantine Hellenism were blotted out “with a strike of a sword.” A later holder of the same history chair at the Collège de France, Paul Veyne, aptly talked about religions spreading “like bestsellers”—a comparison that indicates unpredictability. These kinds of discontinuities in the chronology of events did not make the historian’s profession too easy: the studious examination of the past in the greatest of detail does not teach you much about the mind of History; it only gives you the illusion of understanding it.

History and societies do not crawl. They make jumps. They go from fracture to fracture, with a few vibrations in between. Yet we (and historians) like to believe in the predictable, small incremental progression.

It struck me, a belief that has never left me since, that we are just a great machine for looking backward, and that humans are great at self-delusion. Every year that goes by increases my belief in this distortion.

Dear Diary: On History Running Backward

Events present themselves to us in a distorted way. Consider the nature of information: of the millions, maybe even trillions, of small facts that prevail before an event occurs, only a few will turn out to be relevant later to your understanding of what happened. Because your memory is limited and filtered, you will be inclined to remember those data that subsequently match the facts, unless you are like the eponymous Funes in the short story by Jorge Luis Borges, “Funes, the Memorious,” who forgets nothing and seems condemned to live with the burden of the accumulation of unprocessed information. (He does not manage to live too long.)