Anatomy of a Black Swan

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 fighting. 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 baccalauréat (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 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.