aim is to spend time away from the clutter of public activities in order to
think about my philosophical-scientific idea in total tranquillity.
ssssff—-'
he writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are
encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal
library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors
into two categories: those who react with "Wow! Signore professore
dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you
read?" and the others—a very small minority—who get the point that a
private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read
books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain
as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage
rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allow you to put there.
You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older,
and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you
menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread
books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.
We tend to treat our knowledge as personal property to be protected
and defended. It is an ornament that allows us to rise in the pecking order.
So this tendency to offend Eco's library sensibility by focusing on the
known is a human bias that extends to our mental operations. People
don't walk around with anti-résumés telling you what they have not studied
or experienced (it's the job of their competitors to do that), but it
would be nice if they did. Just as we need to stand library logic on its head,
we will work on standing knowledge itself on its head. Note that the Black
2 UMBERTO E C O ' S A N T I L I B R A RY
Swan comes from our misunderstanding of the likelihood of surprises,
those unread books, because we take what we know a little too seriously.
Let us call an antischolar—someone who focuses on the unread books,
and makes an attempt not to treat his knowledge as a treasure, or even a
possession, or even a self-esteem enhancement device—a skeptical empiricist.
The chapters in this section address the question of how we humans deal
with knowledge—and our preference for the anecdotal over the empirical.
Chapter 1 presents the Black Swan as grounded in the story of my own obsession.
I will make a central distinction between the two varieties of randomness
in Chapter 3. After that, Chapter 4 briefly returns to the Black
Swan problem in its original form: how we tend to generalize from what
we see. Then I present the three facets of the same Black Swan problem: a)
The error of confirmation, or how we are likely to undeservedly scorn the
virgin part of the library (the tendency to look at what confirms our
knowledge, not our ignorance), in Chapter 5; b) the narrative fallacy, or
how we fool ourselves with stories and anecdotes (Chapter 6); c) how
emotions get in the way of our inference (Chapter 7); and d) the problem
of silent evidence, or the tricks history uses to hide Black Swans from us
(Chapter 8). Chapter 9 discusses the lethal fallacy of building knowledge
from the world of games.
Chapter One
THE APPRENTICESHIP
OF AN EMPIRICAL SKEPTIC
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
4 UMBERTO E C O ' S A N T I L I B R A RY
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 olivegrowing
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
THE A P P R E N T I C E S H I P OF AN E M P I R I C A L S K E P T I C 5
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
* 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.
6 UMBERTO E C O ' S A N T I L I B R A RY
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 oh
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
THE A P P R E N T I C E S H I P OF AN E M P I R I C A L S K E P T I C 7
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 na?ve
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
