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 televi8
UMBERTO E C O ' S A N T I U B R A RY
sion 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.
HISTORY AND THE TRIPLET OF OPACITY
History is opaque. You see what comes out, not the script that produces
events, the generator of history. There is a fundamental incompleteness in
your grasp of such events, since you do not see what's inside the box, how
the mechanisms work. What I call the generator of historical events is different
from the events themselves, much as the minds of the gods cannot
be read just by witnessing their deeds. You are very likely to be fooled
about their intentions.
This disconnect is similar to the difference between the food you see on
the table at the restaurant and the process you can observe in the kitchen.
(The last time I brunched at a certain Chinese restaurant on Canal Street
in downtown Manhattan, I saw a rat coming out of the kitchen.)
The human mind suffers from three ailments as it comes into contact
with history, what I call the triplet of opacity. They are:
a. the illusion of understanding, or how everyone thinks he knows
what is going on in a world that is more complicated (or random)
than they realize;
b. the retrospective distortion, or how we can assess matters only
after the fact, as if they were in a rearview mirror (history seems
clearer and more organized in history books than in empirical reality);
and
c. the overvaluation of factual information and the handicap of
authoritative and learned people, particularly when they create
categories—when they "Platonify."
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 9
Nobody Knows What's Going On
The first leg of the triplet is the pathology of thinking that the world in
which we live is more understandable, more explainable, and therefore
more predictable than it actually is.
I was constantly told by adults that the war, which ended up lasting
close to seventeen years, was going to end in "only a matter of days."
They seemed quite confident in their forecasts of duration, as can be evidenced
by the number of people who sat waiting in hotel rooms and other
temporary quarters in Cyprus, Greece, France, and elsewhere for the war
to finish. One uncle kept telling me how, some thirty years earlier, when
the rich Palestinians fled to Lebanon, they considered it a very temporary
solution (most of those still alive are still there, six decades later). Yet
when I asked him if it was going to be the same with our conflict, he
replied, "No, of course not. This place is different; it has always been different."
Somehow what he detected in others did not seem to apply to
him.
This duration blindness in the middle-aged exile is quite a widespread
disease. Later, when I decided to avoid the exile's obsession with his roots
(exiles' roots penetrate their personalities a bit too deeply), I studied exile
literature precisely to avoid the traps of a consuming and obsessive nostalgia.
These exiles seemed to have become prisoners of their memory of idyllic
origin—they sat together with other prisoners of the past and spoke
about the old country, and ate their traditional food while some of their
folk music played in the background. They continuously ran counterfactuals
in their minds, generating alternative scenarios that could have happened
and prevented these historical ruptures, such as "if the Shah had
not named this incompetent man as prime minister, we would still be
there." It was as if the historical rupture had a specific cause, and that the
catastrophe could have been averted by removing that specific cause. So I
pumped every displaced person I could find for information on their behavior
during exile. Almost all act in the same way.
One hears endless stories of Cuban refugees with suitcases still half
packed who came to Miami in the 1960s for "a matter of a few days"
after the installation of the Castro regime. And of Iranian refugees in Paris
and London who fled the Islamic Republic in 1978 thinking that their absence
would be a brief vacation. A few are still waiting, more than a quarter
century later, for the return. Many Russians who left in 1917, such as
10 UMBERTO E C O ' S A N T I U B R A RY
the writer Vladimir Nabokov, settled in Berlin, perhaps to be close enough
for a quick return. Nabokov himself lived all his life in temporary housing,
in both indigence and luxury, ending his days at the Montreux Palace
hotel on Lake Geneva.
There was, of course, some wishful thinking in all of these forecasting
errors, the blindness of hope, but there was a knowledge problem as well.
The dynamics of the Lebanese conflict had been patently unpredictable,
yet people's reasoning as they examined the events showed a constant: almost
all those who cared seemed convinced that they understood what
was going on. Every single day brought occurrences that lay completely
outside their forecast, but they could not figure out that they had not forecast
them. Much of what took place would have been deemed completely
crazy with respect to the past. Yet it did not seem that crazy after the
events. This retrospective plausibility causes a discounting of the rarity
and conceivability of the event. I later saw the exact same illusion of understanding
in business success and the financial markets.
History Does Not Crawl, It Jumps
Later, upon replaying the wartime events in my memory as I formulated
my ideas on the perception of random events, I developed the governing
impression that our minds are wonderful explanation machines, capable
of making sense out of almost anything, capable of mounting explanations
for all manner of phenomena, and generally incapable of accepting
the idea of unpredictability. These events were unexplainable, but intelligent
people thought they were capable of providing convincing explanations
for them—after the fact. Furthermore, the more intelligent the
person, the better sounding the explanation. What's more worrisome is
that all these beliefs and accounts appeared to be logically coherent and
devoid of inconsistencies.
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
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 11
outside Lebanon while people were dying, but, paradoxically, I was less
concerned by the events and able to pursue my intellectual interests guiltfree
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.
12 UMBERTO E C O ' S A N T I U B R A RY
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 selfdelusion.
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.)
I had my first exposure to the retrospective distortion as follows. During
my childhood I had been a voracious, if unsteady, reader, but I spent
the first phase of the war in a basement, diving body and soul into all manner
of books. School was closed and it was raining mortar shells. It is
dreadfully boring to be in basements. My initial worries were mostly
about how to fight boredom and what to read next*—though being
forced to read for lack of other activities is not as enjoyable as reading out
of one's own volition. I wanted to be a philosopher (I still do), so I felt that
I needed to make an investment by forcibly studying others' ideas. Circumstances
motivated me to study theoretical and general accounts of
wars and conflicts, trying to get into the guts of History, to get into the
workings of that big machine that generates events.
Surprisingly, the book that influenced me was not written by someone
in the thinking business but by a journalist: William Shirer's Berlin Diary:
The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, 1934-1941. Shirer was a radio
correspondent, famous for his book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
It occurred to me that the Journal offered an unusual perspective. I had already
read (or read about) the works of Hegel, Marx, Toynbee, Aron, and
Fichte on the philosophy of history and its properties and thought that I
had a vague idea of the notions of dialectics, to the extent that there was
* Beno?t Mandelbrot, who had a similar experience at about the same age, though
close to four decades earlier, remembers his own war episode as long stretches of
painful boredom punctuated by brief moments of extreme fear.
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 13
something to understand in these theories. I did not grasp much, except
that history had some logic and that things developed through contradiction
(or opposites) in a way that elevated mankind into higher forms of
society—that kind of thing. This sounded awfully similar to the theorizing
around me about the war in Lebanon. To this day I surprise people who
put the ludicrous question to me about what books "shaped my thinking"
by telling them that this book taught me (albeit inadvertently) the most
