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
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 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
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
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 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
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 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
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
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.
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
