Nassim Nicholas Taleb: evaluation

Transcript context

…I was talking with Eric Weinstein recently, and I suggested the following to him. The way I read your work, on one hand, it was trying to explain what happened to Lebanon, and so it’s a very regional concern. But you are also trying to put forward a vision of what an alternative Lebanese history would look like, a Phoenician one. That positive program was the underdiscussed part of understanding your work. You’re trying to lay out how Lebanon could be seen or could be a Phoenician culture in the future. It is an eastern Mediterranean culture, and it is very easy to convince people it’s an eastern Mediterranean culture in Lebanon, despite the textbooks writing the opposite. Let me tell you really what happened. In 1860, the Christians of Lebanon did not write in Arabic. They wrote in a character called garshounè. The American University in Beirut came in and tried to recruit Muslims, and it didn’t work. At the time it was called Syrian Protestant College. They couldn’t convert Muslims, so they decided to convert Christians. They translated the first translation of the Bible, the whole thing, into Arabic, which was done by the surgeon called Van Dyke. An attempt had been done years earlier and failed. So this Arabization that started in the 1860s in Lebanon, when the Turks were around, is, in fact, a distortion of history, a perception of habit. It’s trying to bring that part of the world away from the Ottoman Empire, which was a Balkan eastern Mediterranean world, in which the place had spent 500 years, and before that, a thousand years under Greco-Romans — trying to move it closer to Arabia. People bought the narrative because the Christians wanted to be non-Muslim, yet have the same rights. So they invented themselves some genetic story that they came from Yemen, they came from a tribe called the Banu Ghassan. The Christians invented themselves some kind of story, “Yeah, the Phoenicians were here, but the Arabs kicked them out, and we, the Christians, come from . . .” and it’s totally genetically bogus that the population had to move. In fact, there is the same people. I see that you brought a book about Charles Corm. Charles Corm was the opposite narrative, the Western narrative that we are Greco-Roman. We had the School of Beirut, the religious school in Beirut that for 500 years made or unmade laws, the only place where laws were made in the Roman Empire. We are Greco-Romans by culture. Let’s go back to the Greco-Roman world, away from 150 years of Arabization. If you look at Lebanon, you realize that 150 years of Arabizing people had no effect. You’re Greek Orthodox by background. If I were to ask, how did the Maronites fit into your schema? There’s a long-standing tension between these groups. It seems to me often that the Greek Orthodox would actually side with the Muslims, wanting a more stable Lebanon, suspicious of the Crusades, suspicious of the Maronites themselves. What’s your take on this?…

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