Antifragile- fragment książki o Syrii i Libanie

 The north­ern Lev­ant, rough­ly to­day’s north­ern part of Syr­ia and Lebanon, stayed per­haps the most pros­per­ous province in the his­to­ry of mankind, over the long, very long stretch of time from the pre-​pot­tery Ne­olith­ic un­til very mod­ern his­to­ry, the mid­dle of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry. That’s twelve thou­sand years—com­pared to, say, Eng­land, which has been pros­per­ous for about five hun­dred years, or Scan­di­navia, now on­ly pros­per­ous for less than three hun­dred years. Few ar­eas on the plan­et have man­aged to thrive with so much con­ti­nu­ity over any pro­tract­ed stretch of time, what his­to­ri­ans call longue durée. Oth­er cities came and went; Alep­po, Eme­sa (to­day Homs), and Laodicea (Lat­takia) stayed rel­ative­ly af­flu­ent.

The north­ern Lev­ant was since an­cient times dom­inat­ed by traders, large­ly ow­ing to its po­si­tion as a cen­tral spot on the Silk Road, and by agri­cul­tur­al lords, as the province sup­plied wheat to much of the Mediter­ranean world, par­tic­ular­ly Rome. The area sup­plied a few Ro­man em­per­ors, a few Catholic popes be­fore the schisms, and more than thir­ty Greek lan­guage writ­ers and philoso­phers (which in­cludes many of the heads of Pla­to’s acade­my), in ad­di­tion to the an­ces­tors of the Amer­ican vi­sion­ary and com­put­er en­trepreneur Steve Jobs, who brought us the Ap­ple com­put­er, on one of which I am re­copy­ing these lines (and the iPad tablet, on which you may be read­ing them). We know of the au­ton­omy of the province from the records dur­ing Ro­man days, as it was then man­aged by the lo­cal elites, a de­cen­tral­ized method of rul­ing through lo­cals that the Ot­toman re­tained. Cities mint­ed their own coins.

Then two events took place. First, af­ter the Great War, one part of the north­ern Lev­ant was in­te­grat­ed in­to the new­ly cre­at­ed na­tion of Syr­ia, sep­arat­ed from its oth­er sec­tion, now part of Lebanon. The en­tire area had been un­til then part of the Ot­toman Em­pire, but func­tioned as some­what au­tonomous re­gions—Ot­tomans, like the Ro­mans be­fore them, let lo­cal elites run the place so long as suf­fi­cient tax was paid, while they fo­cused on their busi­ness of war. The Ot­toman type of im­pe­ri­al peace, the pax Ot­tomana, like its pre­de­ces­sor the pax Ro­mana, was good for com­merce. Con­tracts were en­forced, and that is what gov­ern­ments are need­ed for the most. In the re­cent nos­tal­gic book Lev­ant, Philip Mansel doc­uments how the cities of the East­ern Mediter­ranean op­er­at­ed as city-​states sep­arat­ed from the hin­ter­land.

Then, a few decades in­to the life of Syr­ia, the mod­ernist Baath Par­ty came to fur­ther en­force utopias. As soon as the Baathists cen­tral­ized the place and en­forced their statist laws, Alep­po and Eme­sa went in­to in­stant de­cline.

What the Baath Par­ty did, in its “mod­ern­iza­tion” pro­gram, was to re­move the ar­cha­ic mess of the souks and re­place them with the crisp mod­ernism of the of­fice build­ing.

The ef­fect was im­me­di­ate­ly vis­ible: overnight the trad­ing fam­ilies moved to places such as New York and New Jer­sey (for the Jews), Cal­ifor­nia (for the Ar­me­ni­ans), and Beirut (for the Chris­tians). Beirut of­fered a com­merce-​friend­ly at­mo­sphere, and Lebanon was a be­nign, small­er, dis­or­ga­nized state with­out any re­al cen­tral gov­ern­ment. Lebanon was small enough to be a mu­nic­ipal­ity on its own: it was small­er than a medi­um-​size metropoli­tan area.

War, Prison, or Both

 

But while Lebanon had all the right qual­ities, the state was too loose, and by al­low­ing the var­ious Pales­tini­an fac­tions and the Chris­tian mili­tias to own weapons, it caused an arms race be­tween the com­mu­ni­ties while placid­ly watch­ing the en­tire buildup. There was al­so an im­bal­ance be­tween com­mu­ni­ties, with the Chris­tians try­ing to im­pose their iden­ti­ty on the place. Dis­or­ga­nized is in­vig­orat­ing; but the Lebanese state was one step too dis­or­ga­nized. It would be like al­low­ing each of the New York mafia boss­es to have a larg­er army than the Joint Chiefs of Staff (just imag­ine John Got­ti with mis­siles). So in 1975 a rag­ing civ­il war start­ed in Lebanon.

A sen­tence that still shocks me when I think about it was voiced by one of my grand­fa­ther’s friends, a wealthy Alep­pine mer­chant who fled the Baath regime. When my grand­fa­ther asked his friend dur­ing the Lebanese war why he did not go back to Alep­po, his an­swer was cat­egor­ical: “We peo­ple of Alep­po pre­fer war to prison.” I thought that he meant that they were go­ing to put him in jail, but then I re­al­ized that by “prison” he meant the loss of po­lit­ical and eco­nom­ic free­doms.

Eco­nom­ic life, too, seems to pre­fer war to prison. Lebanon and North­ern Syr­ia had very sim­ilar wealth per in­di­vid­ual (what economists call Gross Do­mes­tic Prod­uct) about a cen­tu­ry ago—and had iden­ti­cal cul­tures, lan­guage, eth­nic­ities, food, and even jokes. Ev­ery­thing was the same ex­cept for the rule of the “mod­ern­iz­ing” Baath Par­ty in Syr­ia com­pared to the to­tal­ly be­nign state in Lebanon. In spite of a civ­il war that dec­imat­ed the pop­ula­tion, caus­ing an acute brain drain and set­ting wealth back by sev­er­al decades, in ad­di­tion to ev­ery pos­si­ble form of chaos that rocked the place, to­day Lebanon has a con­sid­er­ably high­er stan­dard of liv­ing—be­tween three and six times the wealth of Syr­ia.

Nor did the point es­cape Machi­avel­li. Jean-​Jacques Rousseau wrote, cit­ing him: “It seemed, wrote Machi­avel­li, that in the midst of mur­ders and civ­il wars, our re­pub­lic be­came stronger [and] its cit­izens in­fused with virtues.… A lit­tle bit of ag­ita­tion gives re­sources to souls and what makes the species pros­per isn’t peace, but free­dom.”