Well, I have done it. I finished my book, The Lebanese Manifesto.
It is about us, the mighty Lebanese and how absurd we are, and how we are missing the point completely.
I will be publishing it soon. Here is a preview
Lebanon is a very perplexing country.
On the one hand it is a beautiful country, enormously endowed with a very wide range of resources.
It has a very distinguished Mediterranean feel, the nature, the mountains, the snow, the water, the flora, the welcoming people and the distinct presence of the four seasons.
It is also endowed with an amazingly rich cultural and diverse heritage. In Lebanon you can find archeological ruins almost everywhere and from historic periods dating 5000 years ago.
Phoenician, Greek, Roman, Arab, Crusader, Mamluk, Turkish
You name it, we got it.
On the other hand Lebanon has been plagued, since it’s existence with a plethora of problems and seemingly unsolvable issues that continue to increase in there acuteness and, most importantly, they divide the people with varying perspective about who is to blame and who is responsible.
I was eleven years old when the war of 1975 broke out. And I went through my teens and early adulthood learning various survival techniques on a very basic level; how to get water, bread, and food. How to dodge the shells, how to judge where a shell was going to land, an art form claimed to be perfected by many Lebanese who witnessed the war and came out alive.
I was also learning how to find shelter, and how to use the physical features of the place we were hiding in. How to use thick walls and how to tolerate the burden of being in a dark underground space with people who, like me, where also trying to survive.
Each with there war theories and solution theories and blame theories.
I was also watching, and trying to understand, who was fighting whom. Because the war started on one premise and ended on a totally different one, passing through many strange and unfathomable premises in between.
The war ended in 1990, but the conflict didn’t.
Growing up, and delving deep into the history of Lebanon I discovered that the war of 1975, while the fiercest, was not the only one, and I secretly concluded that it would not be the last one.
There were at least a dozen civil conflicts in the past two centuries. Each time between different factions and for different reasons, and each time ending in a compromise without a real solution or victory, except for the certainty that many people lost their lives as a result and the country never had the chance to place itself on a solid road for future prosperity.
And I started analyzing in order to understand why such a small and beautiful country with what seemed to me a huge potential for prosperity, was not able to prosper and flourish.
I read a lot, and the more I read the less I comprehended and was convinced of the enormous complexity inherent in our country’s building blocks.
One of the reasons of this conflict was the fact that many of the written text about our history was written with a certain purpose in mind and lacked historic objectivity, this is why I had to go through a combing process to separate between the objective and the subjective.
Then I summoned the aid of William of Ockham, the 14th century English Franciscan friar whose technique of reductionism is a brilliant way to sift through complex ideas, platforms and conflicts by eliminating uncertain assumptions and unnecessary premises for the purpose of finding the simplest hypothesis, which was usually the most correct one.
I applied the logic of William of Ockham, Ockham’s razor, to simplify the massive, foggy and conflicting theories of our history and I came up with two naïve conclusions.
First, the idea of Lebanon is not clear, or not homogeneous to all Lebanese. Each Lebanese has an idea of Lebanon; some Lebanese have no idea at all. And what worries me is the belief that the majority of Lebanese have no idea at all about the idea of Lebanon.
This is a huge problem but one that can be solved easily with an attitude change. Maybe it is not necessary for us to agree consciously on the idea of Lebanon now. Maybe this idea needs some more time to be polished.
But we can easily say about ourselves that we are Lebanese, before mentioning our affiliations, and that we have a beautiful country that is being ravaged by all sorts of calamities and that we, as individuals and each on his own, will develop a feeling of attachment to this country in spite of all those calamities and the difference of opinion regarding the idea of Lebanon.
Second, we are very poor at communication skills among each other. This is probably a derivative of the first conclusion.
We don’t know how to talk to each other, we don’t know how to empower our ideas to become convincing. We fail to convince because we don’t know how to communicate.
We think that just by having an argument, or being convinced with an idea, this is enough for the other party to be convinced with it as well.
And when this doesn’t happen, we go to war. And if you think about it, this is why people go to war in the first place. One party is unable to convince the other so they fight and the party that manages to kill the other conviction, by killing those who embrace it, wins.
This is wrong, and this is contributing greatly to the misery of this country.
The notion that one of us might be wrong, or partially wrong, doesn’t exist. And I believe Sir Ken Robinson when he says that if you are not willing to be wrong, you can never add value to any argument or idea.
No one is willing to consider hat he might be wrong.
When two opposing people in Lebanon debate an issue, the debate is a show of force of who shouts the loudest or use more obscene language. And our media generously exposes us to this obscenity.
No one enters into a discussion or debate willing to consider the point of view of the other.
And this has many reasons, the most important of which in my opinion is that we lack the imagination to consider the alternatives. This is why we have failed to produce a single theory or idea about Lebanon, one that is accepted, embraced and consciously felt by every single Lebanese.
This is why we always blame the others for our problems.
But we never blame ourselves. We never consider for a second that we might be wrong.
This is why we are unable to progress.
This is why we are unable to change.
This is what this book is about.
This book is a wake up call, a tap on the shoulder, a drizzle of cold water on a sleepy and sloppy people who don’t seem to realize that their country, which they claim to love, is either going to disappear or change to an unrecognizable form.
For those who imagine this is an exaggeration, please let me draw your attention to the various forces that are contributing to this hypothesis.
They are:
Politics, economy, infrastructure, natural resources, electricity, water, employment, immigration, security, feudalism, media, culture, environment, civil codes, legislation, unions, poverty, history, ignorance, weapons, and so on.
Bleak picture? Maybe.
But what strikes me as bleaker is the fact that those forces are not working in silence, they are flagrant, daring and obvious. Yet we choose to ignore them and live under the false hope that someday all this will change. We numb ourselves in the meantime with silly innuendos and conversations about how bad the traffic was this day, or the price of gas.
We seem to be waiting for change, but we have few ideas about where this change will come from and what shape it is going to assume.
This is precisely what this book is about
