Initial Book Review: The Black Swan

Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Although the primary subject of the book - distillation of a life-long personal, academic and professional inquiry - may sound technical being related to finance and econometrics, the book interests all. Its not just that the application of the subject is universal, it's also that the cross-disciplinary approach and wealth of examples makes it a much more interesting book. Too enjoyable for escapists and hedonists. Psychology and philosophy have this aspect being accessible and relate-able to many, if not all, as their interests revolve around humans and their various problems, theoretical and practical.

It's 1970s. Lebanon (or the old Levant) enjoyed centuires of societal harmony despite as a hub of diverse cultures, ethnicity, religions, and sects of all sorts; as a meeting place of East and West, although more European than Eastern. (Fact that Europe exlcuded it from itself just gives a clue about their "openness" and the yearning to be in there by those relegated to East points to their "authenticity" and "independence".) Any prediction of a sudden, unnoticable, rare and catastrophic breakdown and dissolution of this harmony was beyond "imagination." It was not to be.

It was to be. Sudden. Unpredictable by conventional thinking, which was based on empirical data of centuries that only predicted more cohesion and unity in diversity than a bloody, long civil war between Muslims and Christians. The prime minister, relative of Taleb, had as reliable a clue about the situation as PM's car driver.

This is what Taleb calls a Black Swan. "All swans are white," was a belief paraded as a scientific truth by many who did not get dose of humility in school. It only took sighting of 1 black swan in Australia (perhaps) to demolish this "fact." Hence the idiom: as rare as a Black Swan.

The book is a decent dose for those who're too cocky about their expert-ness, especially of financial and mathematical models. At another level, it is also a critique of those obsessed with trying to fit things into neat and clean forms, types and categories, ignoring nuances and not-so-apparent distinguishing elements. At another level, it also questions our temptations to "explain things away" and find causes and motives to every fact or happening as immature babbling of an untrained mind.

Author belongs to the large pool of profane minded thinkers, intellectuals and writers, i must add. They are skeptic about everything else, but not about their value-judgments and exclusivist  mechanistic view of the world and creation, and their rejection of transcendence and fate. They believe in accidents as if accident is god or gods? They don't explain that. They're not skeptic about dogmas of modernity, and very unequivocal about their rejection of any "chance" of transcendence.

Overall, interesting book to read before sleeping.

Disbelievers are mad, mad, mad

Mad not in the sense being suffering from some mental or biological disorder but not being reasonable and logical, and being contradictory. There are many living concepts, so to speak part of the world, which we recognize to be existent but we don't observe them, or know them by seeing, or, even, fully understand them. We don't know how such things as gravity, unconscious, invisible rays, etc., as work. We don't know how they make things behave, and on and on and on. We don't know their inner processes or reality through our senses, but know that these exist through their manifestations. Gravity exists because we its effects. Unconscious exists because we see its effects. Although these forces and entities are hidden and beyond our observations, their behavior, their 'products' are however observable.

Take the Freud's unconscious. Despite all criticisms made against him on purely scientific grounds (not that i believe in absolute truthiness of scientific methods), his idea of the "unconscious is intact," as per professor Bloom of Yale. Unconscious is fascinating. All the slip tongues, memory gaps, and other crazy stuff comes from unconscious of which we have no conscious trace or understanding. Still its there. A better example than this is gravity that we can feel but don't observe the way we want to observe God, which is impossible for our perceptions.

The simple logic behind believing in these unobservables is their fruits, to be poetic. Then how we deny the Creator? Dr Asad Zaman in his lecture on logical positivism [lecture # 7] shows how these atheistic scientific theories are so grounded and motivated by this urge of non-believing communities to deny the Maker of the Universe. This logically explains their consistent efforts to deny Allah despite their admission about existence of life and universe being nothing short of a miracle. Allah shows the disbelieving miracles but they deny, as their predecessors did. Allah knows best.

Sidi (late) Charles Gai Eaton shows difference between a Muslim-believer and modern agnostic/atheist western's approach towards faith:

"Formerly, this confrontation [b/w Muslims and Christians in middle ages] was between men of faith who had more in common than they could ever have acknowledged. That likeness, that shared devotion to an almighty and unseen God, no longer exists. The gulf has become infinitely wider and mutual comprehension has become far more difficult. The believer to whom the transcendent reality of God is the most compelling fact known to him cannot really understand unbelief or imagine its sterility. The unbeliever, try as he may, cannot even guess what the experience of faith is; his imagination is baffled by this strange, other-worldly phenomenon."

Hilarious: of moderate mozlems

"The Moderate Muslim: ‘Islam is against mass murder! Deep down, we’re just as lovely as you! er … Where’s the buffet?’"

- Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad. Source. # 26 of Contentions 15.

Moderate Islam is that of extreme apologeticism, forged in the fire of Protestantism. It is being shaped by the policy makers of Imperial Power of America through funding of "moderate voices." This is the greatest of pitfalls of terms because Muslim ummah is that of middle path, who always strives to be moderate in its actions and even in theory. We can no more use this currency anymore. Seyyed Hossein Nasr i believe came  with a better solution who is opposed both to modernism and fundamentalism. He places mainstream, orthodox Sunni-Shia dimension of Islam at the Centre, and judges all other sects or interpretations from their proximity to the Centre, to the Orthodoxy. Those interpretation which seek to by-pass 1400 years of orthodoxy, a diverse yet unified systematized development of an understanding of Islam, are extremists. It is so because they're away from the centre. This is both evident in the wrongdoings of Al-Qaeda and Progressive/Modernists/Re-formulationist (or Deformists) movements. There's at least one monograph dedicated to this very topic but which limited its scope to fundamentalism alone, edited by Joseph Lumbard (a Muslim scholar of Islam) entitled, Islam, Fundamentalism and the Betrayal of Tradition. There's now greater need of a detailed surgical analysis of modernist Islam as well.