Skin in the Game

by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

  LINGUA FRANCA

  If a meeting is taking place in Germany in the Teutonic-looking conference room of a corporation that is sufficiently international or European, and one of the persons in the room doesn’t speak German, the entire meeting will be run in…English, the brand of inelegant English used in corporations across the world. That way they can equally offend their Teutonic ancestors and the English language. It all started with the asymmetric rule that those who are nonnative in English know (bad) English, but the reverse—English speakers knowing other languages—is less likely. French was supposed to be the language of diplomacy, as civil servants coming from aristocratic backgrounds used it, while their more vulgar compatriots involved in commerce relied on English. In the rivalry between the two languages, English won as commerce grew to dominate modern life; the victory has nothing to do with the prestige of France or the efforts of their civil servants in promoting their more or less beautiful Latinized and logically spelled language over the orthographically confusing one of trans-Channel meat-pie eaters.

  We can thus get some inkling of how the emergence of lingua francas can come from minority rules—and that is a point that is not visible to linguists. Aramaic is a Semitic language that succeeded the Canaanite language (that is, Phoenician-Hebrew) in the Levant and resembles Arabic; it was the language Jesus Christ spoke. The reason it came to dominate the Levant and Egypt isn’t because of any particular imperial Semitic power or the fact that they have interesting noses. It was the Persians—who speak an Indo-European language—who spread Aramaic, the language of Assyria, Syria, and Babylon. Persians taught Egyptians a language that was not their own. Simply, when the Persians invaded Babylon they found an administration with scribes who could only use Aramaic and didn’t know Persian, so Aramaic became the state language. If your secretary can only take dictation in Aramaic, Aramaic is what you will use. This led to the oddity of Aramaic being used in Mongolia, as records were maintained in the Syriac alphabet (Syriac is the Eastern dialect of Aramaic). And centuries later, the story would repeat itself in reverse, with the Arabs using Greek in their early administration in the seventh and eighth centuries. For during the Hellenistic era, Greek replaced Aramaic as the lingua franca in the Levant, and the scribes of Damascus maintained their records in Greek. But it was not the Greeks who spread Greek around the Mediterranean, but the Romans who accelerated the spreading of Greek, as they used it in their administration across the Eastern empire, as well as the coastal Levantines—the New Testament was written in the Greek of Syria.

  A French Canadian friend from Montreal, Jean-Louis Rheault, bemoaning the loss of the French language among French Canadians outside narrowly provincial areas, commented as follows: “In Canada, when we say bilingual, it is English-speaking, and when we say French-speaking it becomes bilingual.”

  GENES VS. LANGUAGES

  Looking at genetic data in the Eastern Mediterranean with my collaborator the geneticist Pierre Zalloua, we noticed that both invaders, Turks and Arabs, left few genes, and in the case of Turkey, the tribes from East and Central Asia brought an entirely new language. Turkey, shockingly, is still inhabited by the populations of Asia Minor you read about in history books, but with new names. Further, Zalloua and his colleagues claim that Canaanites from 3,700 years ago represent more than nine-tenths of the genes of current residents of the state of Lebanon, with only a tiny amount of new genes added, in spite of about every possible army having dropped by for sightseeing and some pillaging.*2 While Turks are Mediterraneans who speak an East Asian language, the French (North of Avignon) are largely of Northern European stock, yet they speak a Mediterranean language.

  So:

  Genes follow majority rule; languages minority rule.

  Languages travel; genes less so.

  This shows us the recent mistake of building racial theories on language, dividing people into “Aryans” and “Semites,” based on linguistic considerations. While the subject was central to the German Nazis, the practice continues today in one form or another, often benign. For the great irony is that Northern European supremacists (“Aryan”), while anti-Semitic, used the classical Greeks to give themselves a pedigree and a link to a glorious civilization, but didn’t realize that the Greeks and their Mediterranean “Semitic” neighbors were actually genetically close to one another. It has been recently shown that both ancient Greeks and Bronze Age Levantines share an Anatolian origin. It just happened that the languages diverged.

  THE ONE-WAY STREET OF RELIGIONS

  In the same manner, the spread of Islam in the Near East, where Christianity was heavily entrenched (remember that it was born there), can be attributed to two simple asymmetries. The original Islamic rulers weren’t particularly interested in converting Christians, as these provided them with tax revenues—the proselytism of Islam did not initially address those called “people of the book,” i.e. individuals of Abrahamic faith. In fact, my ancestors who survived thirteen centuries under Muslim rule saw clear advantages in not being Muslim: mostly in the avoidance of military conscription.

  The two asymmetric rules are as follows. First, under Islamic law, if a non-Muslim man marries a Muslim woman, he needs to convert to Islam—and if either parent of a child happens to be Muslim, the child will be Muslim.*3 Second, becoming Muslim is irreversible, as apostasy is the heaviest crime under the religion, sanctioned by the death penalty. The famous Egyptian actor Omar Sharif, born Mikhael Demetri Shalhoub, came from a Lebanese Christian family. He converted to Islam to marry a famous Egyptian actress and had to change his name to an Arabic one. He later divorced, but did not revert to the faith of his ancestors.

  Under these two asymmetric rules, one can do simple simulations and see how a small Islamic group occupying Christian (Coptic) Egypt can lead, over the centuries, to the Copts becoming a tiny minority. All one needs is a small rate of interfaith marriages. Likewise, one can see how Judaism doesn’t spread and tends to stay in the minority, as the religion has weaker rules: the mother is required to be Jewish. An even stronger asymmetry than that of Judaism explains the depletion in the Near East of three Gnostic faiths: the Druze, the Ezidi, and the Mandeans (Gnostic religions are those with mysteries and knowledge that are typically accessible to only a minority of elders, with the rest of the members kept in the dark about the details of the faith). Unlike Islam, which requires either parent to be Muslim, and Judaism, which asks for at least the mother to have the faith, these three religions require both parents to be of the faith, otherwise the child and the parents say toodaloo to the community.

  In places such as Lebanon, Galilee, and Northern Syria, with mountainous terrain, Christians and other non-Sunni Muslims remained concentrated. Christians, not being exposed to Muslims, experienced no intermarriage. By contrast, Egypt has a flat terrain. The distribution of the population presents homogeneous mixtures there, which permits renormalization (i.e. allows the asymmetric rule to prevail).

  Egypt’s Copts suffered from an additional problem: the irreversibility of Islamic conversions. Many Copts during Islamic rule converted to the dominant religion when it was merely an administrative procedure, something that helps one land a job or handle a problem that requires Islamic jurisprudence. One did not have to really believe in it, since Islam doesn’t conflict markedly with Orthodox Christianity. Little by little a Christian or Jewish family engaging in a Marrano-style conversion becomes truly converted, as, a couple of generations later, the descendants forget the arrangement of their ancestors.

  So all Islam did was out-stubborn Christianity, which itself won thanks to its own stubbornness. For before Islam, the original spread of Christianity in the Roman empire was largely due to…the blinding intolerance of Christians; their unconditional, aggressive, and recalcitrant proselytizing. Roman pagans were initially tolerant of Christians, as the tradition was to share gods with other members of the empire. But they wondered why these Nazarenes
didn’t want to give and take gods and offer that Jesus fellow to the Roman pantheon in exchange for some other gods. What, our gods aren’t good enough for them? But Christians were intolerant of Roman paganism. The “persecution” of the Christians had vastly more to do with the intolerance of the Christians for the pantheon of local gods than the reverse. What we read is history written by the Christian side, not the Greco-Roman one.

  We know too little about the Roman perspective during the rise of Christianity, as hagiographies have dominated the discourse: we have for instance the narrative of the martyr Saint Catherine, who kept converting her jailors until she was beheaded, except that…she may have never existed. But the beheading of Saint Cyprian, bishop of Carthage, under Valerian, was real. So there are endless histories of Christian martyrs and saints—but very little is known of pagan heroes. Even the early Christians of the Gnostic tradition have been expurgated from the record. When Julian the Apostate tried to go back to ancient paganism, it was like trying to sell French food in South Jersey: it simply had no market. It was like trying to keep a balloon under water. And it was not because pagans had an intellectual deficit: in fact, my heuristic is that the more pagan, the more brilliant one’s mind, and the higher one’s ability to handle nuances and ambiguity. Purely monotheistic religions such as Protestant Christianity, Salafi Islam, or fundamentalist atheism accommodate literalist and mediocre minds that cannot handle ambiguity.*4

  In fact, we can observe in the history of Mediterranean “religions” or, rather, rituals and systems of behavior and belief, a drift dictated by the intolerant, actually bringing the system closer to what we can call a religion. Judaism might have almost lost because of the mother rule and its confinement to a tribal base, but Christianity ruled, and for the very same reasons, Islam did. Islam? There have been many Islams, the final accretion quite different from the earlier ones. For Islam itself is ending up being taken over (in the Sunni branch) by purists simply because they are more intolerant than the rest: the Wahhabis (aka Salafis), founders of Saudi Arabia, destroyed the shrines in most parts of what is now their country during the nineteenth century. They went on to impose the maximally intolerant rule in a manner that was later imitated by ISIS. Every single accretion of Salafism seems to exist to accommodate the most intolerant of its branches.

  DECENTRALIZE, AGAIN

  Another attribute of decentralization, and one that the “intellectuals” opposing an exit of Britain from the European Union (Brexit) don’t get: if one needs, say, a 3 percent threshold in a political unit for the minority rule to take its effect, and on average the stubborn minority represents 3 percent of the population, with variations around the average, then some states will be subject to the rule, but not others. If, on the other hand, we merge all states in one, then the minority rule will prevail all across. This is the reason the U.S.A. works so well. As I have been repeating to everyone who listens, we are a federation, not a republic. To use the language of Antifragile, decentralization is convex to variations.

  IMPOSING VIRTUE ON OTHERS

  This idea of one-sidedness can help us debunk a few more misconceptions. How do books get banned? Certainly not because they offend the average person—most persons are passive and don’t really care, or don’t care enough to request the banning. From past episodes, it looks like all it takes is a few (motivated) activists for the banning of some books, or the blacklisting of some people. The great philosopher and logician Bertrand Russell lost his job at the City University of New York owing to a letter by an angry—and stubborn—mother who did not wish to have her daughter in the same room as the fellow with a dissolute lifestyle and unruly ideas.

  The same seems to apply to prohibitions—at least to the prohibition of alcohol in the United States, which led to interesting mafia stories.

  Let us conjecture that the formation of moral values in society doesn’t come from the evolution of the consensus. No, it is the most intolerant person who imposes virtue on others precisely because of that intolerance. The same can apply to civil rights.

  An insight into how the mechanisms of religion and the transmission of morals obey the same renormalization dynamics as dietary laws—and how we can show that morality is more likely to be something enforced by a minority. We saw earlier in the chapter the asymmetry between obeying and breaking rules: a law-abiding (or rule-abiding) fellow always follows the rules, but a felon or someone with looser sets of principles will not always break the rules. Likewise we discussed the strong asymmetric effects of halal dietary laws. Let us merge the two. It turns out that, in classical Arabic, the term halal has one opposite: haram. Violating legal and moral rules—any rule—is called haram. It is the exact same interdict that governs food intake and all other human behaviors, like sleeping with the wife of your neighbor, lending with interest (without partaking of downside of the borrower), or killing one’s landlord for pleasure. Haram is haram and is asymmetric.

  Once a moral rule is established, it will suffice to have a small, intransigent minority of geographically distributed followers to dictate a norm in society. The sad news is that one person looking at mankind as an aggregate may mistakenly believe that humans are spontaneously becoming more moral, better, and more gentle, with better breath, when this applies to only a small proportion of mankind.

  But things work both ways, the good and the bad. While some believe that the average Pole was complicit in the liquidation of Jews, the historian Peter Fritzsche, when asked, “Why didn’t the Poles in Warsaw help their Jewish neighbors more?,” responded that they generally did. But it took seven or eight Poles to help one Jew. It took only one Pole, acting as an informer, to turn in a dozen Jews. Even if such select anti-Semitism is contestable, we can easily imagine bad outcomes stemming from a minority of bad agents.

  STABILITY OF THE MINORITY RULE, A PROBABILISTIC ARGUMENT

  Wherever you look across societies and histories, you tend to find the same general moral laws prevailing, with some, but not significant, variations: do not steal (at least not from within the tribe); do not hunt orphans for entertainment; do not gratuitously beat up Spanish grammar specialists for training, instead use boxing bags (unless you are Spartan and even then you can only kill a limited number of helots for training purposes), and similar interdicts. And we can see these rules evolved over time to become more universal, expanding to a broader set, to progressively include slaves, other tribes, other species (animals, economists), etc. And one property of these laws: they are black-and-white, binary, discrete, and allow no shadow. You cannot steal “a little bit” or murder “moderately”—just as you cannot keep kosher and eat “just a little bit” of pork at Sunday barbecues.

  I don’t think that if you fondled the breast of the wife or girlfriend of some random weight lifter in front of him, you would do well in the intervening noisy episode, nor would you be able to convince him that it was “just a little bit.”

  Now, it would be vastly more likely that these values emerged from a minority than a majority. Why? Take the following two theses:

  Outcomes are paradoxically more stable under the minority rule—the variance of the results is lower and the rule is more likely to emerge independently across separate populations.

  What emerges from the minority rule is more likely to be black-and-white, binary rules.

  An example. Consider that an evil person, say an economics professor, decides to poison the collective by putting some product into soda cans. He has two options. The first is cyanide, which obeys a minority rule: a drop of poison (higher than a small threshold) makes the entire liquid poisonous. The second is a “majority-style” poison; it requires more than half the ingested liquid to be poisonous in order to kill. Now look at the inverse problem, a collection of dead people after a dinner party. The local Sherlock Holmes would assert that, conditional on the outcome that all people drinking the soda having been killed, the evil man op
ted for the first, not the second option. Simply, the majority rule leads to fluctuations around the average, with a high rate of survival. Not the minority rule. The minority rule produces low-variance in outcomes.

  POPPER-GOEDEL’S PARADOX

  I was at a large, multi-table dinner party, the kind where you have to choose between the vegetarian risotto and the non-vegetarian option, when I noticed that my neighbor had his food catered (including silverware) on a tray reminiscent of airplane fare. The dishes were sealed with aluminum foil. He was evidently ultra-kosher. It did not bother him to be seated with prosciutto eaters, who, in addition, mix butter and meat in the same dishes. He just wanted to be left alone to follow his own preferences.

  For Jews and Muslim minorities such as Shiites, Sufis, and (vaguely) associated religions such as Druze and Alawis, the aim is to be left alone—with historical exceptions here and there. But had my neighbor been a Sunni Salafi, he would have required the entire room to be eating halal. Perhaps the entire building. Perhaps the entire town. Hopefully the entire country. Ideally, the entire planet. Indeed, given the total lack of separation between church and state in his creed, and between the holy and the profane, to him haram (the opposite of halal) means literally illegal. The entire room was committing a legal violation.

  As I am writing these lines, people are disputing whether the freedom of the enlightened West can be undermined by the intrusive policies that would be needed to fight fundamentalists.

  Can democracy—by definition the majority—tolerate enemies? The question is as follows: “Would you agree to deny the freedom of speech to every political party that has in its charter the banning of freedom of speech?” Let’s go one step further: “Should a society that has elected to be tolerant be intolerant about intolerance?”