“Have you ever wondered who you would have been if you had been born in Helsinki?”
That’s what my friend Manal, with whom I spent so many childhood summers fig picking in our native village of Yaroun, asked me a few days ago.
“Why Helsinki exactly?” I answered, almost laughing. The choice sounded arbitrary, even absurd. It did not seem like the obvious fantasy destination for a Lebanese woman, much less for a southerner whose village is currently being reduced, once again, to rubble.
“Because I read somewhere that Finland is the happiest country in the world,” she replied. “And yesterday, after you sent me that video of our houses being bulldozed, I felt suffocated. So I started looking at Finnish accounts on social media. I wanted to see what the happiest people on earth actually resembled.”
What does a human being look like when they haven’t lived through serial wars?
Then she said something that unsettled me profoundly: “What does a human being look like when they haven’t lived through serial wars? How do they sleep, make plans, fall in love, complain about trivialities, or grow old without ever having watched their world collapse in installments?”
Her question instantly brought back something I experienced myself last year on a flight from Beirut to London. I was watching a documentary about Lebanon in the 1950s and 1960s—that legendary “golden age” so obsessively fetishized by Lebanese nostalgia. I found myself less interested in the glossy mythology of prewar Lebanon that was highlighted in it than in the anonymous faces drifting through the background.
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Whenever one appeared casually on screen, I would pause the film and stare at it, trying to identify the disparities between us, a sort of real-life version of “Spot the Difference.” As if those people, those Lebanese, were aliens from the past. I remember wondering: Did they sleep more peacefully? Laugh less defensively? Carry less invisible tension in their shoulders? Did they worry, when they fell in love or made plans or opened businesses, that the ground beneath them might disappear? In short, did they experience life without that low-grade vibration of dread beneath ordinary existence, like we do?
Fifty Years of War
Scientists say that lifestyles alter genetic expression over time. I know that fifty years are insignificant in evolutionary terms, but I can’t help but wonder about the effects of a half-century of wars, militias, occupations, sectarian indoctrination, economic breakdown, corruption, explosions, and chronic instability? What sort of damage has this inflicted on the Lebanese person? Not to Lebanon as an abstract nation, but to the Lebanese psyche itself.
Trauma is no longer an emotional legacy in Lebanon. It is becoming behavioral culture. We all ask ourselves: Will our children inherit only our political failures and economic ruins, or will they inherit our fears as well?
And what about our brains? Have certain parts shrunk over time, and have other ones become more complex in order to help us cope with the specific conditions imposed on us for decades? My mother likes to say that we are “smarter” than many of today’s “peaceful” European societies because we had to learn how to survive amid hardships. Is that true, or is it simply her way of consoling herself for the brutal life she’s had?
Who exactly is the “new Lebanese person,” if there is indeed such a thing, and what kind of human does Lebanon manufacture today? Is he made of the same old fabric, or did he metamorphose into something entirely different? Is he patriotic, or merely territorially attached? Militant, or simply dependent on conflict? Detached from reality, or emotionally drained? Self-centered, or just adaptive?
What happens when an entire population has spent decades with its nervous system switched to emergency mode? And reliant to anti-depressants? What does that do to a society over time, and what gets transmitted to future generations? Just memory? Or biology too? Trauma is no longer an emotional legacy in Lebanon. It is becoming behavioral culture. We all ask ourselves: Will our children inherit only our political failures and economic ruins, or will they inherit our fears as well?
This matter fascinates me because it goes far beyond politics. It is anthropological and psychological. But another equally important question imposes itself here: Have the Lebanese really become a new species? Or were we always this way beneath the cosmetic mythology we built around ourselves? Perhaps what we call the “new Lebanese person” is merely the unmasked version of the old one, after the façades, fantasies, and illusions have fallen away. Perhaps we have simply grown too exhausted to maintain the performance.
The country no longer produces citizens in the traditional sense. It produces individuals trained almost exclusively for staying afloat. My theory is that it always has.
After all, we were never truly citizens in the classical sense. Survival networks in Lebanon always mattered more than the state. Sectarian belonging always felt more concrete than national identity. The Lebanese, except for a small minority, never truly believed in the state to begin with, only in their ability to outsmart its absence. Improvisation was constantly our real constitution. Wasn’t this our original programming all along? The manufacturing default in our system ever since Greater Lebanon itself was founded on sectarian distribution rather than genuine citizenship?
For decades, we romanticized the Lebanese as resilient, entrepreneurial, adaptable, cosmopolitan, endlessly resourceful in the face of catastrophes. But perhaps catastrophe is, and always was, our normal. The modern Lebanese person did not invent anything new, after all. He has simply perfected what the old Lebanese had already practiced: the art of living provisionally, psychologically conditioned to expect rupture.
Everything, almost everything, has always been interim in Lebanon: loyalties, statuses, alliances, banks, institutions, currency, truces, geography – especially geography. Joy itself feels temporary, even more so nowadays. And yet, however temporary, it shines stronger than ever: We open bars during bombardments. We dance while checking missile alerts. We furnish apartments while applying for visas. We mock tragedy because joking about it feels less terrifying than acknowledging its scale. “Hey! Let’s go to a beach party before another round of war.” “Let’s have an extravagant dinner before a new drone attack.” “Let’s have a torrid love affair before we emigrate (or die).”
And so on and so forth. The country no longer produces citizens in the traditional sense. It produces individuals trained almost exclusively for staying afloat. My theory is that it always has.
Adversity as Identity
The result is a strange contradiction. The Lebanese person appears simultaneously indifferent and hyperreactive, sneering and passionate, politically exhausted yet neurotically political. He trusts nothing collectively, but functions intensely at the individual level. He doesn’t believe in the state, yet spends hours every day discussing it, cursing it, obsessing over it. He complains about Lebanon constantly, but panics at the idea of losing the country completely. In other words, the Lebanese inhabits adversity as a permanent identity.
The truly frightening question is this: If we woke up tomorrow inside a peaceful, ordinary Beirut, would we know how to live in it?
Since the Lebanese state effectively abdicated most of its functions, endurance itself has become privatized. We produce our own electricity, secure our own water, improvise our own healthcare, seek our own justice, construct our own parallel economies, and curate our own versions of truth. Sectarianism itself increasingly resembles a self-preservation subscription model rather than genuine ideological conviction. People cling to sectarian structures not necessarily because they believe in them, but because they no longer believe anything else will keep them alive.
So to sum it up, we do not build lives. We build interludes between one threat and another. We are not citizens. We are individuals living together, like roommates on the scale of a country.
But then again, haven’t we always been exactly that, only better disguised? The successive wars stripped us bare. The state’s disintegration merely accelerated the exposure.
Perhaps that is why Manal’s words unsettled me so deeply. Because the real question is not who we would have been had we been born in Helsinki.
The truly frightening question is this: If we woke up tomorrow inside a peaceful, ordinary Beirut, would we know how to live in it?
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Middle East Broadcasting Networks.
