February 23, 2010--Voodoo

Haiti is slipping off our collective radar screen. Less than two months after one of the great natural cataclysms in recorded history, one right on our doorstep, we are left with stories in the media about how inappropriate it was when rerecording “We Are the World,” that a rapper was allowed to add his interpretation to the performance.

And then there is a small storm of controversy in the press about why Haiti, unlike neighboring islands, has for centuries been unable to overcome its unimaginable poverty.

Among other reasons, from his lofty perch as an op-ed columnist for the New York Times, the Times’ house conservative, David Brooks, in his January 15th column, attempting to understand why poverty is so intractable in Haiti, wrote that among other reason’s it’s because so many Haitians follow the teachings of Voodoo. He wrote:

As Lawrence E. Harrison explained in his book “The Central Liberal Truth,” Haiti, like most of the world’s poorest nations, suffers from a complex web of progress-resistant cultural influences. There is the influence of the voodoo religion, which spreads the message that life is capricious and planning futile. There are high levels of social mistrust. Responsibility is often not internalized. Child-rearing practices often involve neglect in the early years and harsh retribution when kids hit 9 or 10.

We’re all supposed to politely respect each other’s cultures. But some cultures are more progress-resistant than others, and a horrible tragedy was just exacerbated by one of them.

Talk about a sophisticated way of blaming the victim.

This is a cleaned up version of what Pat Robertson saw to be the reason why Haiti was selected by God to be so devastated—because, he said, they “made a pact with the Devil.” Though nominally Christian (actually Catholic—another issue for Robertson), it is clear that he is referring to the fact that most Haitians, in addition to Catholicism, also incorporate Voodoo into their religious practices.

Robertson would unlikely not know this, but this kind of amalgam between traditional and imported religions is quite common. In fact, it is usually what happens when a people are voluntarily or forcefully converted to a new belief system.

Christianity itself is just such a blend of Judaism, Saint Paul’s version of the meaning of Jesus’ life, and the rituals of the local mystery cults that existed in regions where Paul and others went to spread the gospel. So what we see in Haiti is not substantially different than what we would have seen during the final century of the Roman Empire as Christianity took root by replacing and assimilating local religions.

Belief in a destiny outside oneself in and of itself is not fatalistic, or what Brooks labels “progress-resistant.” Nor is the accompanying pejorative implication valid that being fatalistic exposes a primitive orientation that dooms one to the vicissitudes of prevailing circumstances. In such cultural instances, planning, as he claims, is futile; and, if one requires evidence of this, the results of such futility are written in Haiti’s history of human misery.

But there are any number of other religions that have significant pre-deterministic beliefs. The founding versions of Protestant thought in this country, the early Calvinism of our Puritan ancestors, saw one’s eternal fate as preordained. But this did not lead to either superstition or futility. In fact, to determine if one was among God’s Elect, people were encouraged to work hard and seek material success in this world as evidence of one’s eternal salvation in the next. Max Weber was so impressed by this cultural imperative that he called this the Protestant Ethic. The ethic that motivated people to strive and the source of Western capitalism.

The Harrison book Brooks quotes is a study of how cultures have the capacity to change and takes its title and intellectual direction from a comment by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, that "the central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself."

Some truth here but also, as with Brooks, a hint of effete imperialism.

Further, in a subsequent article, from Saturday’s New York Times, perhaps as an amendment to or perhaps a muted apology for the incipient racism of Brooks’ op-ed piece, in an On Religion column, Samuel Freedman writes about Voodoo itself. Well, sort of writes about it. (See full article linked below.)

As a form of validation, he speaks about how Voodoo is “a New World version of ancestral African faiths.” Good enough. But then Freedman fails utterly to say another word about those faiths. He tells us nothing more about their central meanings or their amalgamation with Haitian Catholicism.

The rest of the column is about how “Voodoo” has entered the vernacular as a kind of cartoonish pop culture point of racist reference. Have you looked recently at any of those Zombie movies of the 1930s and 40s? Not a pretty picture of how ancestral African faiths made their way to the New World.

More recently not many blanched when George H. W. Bush, during his fierce primary battle with Ronald Reagan, in 1980 referred to Reagan’s supply-side economic assertions as “Voodoo economics.” Bush was right about the failures of supply-side thinking to trickle down as promised but not very culturally sensitive when he labeled it as such. What a ruckus he would have caused if he had referred to it as Hindu or Buddhist or, worse, Jewish economics.

The principal belief in Haitian Vodou is that deities called Lwa (or Loa) are subordinates to a god called Bondyè, This supreme being does not intercede in human affairs.

Sound familiar? In traditional Judaism and Christianity we pray to a supreme deity who, like the Lwa or Bondyè, does not intercede in our affairs.

And David Brooks should take a lesson from this and like them also stay out of Haitian affairs. They have enough problems as it is.