Today, New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote a column about the earthquake in Haiti entitled, “The Underlying Tragedy.” Brooks is one of the few conservative commentators I make sure to read. Although I strongly disagree with him on just about every issue, his appeal to rationality and thinking is a welcome contrast to Limbaugh, Beck, O’Reilly, Coulter, and Hannity. In fact, Brooks’s recent article on the Tea Party’s anti-intellectual fervor should be required reading for all of us who want to understand a growing movement in American politics. (This article by Mark Lilla explores some of the same issues more critically.)
But Brooks could hardly have been more wrong in the Haiti article. It starts strongly:
This is not a natural disaster story. This is a poverty story. It’s a story about poorly constructed buildings, bad infrastructure and terrible public services.
I’ve read a little about Haitian history, and I must say, “Amen to that.” But any tingly feelings quickly gave rise to anger after I read these three paragraphs:
Third, it is time to put the thorny issue of culture at the center of efforts to tackle global poverty. Why is Haiti so poor? Well, it has a history of oppression, slavery and colonialism. But so does Barbados, and Barbados is doing pretty well. Haiti has endured ruthless dictators, corruption and foreign invasions. But so has the Dominican Republic, and the D.R. is in much better shape. Haiti and the Dominican Republic share the same island and the same basic environment, yet the border between the two societies offers one of the starkest contrasts on earth — with trees and progress on one side, and deforestation and poverty and early death on the other.
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.
David Brooks’s biggest problem is his tendency to generalize, to simplify complex problems into pithy “facts.” Here, he has suggested Haiti underwent oppression equal to Barbados and that the country’s poverty stems from (1) Voodoo, which supposedly lies at the center of “progress resistance,” and (2) Haiti’s child bearing practices, which supposedly fuel a want of responsibility and a surfeit of violence.”
First, Barbados is far, far different from Haiti in language, colonial rule, government, history of dictatorships, trajectory of independence, geography, population, social structure, foreign interference, and economic underpinnings. The Dominican Republic is also different in many ways. It’s a facile, even malicious, comparison.
Second, the recent events have led me to re-read some of Paul Farmer’s book, The Uses of Haiti, first published in 1994. (Farmer, unlike Brooks, actually knows something about the history Haiti.) Brooks’s column reminds me of the following passage (emphasis mine):
In few places in the world are the lineaments of responsibility so easily traced. In few places in the world have the actions of the powerful had such direct, if unanticipated, effects on the poor.
The United States and Haiti are something other than the richest and poorest countries in the hemisphere; they are also its two oldest republics. Rarely, in fact, have two countries been as closely linked as the United States and Haiti. Haitians are, by and large, fully aware of this historical fact. But citizens of the United States are, by and large, oblivious to these links — ignorant, even, of the two decade U.S. military occupation of Haiti earlier in this century…
In Haiti, [U.S.] share [of blame] is high indeed. Many Americans resist the idea that U.S. administrations have hastened the decline of this beleaguered little nation. This resistance is due to many factors, not the least of which is the discomfort born of facing ugly realities about the role of our government in the Third World. It is far more comforting to attribute the ongoing violence in Haiti (or Guatemala or El Salvador) to factors native to that setting. Among the most popular exploratory models are those invoking “cultural” factors; voodoo, in particular, is often evoked to “explain” Haiti (in previous generations, the concept of race was used with similar intent). The garish extremity of events in Haiti reinforces these erroneous notions: that much that happens here — a hospital room execution, seems outlandish to North American audiences….
Haiti’s embrace of democracy (under Aristide), as we shall see, was swept away by old forces and new guns. It is my hope that [this book] might play a role in countering the mystifications seen in the most influential forums of the United States. The reality of Haiti is the reality of Latin America at its most wretched. Time is running out if we are to help make sure that the Haitian poor do not “die in the silence of history.”
Could there be a more paradigmatic example of a “mystification in the most influential forums in the United States” than Brooks’s column?