In Rebuilding Haiti (Or Any Failed State), Culture Matters

Among policy prescriptions being considered towards building a new Haiti, one that seems to escape everyone’s attention is the need to understand and examine Haiti’s debilitating culture. For despite all kinds of assistance and good intentions from outside, Haiti has remained a dysfunctional society. This illuminating piece, “Haiti and the Voodoo Curse: The Cultural Roots of the Country’s Endless Misery,” by Lawrence Harrison, explains why.

Bad policies, weak institutions, and corrupt leaders have been blamed for everything that has gone wrong in the country. But also, according to Harrison, Haitians have been acculturated to “a set of values, beliefs and attitudes, rooted in African culture and the slavery experience that resist progress.”

For one, the religious practice of voodoo that teaches a Haitian child that everything that happens is caused by spirits and that he is in constant danger would make anyone feel helpless and resigned to his fate. Couple this with a slavish mentality born of Haitians’ slavery experience, reinforcing a class system that gives power and privilege to a mulato upper class against an inferior class of black Haitians, could only produce a culture that is debilitating, stultifying, and resistant to progress.

This culture has to change if Haitians want to move forward and have a better life. How to change it into what and by whom is the challenge.

Charles Kesler, professor of government at Claremont McKenna College, looks to Aristotle’s founding of a city as an example of how culture can be shaped. In his article, “Culture, Politics, and the American Founding,” Kesler argues that culture must be shaped by reasonable standards, recognizing the sub-rational parts of human nature that prevail in a community and subjecting them to a higher goal. In an old paper I co-wrote about cultural separatism and the Muslim question in Philippine politics, I reiterated Kesler’s point:

In his Politics, Aristotle argues for recognizing the importance of culture and channeling culture to serve justice and the common good. He compares the process of founding a city (today we would say, a country) to a sculptor shaping a block of marble into a statue. The block of marble represents the “matter” of a city – “its location, population, ethnic stock, customs, economic skills and resources, distribution of wealth, levels of education, and so forth.” So to speak, the marble does not know that it is merely marble, whereas the sculptor makes it into something else by virtue of his ability to see and then shape what that marble can become. Aristotle recognizes that “matter limits the forms that can be combined with it” – that rulers “have to start from pre-existing way of life or culture” before they can make it something different or better. Whereas the residents of a city are likely to think their city and way of life the best one, or even the only one, the founder sees that it could be otherwise than it is; the statesman sees the city in light of something beyond and perhaps above it. So as the sculptor eventually imposes a new arrangement and character upon the marble, Aristotle argues, politics can rule over culture – that, indeed, it is the laws, offices, and common aspirations of a city that constitute its distinctive character, its regime, its very way of life.

Culture, therefore, can be shaped by politics, that is, by the reasonable ruling of a regime . . . This requires practical reason or prudence. This practical reason, however, if it is to escape the infinite regress of culturalism and other subrational motives, must be directed eventually by a theoretical reason – an understanding that sees in the light of the nature of the human condition that all cultures are merely cultures, that they are at best limited, partial answers to the question of how to cultivate the best properties of humans and minimize our vices.

Whoever is going to underwrite the rebuilding of Haiti has the perfect opportunity to reshape its culture . . . into something that will serve justice, the common good, and the flourishing of every Haitian.