Why Is Haiti Uniquely Miserable?
By Rod Dreher, European Conservative.
Back in 2018, President Donald Trump referred to Haiti as a “s**thole,” and was roundly denounced for being a racist. While watching a clip of a “cannibal gang” member eating a piece of roasted human leg on the streets of Port-au-Prince the other night (it’s revolting; you have been warned), it struck me that Trump’s judgment has held up pretty well.
Why is Haiti the way it is? Everybody has an explanation. The most popular one is that Haiti was horribly exploited by its former colonial master France, which imposed reparations on it that weren’t paid off until 1947. That’s true, and morally obscene. But the Dominican Republic, with which Haiti shares the island of Hispaniola, was just as poor as Haiti in 1947, and today is six to seven times richer.
Almost one hundred years ago, Haiti was invaded and occupied for a time by the United States. Yes, but so was the Dominican Republic.
Haiti is subject to hurricanes and earthquakes … but, sorry, so is the Dominican Republic. In 1950, half of Haiti was covered by forest, but now, Haitians have deforested their part of the island, leading to economic disaster. In sharp contrast to the green Dominican Republic, today less than 2% of Haiti is forested. This is surely a factor in Haiti’s misery, but it is hardly a complete explanation.
Both Haiti and the Dominican Republic were led by dictators in the 20th century. It has been argued that Haiti’s Duvalier family used its monopoly on power to do nothing but exploit the country, while the D.I.’s Rafael Trujillo, though a strongman, nevertheless modernized his country. This seems plausible—but again, only as a contributing factor.
What about religion? It cannot be denied that religious belief, which infuses culture (after all, you can’t have culture without cult) has tremendous effects on political, social, and economic life. Max Weber famously credited Protestant values with building capitalism and liberal democracy. Samuel P. Huntington argued that the reason the United States and Canada developed wealthier and more stable countries than other New World nations is because they were settled by Anglo Protestants, not Latin Catholics. His point, of course, was not that Latin Catholics are worse people than Anglo Protestants, but that ideas have consequences.
More recently, Harvard anthropologist Joseph Henrich, in his provocative 2020 book The WEIRDest People In The World, explained how Western culture became a far outlier on global cultures, become educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic while the rest of the world did not—or only did under Western influence. The key factor, he found, is the way the Latin church organized western European cultures in the wake of the Roman Empire’s 5th century collapse. A secondary factor is the rise of literacy after the Reformation.
The lesson is that religion matters for the prosperity and stability of any society. Not just ‘religion,’ but the content and form of religion, because it provides to its adherents a model of how the world works and gives them a model of how to conduct oneself in it.
In Haiti, there is a famous saying: “Haiti is 90% Catholic, 10% Protestant, and 100% Vodou.” Vodou, or voodoo, is the Creolized form of indigenous West African religion preserved by Haitian slaves. It is a polytheistic religion in which worshipers make sacrifices to various deities, called lwa, to propitiate them, to serve them, and to get the lwa to do their bidding.
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