Cyreenik Says
OK... OK... I'm going to venture into the intellectual and moral mousetrap of assuming Haiti can be fixed.
If it can be fixed, we need to define what a right Haiti would be, what is wrong with it now, and then look at how to change what is wrong in a positive and enduring way. Given the mess that Haiti is currently in, it's clear these steps have not been correctly taken in the past. In the past, lots of money has been sent to Haiti by outsiders, but that money hasn't pulled Haiti into the 21st century... in a good way... as defined by those looking in from the outside.
Here is a Roger White definition of a Good Haiti. Just to be absolutely clear, I'm an outsider defining what I want to see in Haiti. I recognize that this definition is not likely to be what the average Haitian sincerely wants to see, but we have to start somewhere. (again, sincerely in this context means willing to pay big bucks, big time, and big effort to obtain)
The Haiti I would like to see -- The Good Haiti -- is one that has a prosperous middle class. This middle class is enfranchised. It can control its government and it can control its own economy. This means that if government officials are not serving the people well, the people can both find out about this, and cast the rascals out. So, the people must be both educated enough to know good governing from bad governing and informed enough that they can have good information to make their choices on. These middle class people are also employees of Haitian businesses, and the Haitian businesses need to be as responsive and responsible as the government officials are.
An not just government and business people! If other community members are betraying the community, they will be called up for doing so and get some kind of meaningful censure -- censure meaning discouraging these people before they become criminals and are sent to jail. In the Haitian context, this may be one of the more difficult goals to achieve. This means giving up their version of modern tribalism -- gangsterism.
Likewise, the people running the businesses of Haiti have the education and information they need to run profitable businesses in a globalized economy. They can make good investment choices, and they need to know they aren't going to get beaten up -- in any sense -- by populist rage movements or government officials that game the system to play favorites.
Once again, this is an issue of enfranchisement -- business people of all sizes and shapes need to feel that they are part of the system, and that the system is paying attention to their needs, and that when their needs change, the system will be responsive.
This is what I think a Good Haiti would look like.
Haiti is the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere. As the earthquake of 2010 vividly demonstrated, this poverty has lead to a lot of suffering. This suffering is the root problem.
But Haiti was suffering long before the earthquake, perhaps for a century before that. If poverty is the root cause of the suffering, what caused the poverty?
One answer could be historical accident: Some country had to be the poorest in the western hemisphere, and Haiti drew the short straw. But that answer isn't very satisfying. It's not as if Haiti is only a few dollars off of the US in per capita income, it's way, way under the US and all other countries.
So, is there something else about Haiti that makes it a favorite for poverty queen? The most distinctive thing about Haiti is its history. Haitians are proud of the fact that it is the only country to achieve independence from a slave revolt. That's something to be proud of, for sure, but it may also be a key to the poverty of today. Haiti, like Barbados and the American South, grew to be a prosperous colony in the 1700's based on a slave culture and an export economy built on plantations using slave labor. Starting early in the 1800's all three of these places had to give up on slave culture and transition from a slave-based plantation economy to some other reasonably profitable alternative. In all three, that transition was difficult and took a long time. The people of Barbados gained universal suffrage only in the 1950's, the Civil Rights movement gained traction in the American South in the 1960's, and we have Haiti today.
Perhaps there was something about the slave culture - plantation environment that was pure poison to moving on? Here is a possibility.
In the slave plantation cultures mentioned above, there was a constant worry about slave revolt. One preventive measure was to keep the slaves as ignorant as possible -- if the slaves didn't know much, they would have neither the tools nor the strong aspirations to change their condition. That worked fairly well short-term, but long-term it was poison. Not only did the slaves not know much, the people watching them had little incentive to learn, and the changes in thinking that accompanied the industrializing going on in western Europe and the northern American colonies pretty much passed these cultures by.
What served these cultures instead was a form of tribal thinking, an us-versus-them kind of thinking, where us was the plantation community and them was everyone else. This us-versus-them kind of thinking is easy and familiar, it worked for thousands of generations in Stone Age villages around the world. So, even to this day, this kind of thinking is easy to teach, and real tough to unlearn. The problem with it is that it doesn't work well when your community uses a lot of mechanical things -- which takes a lot of knowledge -- and you must cooperate intensively with people all over the world -- which takes a lot of cooperating with and trusting strangers.
But... it is easy thinking. So sadly, this poison to industrial age thinking ran so deeply that it took five generations for Barbados and the American South to purge it, and Haiti still hasn't. In Haiti, the modern form of this tribal thinking -- gangsterism -- is still very much alive and well.
This is why Haiti is still such a dangerous place to strangers, and this why Haiti is so poor, in so many ways.
For Haiti to change into something that looks like a developed nation, Haitian thinking must change. It must become advantageous for Haitians to discourage tribal thinking and embrace Industrial Age thinking -- and all the Haitians must clearly see this advantage. The Haitians must see the advantage in not betraying strangers at every opportunity. They must see the advantage of having everyone learning analytical thinking and becoming informed citizens, and they must see the advantage of having all of the community enfranchised.
This is a tall order, and not a straight-forward or easy one. If it was straight-forward and easy, the charities would have done it because the donors would have seen it was the right thing to be doing with their money.
In truth, I have no idea how to do this, but this is what must be done. Sadly, I'll have to let some true genius in human thinking figure out how to do this.
Update: I'm not the only one thinking about this problem, and others, headed by a Bill Clinton task force, are now willing to throw 10 billion at it. Here's a 1 Apr 10 article in The Guardian by Rory Carroll Haiti promised 10bn in aid -- double what it asked for. At the end of the article Clinton notes that pre-earthquake aid failed miserably, and he plans that this round will do much better because it will be given directly to the corrupt government rather than circumventing it. ...Eh?
Update: On February 27th, 2010 a much stronger earthquake struck Chile, and the difference in response is illuminating. The Chilean quake has killed less than 1000 people and the Chileans themselves will handle most of the disaster relief. This difference in ability to deal with a similar calamity shows one of the big differences that advanced civilization makes -- the advanced civilization can deal much better with calamities.
The earthquake centered near Port Au Prince, Haiti on January 12, 2010 has been devastating to the country: Much of Port Au Prince has been leveled and the death toll in Haiti is over 100,000.
My heart goes out to the people of Haiti. But... should more than my heart go out? What should follow? Here is an editorial in the January 19th edition of the Wall Street Journal that reflects some cool-headed thinking about Haiti's condition: To Help Haiti, End Foreign Aid. A quick summary is that beyond immediate disaster relief, more foreign aid may not be the best way to help Haiti, or other impoverished nations.
Haiti, like Afghanistan and Somalia, is a place where tribal culture and small scale government has proved quite durable. There are many places on the earth where tribal lifestyles are still quite viable. Other lower-profile places are the remote areas of Indonesia/New Guinea/South Philippines, central Africa, and the Amazon basin. Haiti, Afghanistan, and Somalia make news because they are tribal lifestylers who are living in strategic or easily visible locations.
Where people are living in a tribal lifestyle and are high profile, there grows a strong desire on the part of the developed world watching them to "fix" how they are living. This can be for charitable reasons ("Those poor souls.") or to get rid of a nuisance (pirates and terrorists), or for geopolitical reasons (If we don't control these people our enemies will.).
The results of these interventions are usually discouraging and sometimes disastrous.
So, why do people of developed cultures chronically invest in such losing propositions?
Part of the problem is asking the wrong question: In this case, who is to blame for Haiti's condition? This question is like asking who is to blame for America's condition? But, it gets asked none-the-less, and gets answered in fascinating ways. I personally have heard radio talk show pundits blame: CIA, evil corporations, US military, and UN aid programs. I sure the list doesn't end there. Once again, this is the wrong question to be asking. Asking about blame implies that someone has done something wrong. What needs to be recognized is that Hatians are living a lifestyle they are as comfortable with as Americans are living a lifestyle they are comfortable with.
o In both cases there is a lot of bellyaching going on that things could be better.
o In both cases people are working and striving to make their lives better.
o In both cases people have adapted well to the circumstances given them.
Over the years, I've watched people invest in some crazy, crazy ideas. Crazy in the sense that they don't accomplish what the investor intended, but the investor still feels good about making the investment. Over the last few years, I've been looking for what is at the root of the satisfaction these people feel when they make their crazy investments.
One of the powerful full root satisfactions is spending to lose guilt. Yes, Virginia, there is a thriving guilt industry, and it shows up in many, many forms.
The form that is behind trying to fix a tribal culture to bring it into the 21st century can take a couple of forms. One is charity. The guilt-ridden people of the on-looking developed country see the poverty and are sincerely moved to fix it -- sincerely, as in willing to spend a lot of money. They see the poverty and all the bad things associated with it -- disease, famine, violence, and suffering from calamities -- and they want to help these people stop the suffering.
The problem becomes how to channel that desire to help -- how to spend that money -- and that is where the rub comes in. The rub is that there is a big difference between what the sufferers want and what the donators want to give the sufferers. Because of this big difference, and because giving goes on regularly, there has emerged an industry of people who manage charity. The people who run successful charities are people who are very good at making donors feel their money is being well spent. Note that this definition says nothing about what the receivers think is a good idea. As far as the money flow is concerned, the receivers are simply tickets to get punched so that the middlemen can get more money from the donors.
This patronizing of the recipients -- telling them what they need -- means that most of the money is spent uselessly, at best, and is pure poison to the recipients, at worst. An example of useless spending is when volunteers build a clinic or school in a tribal community, and once they are finished, it stands abandoned and unused because there are no funds to maintain it. An example of pure poison is when lots of low-cost food is handed out to a community, and this puts the local farmers out of business, and makes them unemployed welfarists subsisting on the handed-out food as well.
Who wins in such a situation? The donors get their guilt reduced and the middle men make a nice living as high-salary beggars. They win, the recipients lose. Ouch!
High salary beggars make their living by making guilt-ridden people feel good about giving up their money. They do not make their living by solving the problems that caused the giving impulse in the first place, and there is a difference, as talked about above.
The damage goes even deeper. The "in the trenches" end of the pipeline also creates a big problem. Think of The Godfather movies -- you have a situation where there is an elite handing out "sugar" to a whole bunch of people who are poorly educated and disenfranchised. (Disenfranchised, as in, not doing much to contribute to the welfare of their own community, not standing on their own two feet.) These followers will be rewarded mostly for their loyalty to the elite.
When this goes on for a while, what at do you end up with? You end up with a situation that reenforces the tribal us-versus-them mentality. You end up with a Warlord/Gangster basis for community relations. More Ouch!
And all these guilt-ridden donors wanted to do was help!
Haiti got its start as a nation as part of the French Revolution. Prior to its independence, it was a prosperous French colony with its wealth coming from slave-farmed plantations of sugar, tobacco and indigo -- much like the nearby British-controlled Barbados island. Its independence war was just as messy as its near-contemporary, the American Revolution.
Haiti, Barbados and the American South all faced a similar challenge in the 1800's: winding down a slavery-based culture and replacing a slave-supported plantation economy with some reasonably profitable alternative. It was not an easy task in any of these places. It wasn't until the 1950's that Barbados extended the right to vote to the common man, and woman. It wasn't until the 1960's that the Civil Rights movement gained traction in the American South. And in Haiti... well... the price of not supporting some kind of planter class for one hundred years was becoming the poorest nation in the Americas.
Since World War Two, what Haiti has maintained in place of a planter class is foreign aid. In retrospect, it seems to have been a poor substitute.
And now we have the earthquake, which has leveled much of the country's infrastructure and killed one or two percent of the population outright. By any measure, this is messy and ugly. And, yes, these people now need a lot of help.
But, as we help, we should keep in mind that, by and large, Haiti was what the Haitians wanted Haiti to be. If they didn't want it that way, they were the ones with the power to change it. And that is still the case. When the Haitians are ready to change Haiti into something different, they are the ones who will figure out how to do it, not well-meaning outsiders.
First off, we need to remember that the question "What should we do about Haiti?" is an outsider's question. The Haitian-oriented question is, "How do I make life better for me, my children, and my community?" and the two questions do not produce identical answers.
What outsiders would like to see is a Haiti that is brought into the 21st century -- one that has a well-organized central government, a thriving middle-class of people who know how to keep their country properous and their government well behaved, and a strong and thriving infrastructure that is supporting these 21st century institutions.
...That's a whole lot of change to a place that is steeped in tribal-level thinking, comfortable with minimal infrastructure, and views dealing with outsiders as a completely different relation from that used with dealing with insiders. Before the earthquake Haiti was a dangerous place to be an outsider, and the earthquake hasn't changed that -- desperate need or no desperate need.
What outsiders need to see is that changing Haitian thinking must come before changing Haitian infrastructure. If outsiders want to see a successful transformation of Haiti into a 21st century-thinking culture, they must start by showing Haitians that there are better ways to survive than by supporting the tribal level us-versus-them thinking that supports warlord/gangsterism.
Clearly this is not an easy or straighforward task. If it was easy and straighforward, it would have happened already. But, none-the-less it is changing attitude that outsider help must focus on, not changing infrastructure, or handing out food to the poor.
And, in the end, it's a Haitian choice to make the transformation, not an outsider choice. The transformation won't happen until the Haitians are ready to make it happen.
It's a tough love attitude, but its still love.
The scars of the 9-11 Disaster are still woven deeply into the American psyche -- particularly in the people of New York City and Washington. And those scars are ready, willing, and able to produce more blunders.
Here are two unsigned editorials from the January 6th, 2010 Wall Street Journal that complain that terrorists are being treated as common criminals, not unholy beings who should be outside normal laws: The Ramzi Yousef Standard and One 'Allegedly' Too Many.
Normally I like the opinions expressed by the WSJ, but in this case I disagree strongly. Yes I say! Terrorists should be treated as common criminals! Because when you treat them as something special, you are asking to have them for around a long, long time.
This is so for three reasons:
o Soldiers and spies can never find and root out all terrorists. And worse, when they look for them using soldiering and spying techniques -- such as bashing down doors, humiliating everyday people as they search for suspects, and torturing high value suspects when they find them -- they are disenfranchising everyone who comes in contact with these activities. Anyone who has been subjected to such treatment will not support any further efforts to root out terrorists.
Conducting the war with soldiers and spies is treating real life like a Hollywood movie. Sadly, real life works differently.
o Likewise, the passenger screening rituals are not going to be effective. As TSA security officials themselves have pointed out many times: any fixed screening ritual will have loopholes, and dedicated terrorists will find and exploit them. In the context of the scare de jour, full body scanners may be expensive, but they are not fool-proof.
o The goal of terrorism is advertising a cause. The more terrorists are treated as special and newsworthy, the more they are succeeding at their goal.
The most common objection these days to full body scanning is invasion of privacy. This ojection makes good emotional sense, but loss of privacy is far from the worst outcome of our modern rituals. What is much worse is the loss of enfranchisement. As this latest incident demonstrated passengers can take care of this kind of problem. A few commentators have noticed this, but they are not having much headway against the white-hot emotion calling for more ritual.
To reduce the airplane terrorism problem over the long term we need to do three things:
o Empower passengers to deal with terrorists.
o Change our journalism standards so that terrorism becomes a less effective advertising techinque.
o Work hard on reducing passengers' fear of flying. Long term, this will do the most to reduce the advertising value of airplane terrorist attacks.
Notice that improving scanning techniques and finding better ways to chase down terrorists is not on this list. Those activities are distractions to going after the root of the problem. The root of the problem is the symbiotic relation between fear of flying and terrorists looking for an effective advertising venue.
-- The End --