Under The Olive Tree

Haiti

The magnitude of the catastrophe that we simply refer to as “Haiti” is a study reserved for those with sufficient determination and resources to discover its roots and causes – and is an investigation that is not recommended for the faint hearted or the fearful.

Most of those involved with attempting to address the rescue and recovery of Haiti’s people have in increasing numbers concluded that simply restoring this nation to its former condition – that is – to the state of affairs proceeding the massive 7.0 earthquake that struck Port Au Prince on January 12, 2010 – is not enough. There seems to be a growing global consensus that the Haitian people need far more than this.

As always, the question is not only how to provide such civic and social engineering – but more critically – how to implement such a vast rebuilding project that is truly sustainable. Recent history is blemished with costly failures – Katrina for example – and Haiti – the most impoverished nation in the Western Hemisphere, presents formidable challenges.

Some, perhaps men like Richard Dawkins, might reasonably be expected to argue that Haiti presents a unique opportunity to transform a society that has been steeped in superstition and ignorance by employing all the intellectual prowess of science and technology – thereby fashioning a model of evolutionary adaptation – the fittest simply applying the principles and truths of Darwinian discovery and understanding and thereby achieving such a remarkable transformation.

It is a stand that you most likely will not see Richard or his friends take because it is fraught with sensitive issues – pitfalls for the optimistic and the zealous, and for those who don’t recognize that we have gone down this road before.

You only need name the ideologies, the locations, and the experiments to conjure up the most blatant obstacles to the application of evolutionary theory on ours – or in this case – Haiti’s evolutionary destiny.

Tuskegee, the Volk, Sterilization Laws, Nuremberg Laws, Aktion T4, eugenics, and in its cardinal departure into madness, Auschwitz, Rwanda, and Darfur.

Of course, the Neo-Darwinist or the “evolutionist”, (whatever their choice of designation), will argue that the connection between these and a true understanding of evolutionary thought is unwarranted and untrue. They would term this subject “Social Darwinism”.

Darwin himself had observations on the subject in “The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex” – Charles Darwin, 1882. “Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.” (emphasis is the editor’s)

Remember – we are exploring here how we can improve Haiti in its rebuilding – and whether the prowess of man’s evolutionary development can be brought to bear resulting in the transformation needed there. In a world of dwindling resources and increasing populations – there is ample room to speculate that some – whether they call themselves Social Darwinists or not – must be looking at Haiti wondering what a sustainable response would be?

Or could it be that we are beyond even the great shadow cast by Darwin’s evolutionary theory? – as a recent commentary by Alan Weisman entitled “Is the Earth striking back?” on CNN explores – questioning whether the real legacy of democracy – which we assume will be part of Haiti’s entitlement – is going to be world-wide cataclysms as the industries of free trade and progress built on the use of carbon fuels change our atmosphere – melting the polar ice caps – and bring on a chilling scenario of an Earth’s crust that is somehow responding and “has begun to stretch and rebound.”

In such a Gaia worshiper’s or Gaia scientific understanding – how does the transformation of Haiti fit in? Is it even a good idea to attempt what UN analysts predict will be a minimum $11.5 billion intervention – with a very distinct possibility of failure?

Surely modern science has the answers.

One thing is obvious – the restoration of a city or nation and the healing of its citizens is no small challenge. Recent disasters have given us a large study group of how individual people respond to and recover from major man-made or natural disasters – and although the task of rebuilding is daunting enough – the challenge of finding ways to help people recover from their great emotional and physical losses and the resultant stress is by all accounts even more far reaching.

Perhaps you believe that science has the answer to that, too.

Recently in reference to a prolonged and ongoing natural disaster an atheist stated that he had heard that some people in the disaster area had resorted to praying – and he chided them, assuring them that modern science would save them. It begs the question – if science has so many answers, why did science fail to save them already – and if science is going to save them, when?