Last week's New Yorker cover was a clearer commentary on the Haiti situation than any offered elsewhere. Everybody has been asking the obvious question, which is why Haiti was in such bad shape before the earthquake and is so little able to respond to it on its own, and everyone offers defensive and embarrassed answers. Haiti was a slave society; Haiti was exploited; Haiti had bad leadership. And everybody points to the resilience of Haitians: that they are not being violent; that they have religious faith in the face of catastrophe; that they are very successful when they find themselves in a different environment. Haitians who come to the United States country become successful businessmen. This last point was made by many, most recently by Nicholas Kristof in his Thursday column in The New York Times. It was part of his attempt to explain away why Haiti was not a successful society. It misses the point, of course. The question is not whether individual Haitians are capable; it is a question of why Haitian society is a failure as a collectivity.

A little more than a week ago, just a few days after the earthquake, Zbig Brzezinski was asked why Haiti was so backward on Morning Joe, the MSNBC morning program his daughter co-hosts with Joe Scarborough. He flustered for a moment, said something about a long history stretching back to the French Revolution, and that he wasn't an expert on the area. (Ha!) The cultural mojos were already at work: don't say anything bad about Haiti. Later, more polished answers by authorities offered a whole host of reasons, including that Haitian nationhood was a product of a slave rebellion, though any attribution of its failure to that defining event was avoided. Meanwhile, we see people huddled in squalor, passing around some water between them, and take that to be a sign of social peace, and we take the fact that survivors put together a list of the living and dead in their neighborhood as a sign of social organization. Correspondents are trying hard to make these victims sympathetic. Americans, like everyone else, want to like victims.

The New Yorker cover was different. It shows a flood washing away part of a door to what I take to be a crypt and revealed some zombies inside, those drawn in a Haitian primitive style. The outer wall of the crypt was made of uneven stones each of which is the face of a dead body looking out at the viewer. The cover is showing voodoo to be alive and well in Haiti, as I had suspected it was, given the tolerance of the nominal Catholic church for local ways and because the funerals shown on television are so bereft of ritual that commentators apologize for them by saying there was no way to have other than a perfunctory service. My interpretation of the lack of ceremony even for those individually deposited by their relatives into crypts is that maybe Haitian religion consists largely of saying that God is great.

Max Weber, as far as I am aware, did not comment on Voodoo as a religion. He was largely concerned with religion further developed and abstracted and so comments for the most part on the religion of literate peoples. The evolution of pre-literate religion as a subject of study goes back to Edmund Tylor, the mid-nineteenth century English scholar who noticed the extent to which primitive religion was a matter of observing living spirits, capable of will and action, as both the essence of and the associates of trees and rocks and other objects. Religions change in their organization and their beliefs through a series of modifications towards greater complexity, as is the case with any other evolutionary process. Religions come to be concerned with morality rather than the enforcement of custom; they abstract God so that He/She becomes the logic of the universe; they turn their beliefs from matters of truth and falsity into ways to give people psychological support.

Looking at religion as an evolutionary process is very different from the way the British structural anthropologists, the American functionalists, the French students of the religious mentality went about it, which was to discern the universal and necessary features of the religious experience and of religious institutions. In that view, all religions are essentially the same, reconciling us to social life as well as to internal mental life, and there is no basis for preferring one to another except that earlier ones may be more fully religious in that they have not been adulterated by the forces of secularism, a premise at the heart of both Durkheim and Levi-Straus.

Voodoo was extensively studied in the Fifties and Sixties, perhaps for no other reason than that if you were in a Religion program and were required to do something outside of Christianity and Judaism you did not have to invest as much time learning it as you another exotic religion, such as Tantric Buddhism. A summer in Hispaniola would do the job.  Those studies showed Voodoo to be a pre-literate religion on the order of those discussed by Tylor. There was a set of god-spirits but they had not been organized into a clear hierarchy or assigned various special powers. The paganism of even early literate Greece was more advanced than that. This was the religion that filled out the life of the society established by the slave rebels, who picked up from French culture neither a Napoleonic idea of the state nor even some desiccated version of a religion of reason. They had became politically free, in the sense of no longer ruled by a nation, but they had not become a nation, much less become spiritually free.

What Max Weber tells me is far more than that religion evolves towards complexity. His distinctive contribution to the theory of religion is that religions co-evolve with economic and other social structures. Pre modern China awarded positions of power and prestige to those who passed centrally monitored exams. That social structural arrangement was based on the idea that the mastery of a canon of very difficult religious texts showed a person to be schooled in the idea of hierarchy that was part of the Confucian ideal: loyalty and obedience to those of superior rank, where parents or officials. A statist regime that did not have much room for innovative or independent commercial enterprises of a large size was consistent with this religiously inspired framework. Western Europe, on the other hand, was open to the spread of modern capitalism because the Protestant point of view opened people up to being productive and goal oriented so as to support their sense that they were among the saved. To work out the evolutionary process, however, was very complex and Weber devoted many volumes to the project.

A clear implication of the Weberean point of view about the intersection of the development of economic and religious institutions is that you cannot build a modern society on the basis of superstition or primitive religion. It is a version of the idea also propounded by that other evolutionist, Leon Trotsky, (which Trotsky abandoned when he was tempted by the chance to share power) that you can’t skip political stages. Well, you cannot skip stages of religious development either. Haiti is stuck because it can’t get out of the pre-literate level of religious experience and religious structure. The Dominican Republic, on the other hand, which has also had a checkered political career, has a somewhat more developed social structure because society is somewhat better structured because Catholic authoritarianism is a number of ranks above primitive religion in getting a society organized

The Weberean thesis has to be pursued structurally rather than psychologically. It is not that Haitians are incapable of thinking the way modern people do. That ability is part of universal human capacity. It is not that what was learned cannot be unlearned. Some Haitians raised in the United States may well become doctors and lawyers. The real issue is that primitive religion is cultish in that every person forms a direct relation to the spirits and requests their own bounty rather than joins in ethnic groups or, later, in congregations, which make organized demands on a deity in exchange for the adherence of the group to that deity, and therefore are able to establish both political order and law and morality, and so have structures that can sustain themselves. The Protestants simply take this inevitable evolution in religious organization to the next level of applying the independence of the congregation to secular institutions, such as businesses, where economic success becomes an end in itself.

Voodoo does not practice modern individualism, a doctrine which means every person makes choices about how to engage in a structure that furthers and regulates economic enterprise, every person having control over how to sell their labor. That is the great transformation that took place in the second half of the eighteenth century in Western Europe. Rather, Voodoo, to the extent that its experience can be abstracted into a doctrine, has every person out on their own, and so largely passive, in dealing with the onslaughts of nature or social life. CNN had a portrait of an American Haitian businessman who came down to Haiti after the earthquake and was spending his time on his cell phone arranging for individuals, one at a time, to be cared for at various hospitals and aid stations operated by any number of foreign nationals who had arrived on the island to provide assistance. He was not looking at the overall problem nor organizing the Haitian Diaspora. There is no Haitian-American Ambulance Corps.

So what is to be done in Haiti? I like the idea that has been bandied about but not as seriously as it ought to be, which is to temporarily evacuate the elderly, sick and young and start from scratch, employing Haitians in reconstruction. There is a real job of nation building to be done for a people who have never been a nation as we understand that, which is the overlap of a culture with a set of political and economic organizations that exercise jurisdiction for that culture or for some part of it. I think the only one in power who is reported to be thinking along these lines is Bill Clinton, who is a bit of a visionary.

But I would add a word of caution. What religious studies show us, I say again, is that you can’t skip stages of religious development. You don’t get to Jesus’ (and Hillel’s) call for religious individualism (every single person is a unit capable of achieving salvation or goodness) without passing through ethnic consciousness (religion as the expression of the cultural and political freedom of a people) as the primary form of religious experience. In similar fashion, you don’t have religion as an organized and organizing way of life unless you rid yourself of individually administered magic (the attempt to coax the spirits to do what you want through bribes, spells, and imploring them to help you out) as the way to shift your fortune. Indeed, the stages of religious evolutionary development may be even more immutable than the stages of economic development. China is recovering a centrally administered economic system from the ravages of a hundred years of transformation. Haiti has nowhere to go back to economically and it is stuck in the mud of its religion. Perhaps the way forward is for the Vatican to make Haiti a ward of the New York Archdiocese. After all, Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York was called in to perform the funeral service for Haiti’s Archbishop, who was killed in the quake. Were there no local priests capable of conducting a fully fleshed out ceremony? The New York Archdiocese might be somewhat forceful in raising religious standards. That, though, is a long term project, even though economic redevelopment programs will be stymied without it.