“‘But are you really superstitious? Do you honestly believe that this horseshoe will bring you luck?’ He replied, ‘Of course not; but they say it helps even if you don’t believe in it.’” — Niels Bohr

I remember reading during the last bout of American-headline-making chaos in Haiti about a prevailing sentiment among Haitian Christians that the ongoing violence and general woes of their home country could be blamed on the continuing prevalence of vodou and its invocation of demons. Despite all its pretensions to reverencing the authenticity of internal opinions among less “privileged” demographics, liberalism in the West could not and can not abide this explanation. Perhaps Christianity could be scapegoated as interfering with otherwise pristinely indigenous thinking from the Haitians, and furthermore vodou might be afforded a venerable status as belonging to positively “primitive” non-Western forms of religious imagination, but I would posit that the most offensive part of this assessment of Haitian social calamity to American ears, even from those closest to the issue, is its lack of materialism. It reeks of superstition, of regressive un-Enlightenment, of being woefully unseasoned with the salt of scientific rationality to which we generally credit Western success.

About a year ago, a Nigerian psychologist writing under the name “Charlatan” invoked this very distinctly liberal, Western mindset in his assessment of “the African question,” that is, the conundrum of sub-Saharan Africa’s continued stagnation in economics, technology, and politics relative to countries both materially prosperous and scientifically curious — or at least entrepreneurially curious — enough to care about the question. He bemoans the stranglehold that religiosity and supernaturalism have on the intelligentsia of Nigeria and her neighbors, blaming the languishing of Africa on the stubborn refusal to adopt Western secularist materialism as a way of interrogating and shaping the world. There’s a very Darwinian, even Hegelian bent to this analysis in its assumption that Africa simply lags behind “developed” countries along a linear axis of evolutionary progress that invariably leads in the direction of “development,” but such a framing begs the question of what “development,” or “progress,” or “success” means. As the most materially “developed” nations undergo a different manner of crisis — dare we say, a spiritual one — with rates of suicide much higher and rates of reproduction far lower than most sub-Saharan countries, it becomes painfully clear that Western science, for all its benefits, has not itself yielded a sufficiently successful definition of “success,” leaving its beneficiaries floundering in a crisis of meaning.

This makes the meaning of the word “success” both pivotal and worth prosecuting. In the cases of countries like Haiti and Nigeria, the Western liberal has generally been torn between two alternative modes of assessment. The first is to fetishize their “cultural” achievements, which usually amount to cuisine, clothing or art, and are often distilled into an accessible, low-resolution, and copiously fictitious vision of pan-Afroism. The second is oriented more toward diagnosis, as in the aforementioned, in which countries flagging in material metrics are treated as malfunctional and, in less compassionate eyes, therefore regarded as inherently deficient — “Africa has no inventions!” Both modes are ultimately condescending, looking down from the ivory tower of Western success to ponder the alien as the inferior, in no small part due specifically to its alien-ness. This fact will agitate some Westerners and embolden others, but it nonetheless remains that by imposing the metrics of success from one’s own cultural frame, a seemingly unavoidable xenophobia is naturally conjured to condemn the object of assessment by virtue of its non-conformity to the subject. Simply put, if an American regards America as a picture of success, he is bound to regard other nations as unsuccessful specifically for being un-American. This may apply in less-nationalistic types through an amorphous conception of a Westernized “global village.”

The first mode is, in some ways, the more interesting and fruitful to dissect. It attempts to shift the metric of success, which in its way is commendable at least for opening some breathing room for the question, but it is no less guilty than the second of blindness to its own cultural impositions on the problem. Just as the diagnosis approach is blind to its culturally instantiated valuation of the material, assuming blithely that GDP and plumbing are valid and unassailable definitions of progress, so too does the fetishistic approach fail to include self-awareness of its own designation of particular artifacts as culturally valuable. The definition of success, no matter the approach, will depend greatly on the assessment of value, and values are themselves deeply inculcated by culture. In the face of this fact, the possibility of an impartial rendering of judgement on foreign success seems rather remote. On the one hand, it seems manifestly universal that human success depends on human survival, and therefore any social, technological, or cultural change that improves survival is unequivocally good. But on the other hand, as the previously mentioned decline in birth rates helps to show, an entirely materialistic approach to improvement of survival is no guarantee, and evidently may become, possibly inevitably, self-defeating. If all the “developed” peoples die out in a handful of generations and only the “unsuccessful” are left, then what will the terms even mean?

The materialist game falters as it becomes evident that it is not self-contained, which is to say that materialism is in some serious way false because it fails on its own standard. Material gains do not come at exclusively material costs. The immaterial interweaves throughout it all, and many spiritual losses have been sustained in the pursuit of economic invincibility. The complexity and obscurity of these dynamics raise a formidable challenge to any attempt to assess history. This fact looms over the book of Job, in which the Old World thesis that spiritual uprightness translates mechanically into material prosperity — a far more defensible sentiment in its own right than the reverse, despite Sam Harris’ insistence — is starkly defied. If it does not follow that immaterial correctness automatically rectifies material incorrectness, then it certainly makes for specious reasoning to adduce that material success is evidence of immaterial success.

What is to be made, then, of the Haitian Christians’ claim that their homeland is shrouded in spiritual darkness, resulting in the physical suffering that has plagued it? Is this opinion any different than the belief that the United States is successful in the ways Haiti is failing precisely because she is righteous in ways Haiti is not? It seems more plausible that Haiti and the United are in a sense the reverse of one another, and in another sense the same. If materialism did yield American success and prosperity, then her success cannot be credited to spirituality, but her woes can be blamed on spiritual deficiency, particularly in view of the fact that the worst of her present problems are not material, but spiritual. It would stand to reason, then, that Haiti might be capable of great strides toward American prosperity along the same avenue if she gave up her superstitions and religiosity, but materialism can hardly be the balm to her very real spiritual wounds.

But even these assertions remain tenuous because the perennial difficulty of establishing causal links remains. The life of an individual is multifaceted as it is to make the sequence of facts which constitute it a veritable forest of information. History is all the more complicated in that it deals with bodies of individuals on scales that said individuals can only mentally approximate. Who can blame the superstitious Haitian any more than the superstitious American, who because of the sequence in which a turn of good fortune follows from knocking on wood, he draws a thread of causality between the two? In the West, science is so often permitted to validate itself, to beg its own question, and Westerners love to rest epistemically on the fact that “science works” while allowing science to determine the definition of “works.” That is, science is given a place of privilege over superstition or supernaturalism because science yields desirable results. But if prayer improves a person’s wellbeing in a self-fulfilling manner, scientific thinking dismisses this as “placebo,” as though prayer cannot work because it does not work scientifically, it is only incidental to science. A causal link between prayer and wellness is not permissible unless it gives obeisance to science as the final arbiter of what “works.” Therapeutic culture must scramble to explain continued statistical verification — science extoling that outside of itself — that church attendance has multifarious mental-health benefits that psychotherapy cannot produce itself. That is, science has failed to generate the desirable results that religion offers, and therefore the whole structure of its self-validation depends on an insistence that the power of religion is actually science, even in the face of serious failures of science to produce religious levels of “working” for people.

All that remains clear, then, is that success is dictated by aims. What we regard as the goal depends on what we value. The robustness of faith, particularly Christian faith, partly lies, therefore, in its capacity to rearrange desires, to reorder values, to reorient aims. As C.S. Lewis depicted in The Great Divorce, the destination of its promises is really a trajectory. All the merits of scientific wonders and engineering marvels are in an important sense worth less than one personal testimony of the knowledge of God, because the former can never disprove the latter despite needing very badly to do so. As far as history goes, the question of “why” anything happens the way it does at all remains all but unanswerable, I think, but the answer to the big question should effervesce up from the little question. The great movements of nations, the grand dramas of history, are all agglomerated from the minutia of individual lives, and the principle of the individual is that of Job. There is some species of success that eludes and overshadows the material. It can be emblemized in Job’s restoration, but not captured or contained. That principle finds its capitulation in Christ, the only righteous man, who by all material metrics was wildly unsuccessful: poor, homeless, persecuted, tortured, unjustly condemned to die. Yet precisely through embracing such failure, He institutes a life that transcends it.

So, while debates will undoubtedly, and perhaps necessarily, continue to rage as to the historical reasons why this or that nation is or isn’t a certain way, it remains that the deepest fact is the deepest need of individual sheep to be brought into the fold of their Shepherd. Nations rise and fall, success in this world comes and goes, evil men win and good men lose. The fool and the wise man are buried in the same grave. But there is a righteousness that supersedes and overrules the grave. Any theory of history that forgoes this wisdom is unlikely to, well, succeed.

For of the wise man as of the fool there is no enduring remembrance, seeing that in the days to come all will have been long forgotten. How the wise man dies just like the fool! — Ecclesiastes 2:16 (RSV)

Then the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind… — Job 40:6 (RSV)