Socioeconomic Realities: Dreaming of Denmark

One of the most abused and misunderstood words in the English language is “socialism.”  At one extreme we have the Russian communists who referred to their governmental form as socialism leading to the impression that socialism and communism are essentially the same thing.  At the other extreme we have what have been termed “social democracies” which are often assumed to be a form of socialism when in fact they are capitalist systems regulated in an attempt to maximize social justice.  Anyone using the word socialist or socialism in the current environment in the United States is most likely referring to a form of social democracy but risks being burdened with a communist-like association.  Consider a current dictionary definition of the term socialism.

“a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole”

It is the phrase “or regulated” that makes all the difference.  This was an addition made to the classical definition in order to make it consistent with current usage.  Under this definition, all nations can be considered “socialist.”  

The question then becomes: of all the forms socialism might take, which is the most desirable?  Fareed Zakaria considers this issue in his recent book Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World.  He provides a brief but succinct political and economic history of the postwar years.  Economic growth was large and inequality was diminished up until around 1980 when the US entered the Reagan era and the UK entered the Thatcher period.  Eliminating much of the progressivity of tax structures, diminishing the economic and political power of wage earners, limiting the role of government programs and workers, starving social program of funds, and attacking the very notion of society as a collection of individuals with shared interests contributed to slower economic growth and greater inequality, both economic and political.  Matters were further muddled in the US as the Supreme Court decided that spending money was a form of speech and the infringing the right to free speech was the one thing that could never be tolerated.  This freed up the assets of wealthy individuals and corporations to be utilized in purchasing the allegiance of legislators.  The only laws or regulations considered bad are those that one did not get to write. 

Zakaria’s focus is provided by the Covid virus pandemic, thus the performance of the US in dealing with that must be discussed.

“At the start of the pandemic, the Norwegian University of Science and Technology made a Facebook post urging any of its students studying abroad to return home, adding, ‘especially if you are staying in a country with poorly developed health services and infrastructure and/or collective infrastructure, for example, the USA.’  The university later deleted the reference to America because it recognized it had made a gaffe—as the joke goes, it had accidently told the truth.”

Clearly, the US performance in dealing with the virus has been dismal.  Other advanced countries have viewed the results with a mixture of pity and laughter.  The US’s look-alikes are the European nations with whom it compares poorly in nearly all aspects of governmental performance. 

“Thomas Philippon, a French economist, arrived in America in the 1980s, amazed by how competitive the economy was, offering an array of choices in products—from airline tickets to banking to phone services—at low prices.  Today, however, it is Europe that has the cheaper goods and services and a greater variety of them.  Over the last twenty years, Europe broadened its offerings while the United States narrowed them.  Philippon’s research shows that some of the forces behind this shift are structural—in the digital economy, any given market tends to be dominated by one or two players, which then have the ability to raise prices.  But a crucial cause, his scholarship revealed, is industries’ political power.  Companies are able to write the rules in a way that shuts out competition and keeps their profits high.”

“Perhaps it is not surprising that, as Philippon shows, the European Union does a better job at enforcing open competition than America.  The ‘Eurocrats’ in Brussels might be arrogant and officious, but they do not sell waivers to regulations in return for campaign contributions.” 

Zakaria does suggest a candidate for the most desirable form of social democracy.

“In his ambitious two-volume work, Political Order and Political Decay, Francis Fukuyama writes that the fundamental question for every human society is simple: How do you get to Denmark?  ‘By this I mean less the actual country Denmark,’ he writes, ‘than an imagined society that is prosperous, democratic, secure, and well governed, and experiences low levels of corruption.’  Fukuyama is speaking more of a political than an economic system, but the two are deeply connected.  Indeed, one reinforces the other.  Denmark is successful politically because it is successful economically—and vice versa.”

Bernie Sanders has often referred to Denmark as possessing the type of society that provides a model for the US to emulate.  As a self-labeled socialist, the Danes were somewhat upset about the implication that their country was in any way socialist. 

“This led the prime minister of the country to publicly contradict Sanders.  ‘Denmark is far from a socialist, planned economy.  Denmark is a market economy,’ Lars Løkke Rasmussen explained in 2015.  The facts bear him out.  Denmark ranks higher than the United States in the free-market Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom (eighth for Denmark, seventeenth for the US).  In general, Denmark, like most Northern European countries, has an open, low-tariff, competitive economy.  In some ways it better incentivizes the accumulation of capital than America does, with lower taxes on capital gains and inheritance…”

The manner in which a society adjusts to market changes that create unemployment is an indication of the efficiency with which the economy can operate.  Ideally, one would prefer minimum disruption by allowing instant termination of unneeded workers followed by rapid retraining or placement in a new role with no significant loss of income in the transition period.  At one extreme some countries respond by making it difficult to terminate workers, while at the other extreme workers can be terminated immediately without cause and left to fend for themselves.  The US exists as the example of the latter extreme.  Denmark has strived for the ideal with an approach it refers to as “flexicurity.” 

“…the first half of the term was key: ensuring employers had the flexibility to hire and fire workers easily, without excessive regulation or litigation, in an economy that’s open to the world and competition—but all within a system that provides the security of a generous safety net.”

Denmark is an example that is representative of what are referred to as the Nordic countries: Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Iceland.  All are high-tax capitalist economies with broad social policies that encourage equality of opportunity and limit excessive economic inequality.  The high tax rates are applied to all citizens, not just the wealthy, but all people benefit because the tax revenue provides high quality services for all people, services which must be purchased by individuals from for-profit venders in the US.  Citizens from a country like Denmark will come out ahead economically from this tax regime and will further benefit by having access to the same services that are available to the wealthy.

“What distinguishes Northern European countries from the United States are their high levels of general taxation and redistribution.  In other words, the system is designed to make it easy to generate wealth through free markets and free trade.  Then the state collects much of that wealth and spends it to ensure that its citizens have equal and abundant opportunities.  Denmark’s taxes add up to 45% of its GDP, whereas in the United States the figure is 24%.  And Denmark doesn’t just tax the rich.  Like other European countries, Denmark collects a large part of its revenues from a national sales tax.  Its sales tax rate is 25%, in line with the European Union’s overall average of 20%.  In the United States, state sales taxes average just 7%.  Denmark’s consumption taxes on everything from beer to eggs to smartphones naturally fall more heavily on the poor, who spend a larger share of their income on purchases.  This regressive system of taxation is more than made up for, however, by the fact that the government expenditures and programs disproportionately help the poor and lower middle class.  One additional advantage of a commonly shared tax burden is greater solidarity: everyone supports the government programs because they feel that everyone has contributed to them.” 

“Imagine that you’re an average family.  You and your spouse have a child, and make the mean household income.  You could choose to live in either America or Denmark.  In high-tax Denmark, your disposal income after taxes would be about $15,000 lower than in the states.  But in return for your higher tax bill, you would get universal healthcare (one with better outcomes than in the US), free education right up through the best graduate schools, worker retraining programs on which the state spends seventeen times more as a percentage of GDP than what is spent in America, as well as high quality infrastructure, mass transit, and many beautiful public parks and other spaces.  Danes also enjoy some 550 more hours of leisure time a year than Americans do.  If the choice were put this way—you can take the extra $15,000 but have to work longer hours, take fewer vacation days, and fend for yourself on healthcare, education, retraining, and transport—I think most Americans would choose the Danish model.”

The services available in the Nordic model also include luxurious child rearing benefits such as generous childcare and family birth benefits that are shared between both parents, pensions, high gender equality and so on.  In particular, it should be noted that the Nordic concept of liberty is focused on providing its citizens with the opportunity to become somebody.  One can risk a low probability career in the arts, for example, without worrying that one will soon starve.  The US concept of liberty is more one of license, the ability to do something: own a gun, refuse to wear a mask during a pandemic, discriminate against a class of people, and so on.  One ventures into a career in the arts knowing they will have no support to fall back on—and perhaps never makes the attempt.

It is also worthy to note that the World Happiness Report has identified the happiest countries and as has been a regular occurrence, the Nordic countries dominate the rankings: Finland, first, Denmark, second, Iceland, fourth, Norway, fifth, and Sweden, seventh.  The US came in at eighteenth. 

Zakaria ends the discussion with an appropriate comment. 

“In staying open to the world and yet arming its people, the countries of Northern Europe, such as Denmark, have found a path that is dynamic, democratic, secure, and just.  They understood that markets were amazingly powerful, yet not sufficient; that they need supports and buffers and supplements.  We should all adapt their best practices to our own national realities.  There really is no alternative.”

  

Castes: The United States, and India

 What is currently the United States of America has been dealing with the issue of slavery and its consequences since the first African slaves appeared on its shores in the seventeenth century.  Many nations have been stained by a history of slave trading and slave labor, but in none was slavery so intrinsic to a nation’s functioning as in the United States.  We began our nation with claims that all men were created equal and immediately made that notion laughable by creating a Constitution forever damaged by accommodations made to protect that vile institution.  It would take nearly a century and a bloody Civil War to end legal slavery.  It would take an additional century to make informal forms of slavery illegal.  The result would be a significant population of descendants of African slaves that the nation must figure out a way to incorporate as fully equal citizens.  Such a goal is far from being reached.  In fact, our polity is currently split between two major parties, one of which at least preaches support for universal equality, while the other facilitates white supremacy.  As the two sides seem to be settling into the same political and rhetorical extremes that preceded the Civil War, one fears for how this will end. 

Isabel Wilkerson has provided a different perspective on our racial issues in her book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.  Most of our racial troubles are usually attributed to lingering historical racism.  In her view that is not the most productive way to consider the interactions of whites and blacks.

“What we face in our current day is not the classical racism of our forefathers’ era, but a mutation of the software that adjusts to the updated needs of the operating system.  In the half century since civil rights protests forced the United States into making state-sanctioned discrimination illegal, what Americans consider to be racism has shifted, and now the word is one of the most contentious and misunderstood in American culture.  For the dominant caste, the word is radioactive—resented, feared, denied, lobbed back toward anyone who dares to suggest it.  Resistance to the word often derails any discussion of the underlying behavior it is meant to describe, thus eroding it of meaning.” 

It is often claimed by Southern whites that they get along better with blacks than urban whites in the West and North.  There can be some truth in that statement, but it comes with a big caveat.  Throughout the Jim Crow era, and extending into the present, whites and blacks in the South coexisted peacefully as long as blacks limited their activities to the ones deemed acceptable by the whites.  Whites used their power to enforce social and economic restrictions on blacks in order to maintain them as a group subordinate to them.  This is a classical example of a caste system.  

“Caste is the granting or withholding of respect, status, honor, attention, privileges, resources, benefit of the doubt, and human kindness to someone on the basis of perceived rank or standing in the hierarchy.”

Casteism can be supported by people who otherwise would be deemed decent and respectable.

“Caste is insidious and therefore powerful because it is not hatred, it is not necessarily personal.  It is the worn grooves of comforting routines and unthinking expectations, patterns of a social order that have been in place for so long that it looks like the natural order of things.” 

“Any action or structure that seeks to limit, hold back, or put someone in a defined ranking, seeks to keep someone in their place by elevating or denigrating that person on the basis of their perceived category, can be seen as casteism.” 

In Wilkerson’s view, we would be better served by considering the whites who flock to Donald Trump as casteists rather than racists, although some do fall into that category. 

“Casteism is the investment in keeping the hierarch as it is in order to maintain your own ranking, advantage, privilege, or to elevate yourself above others or keep others beneath you.  For those in the marginalized castes, casteism can mean seeking to keep those on your disfavored rung from gaining on you, to curry the favor and remain in the good graces of the dominant caste, all of which serve to keep the structure intact.”

Wilkerson quotes sociologists who have studied the dynamics of caste systems to conclude that caste produces an inevitable form of narcissism among the dominant caste.

“’No matter how degraded their lives, white people are still allowed to believe that they possess the blood, the genes, the patrimony of superiority.  No matter what happens, they can never become “black”,’ wrote the sociologist Andrew Hacker.  ‘White Americans of all classes have found it comforting to preserve blacks as a subordinate caste: a presence that despite all its pain and problems still provides whites with some solace in a stressful world’.” 

The elite in the slave states imbedded in their society the notion that “the lowest white is superior to the most accomplished black.”  Slavery was difficult economically for lower class whites who continually competed with slaves for their wages.  Yet, when slavery was under military threat in the Civil War, poor whites were willing to die to protect this system that so disadvantaged them. 

“History has shown that nations and groups will conquer, colonize, enslave, and kill to maintain the illusion of their primacy.  Their investment in this illusion gives them as much a stake in the inferiority of those deemed beneath them as in their own presumed superiority.  ‘The survival of the group.’ Fromm wrote, ‘depends to some extent on the fact that its members consider its importance as great or greater than their own lives, and furthermore that they believe in the righteousness, or even superiority, of their group as compared to others.”

In the era of Trump, we wonder at the fanaticism of his followers.  Fromm provides some necessary perspective.

“The right kind of leader can inspire a symbiotic connection that supplants logic.  The susceptible group sees itself in the narcissistic leader, becomes one with the leader, sees his fortunes and his fate as their own.  ‘The greater the leader,’ Fromm wrote, ‘the greater the follower…The narcissism of the leader who is convinced of his greatness, and who has no doubts, is precisely what attracts the narcissism of those who submit to him’.”

The nature of castes and their social consequences have been discussed.  Wilkerson devotes much of her volume to discussing caste systems in other countries to convince the reader that such a situation is exactly what blacks in the United States face.  She discusses the discrimination imposed by German Nazis on Jews during the Hitler era.  While they learned from the Jim Crow laws of the American South and admired the use of violence to keep the black caste in line, using American eugenics research as a theoretical underpinning for their activities, the most relevant comparison is with the ancient division of India into castes.  We will focus on only a few comparisons with that system to make the point.

The most important and longest-lasting sources of discrimination in the world are those based on religious beliefs.  To truly justify the enslavement of African Americans and the rendering of a collection of Indians as “untouchables,” one must identify these people as being subhuman in some way.  Religions provide the readiest opportunities if that is one’s intention. 

“Before the age of human awareness, according to the ancient Hindu text of India, Manu, the all-knowing, was seated in contemplation, when the great men approached him and asked him, ‘Please, Lord, tell us precisely and in the proper order the Laws of all the social classes as well as of those born in between.”

Four major castes, or varnas, were described with their attributes and the functions to be performed.

“From lowest to highest, bottom to top: The Shudra…the servant, the bearer of burdens.  The Vaishya…the engine, the merchant, the trader.  The Kshatriya…the warrior, the protector, the ruler.  And above them all, the Brahmin…the philosopher, the sage, the priest, the one nearest to the gods.”

“Unmentioned among the original four varnas were those deemed so low that they were beneath even…the Shudra.  They were living out the afflicted karma of the past, they were not to be touched and some not even to be seen.  Their very shadow was a pollutant.  They were outside of the caste system and thus outcastes.  They were the Untouchables who would later come to be known as Dalits, the subordinate cast of India.”

“In some parts of India, the lowest-caste people were to remain a certain number of paces from any dominant-caste person while walking out in public—somewhere between twelve and ninety-six steps away, depending on the castes in question.  They had to wear bells to alert those deemed above them so as not to pollute them with their presence.”

“Touching or drawing near to anything that had been touched by an Untouchable was considered polluting to the upper castes and required rituals of purification for the high-caste person following this misfortune.  This they might do by bathing at once in flowing water or performing Pranayama breaths along with meditation to cleanse themselves of the pollutants.” 

One can easily view these traditions as an attempt to create a stable social structure in which those in power maintain their power over the castes below them.  In India, the identification of a caste member must be done carefully.  Lower caste members tend to be darker in skin color, but not reliably so.  They are also identified by their names and occupations.  Untouchables do the type of work that is only performed by an untouchable, and act like a subservient person thus reinforcing the system. 

Parallels with the treatment of blacks in our nation as a lower caste are apparent, but people have not taken the time to notice them.  That is why Wilkerson’s book is so important.  She tells the tale of Martin Luther King’s realization of his status only after being identified by an Indian Dalit as a fellow untouchable.  This realization would come in 1959 after he had already acquired international status as a person of repute.

“Then he began to think about the reality of the lives of the people he was fighting for—20 million people, consigned to the lowest rank in America for centuries, ‘still smothering in an airtight cage of poverty,’ quarantined in isolated ghettoes, exiled in their own country.” 

“And he said to himself, ‘Yes, I am an untouchable, and every negro in the United States of America is an untouchable’.”

“In that moment, he realized that the Land of the Free had imposed a caste system not unlike the caste system of India and that he had lived under the system all of his life.  It was what lay beneath the forces he was fighting in America.” 

Western nations would find justification for imposing their power on black people from the Old Testament.  In that document, after the great flood which Noah survived, the world would be repopulated by the offspring of Noah’s three sons.  One son, Ham, would have a son named Canaan.  Ham would displease his father who would issue a curse upon his son’s offspring.

“Cursed be Canaan!  The lowest of slaves will he be to his brothers”

Driven by a lot of wishful thinking, the children of Ham would be associated with black Africans, particularly after the slave trade became profitable.  The Old Testament, in Leviticus, was further useful in encouraging the enslavement of any person who was considered a non-believer. 

“As the riches from the slave trade from Africa to the New World poured forth to the Spaniards, to the Portuguese, to the Dutch, and lastly to the English, the biblical passage would be summoned to condemn the children of Ham and to justify the kidnap and enslavement of millions of human beings, and the violence against them.  From the time of the Middle Ages, some interpreters of the Old Testament described Ham as bearing black skin and translated Noah’s curse against him as a curse against the descendants of Ham, against all humans with dark skin, the people who the Europeans told themselves had been condemned to enslavement by God’s emissary, Noah himself.”

The importance of the Bible in supporting the eternal degradation of black-skinned people is clear from this quote from a defender of slavery.

“’The curse of Ham is now being executed upon his descendants,’ Thomas R. R. Cobb, a leading Confederate and defender of slavery, wrote, 240 years into the era of human bondage in America.  ‘The great Architect had framed them both physically and mentally to fill the sphere in which they were thrown.  His wisdom and mercy combined in constituting them thus suited to the degraded position they were destined to occupy’.”

One might believe any comparison with the fears of pollution by Indians from contact with an untouchable would be overdrawn in the American caste system.  Wilkerson provides examples that parallel the Indian fear of being polluted in an American setting.

“The town of Newton, Kansas, went to the state supreme court to keep black people out of the pool it built in 1935.  The city and its contractor argued that black people could never be permitted in the pool, not on alternate days, not at separate hours, not ever, because of the type of pool it was.  They told the court it was ‘a circulatory type of pool,’ in which ‘the water is only changed once during the swimming season.’  White people, they argued, would not go into water that had touched black skin.  ‘The only way white residents would swim in a pool after blacks,’ wrote the historian Jeff Wiltse, ‘was if the water was drained and the tank scrubbed.’  The operators couldn’t do all that every time a black person went into the pool, so they banned black people altogether.  The court sided with the city, and, for decades more, the town’s only public pool remained for the exclusive use of the dominant caste.”

“A public pool outside Pittsburg solved this problem by keeping black people out until after the season was over in September, which meant it was closed to black swimmers at the precise time that they or anyone else would have wanted to use it.  The manager said this was the only way the maintenance crew could get ‘sufficient time to properly cleanse and disinfect it after the negroes have used it’.”

Wilkerson has made the point that relationships between blacks and whites are better thought of as those between a dominant and a subordinate cast than as ones characterized by traditional racism.  Given that, what should do about it?  She is much weaker here.  It seems there are two primary options.  The first would encourage greater interaction between the castes and assume that what would follow would be a gradual breakdown of the caste boundaries.  Haven’t we been hoping for this since the 1960s with only little progress?  Perhaps recognition of the caste nature of the status quo would accelerate this process? 

The Indians, who have lived with their caste system much longer, concluded that some more aggressive affirmative action would be required if the lot of the Dalits was to improve.  When they gained their freedom to control their own fate, they included what has become referred to as “reservations” as part of their Constitution.  From Wikipedia: 

 “Reservation is a system of affirmative action in India that provides historically disadvantaged groups representation in education, employment, and politics.”

This is essentially a set of quotas to enforce wider participation of these groups in various aspects of society.  Such an approach has not been universally popular in India and has thus far been rejected in the United States, being viewed as counterproductive in trading one form of unfairness for another. 

One could argue that both approaches have provided some benefits over time, but not that either approach is the most appropriate.  Perhaps the solution is that both approaches should be applied in some coherent form.  Hopefully, Wilkerson’s efforts will produce some original and insightful thinking.

 

Zombies: Can They Be Real?

Charles King has provided an interesting tale of the development of anthropology as a scientific field in his book Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century.  His story focuses on the career of Franz Boas as he formulated his personal beliefs and propagated them through his and his students’ activities.  King focuses on four of the most famous and most interesting: Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ella Cara Deloria.  It was unusual at that time to encounter one woman performing cutting edge research, let alone accumulating four.  And Hurston was an African-American woman, while Deloria was of Native-American descent.  

Zora Hurston never became a full-time student, but she did participate in research suggested by Boas and also pursued her own initiatives.  Given her heritage, she was mostly involved in work among the blacks of the American South, and Caribbean peoples.  Her most interesting accomplishment was to be the first person to photograph what she believed to be a real, live, undead zombie.  Her efforts would produce the book “Mules and Men,” but she would ultimately become best known as a writer with her most famous work being the novel “Their Eyes Were Watching God.” 

Hurston would reach Haiti in the 1930s already familiar with the traditions of voodoo from a book by William Seabrook, The Magic Island (1928).  Seabrook had described the prevalent belief that zombies existed: “a soulless human corpse, still dead but taken from the grave and endowed by sorcery with a mechanical semblance of life.”  Hurston would discover that belief in  zombies was a significant part of Haitian life.

“Everyone Hurston knew had met one, or new someone who had met one.  But all that was talk.  Nothing could quite prepare her for coming face-to-face with such a creature herself.”

Hurston would encounter a woman being kept in a hospital who was known as Felicia Felix-Mentor.  She had been found a year earlier walking on a country road naked.  She told someone she had once owned a property there that she inherited from her father.  The owner of the property showed up and identified the woman as his sister.  Her former husband would also recognize her as being his former wife.  The medical records indicated that she had died and was buried in 1907, twenty-nine years ago. 

“Doctors told Hurston that Felix-Mentor was likely the victim of poisoning.  A practitioner of dark magic, a bocor, might have given her a drug that simulated death, concocted from a secret formula passed down from priest to priest.  The bocor could then summon her back to life, brain-damaged and only a shell of the person she had been before…” 

This case could be representative of a common theme about zombie creation.  A person is rendered a zombie in order to eliminate someone troublesome or convert that person into a docile servant. 

“In her absence, everyone, including Felix-Mentor herself, had become someone else.  The brother was a prosperous farmer, with control over the old family property that might otherwise have been shared with her.  The husband was a minor official in the postoccupation government, with a new family of his own.  There was little to be done except to seal her up again, this time behind the walls of the hospital where Hurston found her.”

Hurston spent some time searching for this secret potion, now believing it to exist, but eventually decided that that could prove to be rather risky.

So, did Hurston encounter an actual zombie, someone returned from the grave or not?  Wikipedia is usually a good source to turn to.  The author of the zombie article found there dismisses zombies as being a myth.

“…a fictional undead corporeal revenant created through the reanimation of a corpse.”

As to Felix-Mentor, she is claimed to be bogus because she was reputed to have had a broken leg at some point and x-rays could not detect such a break having occurred.  Someone more expert would have to rule on whether or not that is a definitive finding.  But others would look and discover other instances of the undead. 

The journalist, David Leafe, tells the tale of Clairvius Narcisse. 

“Doctors in Haiti had been baffled anew by the case of Clairvius Narcisse, a man in his 40s who in 1962 suffered a mysterious fever and within a fortnight was pronounced dead by two doctors, and buried.” 

“Eighteen years later, his sister was traumatised when a heavy-footed and vacant-eyed man approached her at the market, claimed to be her brother and told her he had been zombified by a witch doctor and put to work on a sugar plantation in the intervening years.”

“At the time of his ‘death’ he had been conscious but rendered immobile, he said, listening to his sister weeping as he was pronounced dead, powerless to protest as his coffin was lowered into the ground.”

“When two Haitian psychiatrists quizzed him on aspects of the family’s past that only a relative would know, he correctly answered all their questions — and many villagers insisted he was the Clairvius Narcisse they had known.”

The Narcisse case generated scientific investigations.  As is normal in much of science, those who wanted to believe could find explanations, those who wanted to not believe could find objections to any explanation.  It seems there is at least one chemical that can produce the near-death state that can lead to burial, and candidates are available to explain the automaton-like behavior after being disinterred.

“…puffer fish whose reproductive organs contain a nerve poison called tetrodotoxin, which lowers a victim’s metabolic rate almost, but not quite, to the point of death.”

“In Japan, where such fish are a delicacy, there had been several famous cases of poisoning, including that of one man who apparently ‘died’ after eating puffer fish, but regained consciousness seven days later in a morgue.”

“Another victim had an even narrower escape, coming round soon after he was nailed into a coffin.” 

Dismissing a phenomenon just because you cannot understand it comes disturbingly close to barbarism, so let the studies and debates go on.  Some useful scientific enlightenment might be revealed.  Perhaps more sophisticated movie and television fare will emerge.  New types of lifeforms, witches, werewolves, vampires, zombies, allow endless variations on human themes, many of them quite entertaining.  

Zora Hurston was an educated and intelligent woman.  What she observed led her to believe in the existence of zombies and that the Haitian culture, a mixture of indigenous influences and African influences, was capable of developing the means of producing zombie-like behavior in humans.  A people “primitive” by our standards should not be assumed to be stupid.  What Boas and his students sought to teach humanity was that all humans are essentially the same even if they did not look alike and they did not follow the same customs.  They fought long and hard against the notion that the more technologically advanced nations were biologically superior to other peoples just because they could physically dominate them. 

If Boas and his team were successful, it would be temporary.  We seem to need to be taught the same lessons over and over.  Those in power are so much happier when they can ignore what science tells us.