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Monday, July 03, 2006Where did we get the ideal of the Noble Savage?On Instapundit and in the Asia Times, and elsewhere, there's a look at prehistoric violence followed by the question, so where does the idea of the peaceful hunter-gatherer come from? The answer is the Enlightenment, but not in the way you would think. 18th century literature is filled with Noble Savages of all varieties. As a once-upon-a-time French lit guy, the most prominent examples for me are: Voltaire's Ingénu, the feminist revived Lettres d'une Péruvienne and Rousseau's cry, "Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains." Reading the 18th century literature, one finds comparatively little interest in what Native Americans, Persians, Mohammedans and Chinamen (though actually the romanticization - as my term implies - didn't really hit till the 19th c.) were like. Their purpose was not to exist for themselves, but merely as a projection of their authors' notions of what a reasonable and reasoned outsider would fault in contemporary society. The most successful update, to show what the genre's really about, is Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, a story that would show us the error of our ways by the thinking of a Martian! When Voltaire created a curious savage from Canada for the Ingénu, he knew better. Which explains why he could also use Micromégas to show what a learned man from outer space (foreshadowing Stranger...) would find amiss in French society. Swift did the opposite with the Whoyouyums and others in Gulliver's Travels, telling quaint stories about quaint people to criticize social practices in his own society. What matters, and where the whole Noble Savage bit went wrong, is that the 18th century cynics and skeptics knew they were telling stories to raise hell. (Though one wonders about Rousseau.) With the 19th century Romantics, things are fuzzed. Where the return to nature, simple solitary existence and the like are hailed, one finds a slightly different form of projection: I don't think the typical Romantic poet idealized anyone other than himself, so that any outsider held up as noble, good and pure was just a figure to make the self-portrait all the sweeter. But then, somewhere, somehow, people began believing the nonsense. If you read Darwin's diaries, you discover that the people of Tierra del Fuego lived off the land as best they could, found shelter where nature provided and wore little clothing. The people of Tahiti lived off the land as best they could, found shelter where nature provided and wore little clothing. The first were primitive monsters. The second were the sweetest people you could meet. How come? Because the Tahitians had made reasonable accomodations with their environment and the Fuegians had not. But for the typical environmentalist, the picture that sticks is of the Tahitians. From the inception of the ideal of the Noble Savage, there has been a game of projection going on where sticking it to those present takes precedence over finding the actual truth of those ostensibly idealized. The difference, in blogger parlance, is that we can fact-check the idealized now, thus discovering that whatever the validity of the critique, the postulated Other does not present a proven solution that we've lost, but a past way that has fallen by the wayside in the face of the forces of history. The Native Americans hunted countless species to extinction. Their later parsimoniousness owed much to how little they had. Yet some celebrate their later approach the same way we admire Depression-era frugality, failing to take into account that it was driven by necessity, not virtue. Today we celebrate the Noble Savage, the primitive Hunter-Gatherer and the present day simple tribesman not from admiration for the Other, but from rejection of ourselves. It started, in the 18th century, as a gambit to get past the censors. Unfortunately, some people have started to believe their own nonsense. The reality of the primitive hunter-gatherer in a peaceful society makes for a pretty picture faintly believeable in Edenic Tahiti but harder to swallow when you're talking about surviving harsh North American and European winters when resources are scare. And given the mysteries of Easter Island, even the land of plenty where Noble Savages live in peace seems to have a spotted record. But when Bush Derangement Syndrome causes you to believe that peace could be made with Osama Bin Laden, telling yourself that maybe on prehistoric earth a peace-loving people amiably agreed to share the last vegetarian yak bone isn't so hard. One other note: While the ideal of the Noble Savage is, to my understanding, a thing especially of the 18th century, it's really just part of the broader pattern of false nostalgia. Peaceful hunter-gatherers on prehistoric earth are for the left what idyllic 1950s families are for Pat Buchanan. And that goes back at least as far as Homer's rant that while once upon a time there were great men, later eras had to suffer with hopelessly mortal fops - like the vain and petulant Achilles. It's actually kind of funny when you think about it. After all these years, the environmentalists and the creationists are coming jointly to believe in a time when a small number of people lived in a land free of want where God, or Nature's God, provided all. 
posted by gbarto at 9:50 AM |
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