The state of nature, in moral and political philosophy, religion, social contract theories and international law, is the hypothetical life of people before societies came into existence. Philosophers of the state of nature theory deduce that there must have been a time before organized societies existed, and this presumption thus raises questions such as: "What was life like before civil society?";
"How did government first emerge from such a starting position?," and;
"What are the hypothetical reasons for entering a state of society by
establishing a nation-state?".
In some versions of social contract theory, there are no rights
in the state of nature, only freedoms, and it is the contract that
creates rights and obligations. In other versions the opposite occurs:
the contract imposes restrictions upon individuals that curtail their natural rights.
The early Warring States philosopher Mozi was the first thinker in history to develop the idea of the state of nature.
He developed the idea to defend the need for a single overall ruler.
According to Mozi, in the state of nature each person has their own
moral rules (yi,
義). As a result, people were unable to reach agreements and resources
were wasted. Since Mozi promoted ways of strengthening and unifying the
state (li, 利), such natural dis-organization was rejected:
"In
the beginning of human life, when there was yet no law and government,
the custom was "everybody according to his rule (yi, 義)." Accordingly
each man had his own rule, two men had two different rules and ten men
had eleven different rules -- the more people the more different
notions. And everybody approved his own moral views and disapproved the
views of others, and so arose mutual disapproval among men. As a result,
father and son and elder and younger brothers became enemies and were
estranged from each other, since they were unable to reach any
agreement. Everybody worked for the disadvantage of the others with
water, fire, and poison. Surplus energy was not spent for mutual aid;
surplus goods were allowed to rot without sharing; excellent teachings (dao, 道) were kept secret and not revealed." Chapter 3 - 1
His proposal was to unify rules according to a single moral system or standard
(fa, 法) that can be used by anyone: calculating benefit of each act. In
that way, the ruler of the state and his subjects will have the same
moral system; cooperation and joint efforts will be the rule. Later his
proposal was strongly rejected by confucianism (especially Mencius) because of the preference of benefit over morals.
Thomas Hobbes
The pure state of nature, or "the natural condition of mankind", was described by the 17th century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan and his earlier work De Cive.
Hobbes argued that natural inequalities between humans are not so great
as to give anyone clear superiority; and thus all must live in constant
fear of loss or violence; so that "during the time men live without a
common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which
is called war; and such a war as is of every man against every man". In
this state, every person has a natural right to do anything one thinks necessary for preserving one's own life, and life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" (Leviathan,
Chapters XIII–XIV). Hobbes described this natural condition with the
Latin phrase (bellum omnium contra omnes) meaning (war of all against
all), in De Cive.
Within the state of nature, there is neither personal property
nor injustice since there is no law, except for certain natural precepts
discovered by reason ("laws of nature"): the first of which is "that every man ought to endeavour peace, as far as he has hope of obtaining it" (Leviathan,
Ch. XIV); and the second is "that a man be willing, when others are so
too, as far forth as for peace and defence of himself he shall think it
necessary, to lay down this right to all things; and be contented with
so much liberty against other men as he would allow other men against
himself" (loc. cit.). From here, Hobbes develops the way out of the state of nature into political society and government by mutual contracts.
According to Hobbes, the state of nature exists at all times
among independent countries, over whom there is no law except for those
same precepts or laws of nature (Leviathan, Chapters XIII, XXX
end). His view of the state of nature helped to serve as a basis for
theories of international law and relations and even some theories about domestic relations.
John Locke
John Locke considers the state of nature in his Second Treatise on Civil Government written around the time of the Exclusion Crisis
in England during the 1680s. For Locke, in the state of nature all men
are free "to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and
persons, as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of nature."
(2nd Tr., §4). "The state of Nature has a law of Nature to govern it",
and that law is reason. Locke believes that reason teaches that "no one
ought to harm another in his life, liberty, and or property" (2nd Tr.,
§6) ; and that transgressions of this may be punished. Locke describes
the state of nature and civil society to be opposites of each other, and
the need for civil society comes in part from the perpetual existence
of the state of nature.
This view of the state of nature is partly deduced from Christian
belief (unlike Hobbes, whose philosophy is not dependent upon any prior
theology).
Although it may be natural to assume that Locke was responding to
Hobbes, Locke never refers to Hobbes by name, and may instead have been
responding to other writers of the day, like Robert Filmer. In fact, Locke's First Treatise is entirely a response to Filmer's Patriarcha, and takes a step by step method to refuting Filmer's theory set out in Patriarcha. The conservative party at the time had rallied behind Filmer's Patriarcha, whereas the Whigs, scared of another persecution of Protestants, rallied behind the theory set out by Locke in his Two Treatises of Government
as it gave a clear theory as to why the people would be justified in
overthrowing a monarchy which abuses the trust they had placed in it.
Montesquieu
Montesquieu makes use of the concept of the state of nature in his The Spirit of the Laws,
first printed in 1748. Montesquieu states the thought process behind
early human beings before the formation of society. He says that human
beings would have the faculty of knowing and would first think to
preserve their life in the state. Human beings would also at first feel
themselves to be impotent and weak. As a result, humans would not be
likely to attack each other in this state. Next, humans would seek
nourishment and out of fear, and impulse would eventually unite to
create society. Once society was created, a state of war would ensue
amongst societies which would have been all created the same way. The
purpose of war is the preservation of the society and the self. The
formation of law within society is the reflection and application of
reason for Montesquieu.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Hobbes' view was challenged in the eighteenth century by Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
who claimed that Hobbes was taking socialized people and simply
imagining them living outside of the society in which they were raised.
He affirmed instead that people were neither good nor bad, but were born
as a blank slate, and later society and the environment influence which
way we lean. In Rousseau's state of nature, people did not know each
other enough to come into serious conflict and they did have normal
values. The modern society, and the ownership it entails, is blamed for
the disruption of the state of nature which Rousseau sees as true
freedom.
David Hume
David Hume offers in A Treatise of Human Nature
(1739) that human beings are naturally social: "'Tis utterly impossible
for men to remain any considerable time in that savage condition, which
precedes society; but that his very first state and situation may
justly be esteem'd social. This, however, hinders not, but that
philosophers may, if they please, extend their reasoning to the suppos'd
state of nature; provided they allow it to be a mere philosophical
fiction, which never had, and never could have any reality."
Hume's ideas about human nature expressed in the Treatise
suggest that he would be happy with neither Hobbes' nor his contemporary
Rousseau's thought-experiments. He explicitly derides as incredible the
hypothetical humanity described in Hobbes' Leviathan.
Additionally, he argues in "Of the Origin of Justice and Property"
that if mankind were universally benevolent, we would not hold Justice
to be a virtue: "’tis only from the selfishness and confin’d generosity
of men, along with the scanty provision nature has made for his wants,
that justice derives its origin."
John Calhoun
John C. Calhoun, in his Disquisition on Government,
(1850) wrote that a state of nature is merely hypothetical and argues
that the concept is self-contradictory and that political states
naturally always existed. "It is, indeed, difficult to explain how an
opinion so destitute of all sound reasoning, ever could have been so
extensively entertained, ... I refer to the assertion, that all men are
equal in the state of nature; meaning, by a state of nature, a state of
individuality, supposed to have existed prior to the social and
political state; and in which men lived apart and independent of each
other... But such a state is purely hypothetical. It never did, nor can
exist; as it is inconsistent with the preservation and perpetuation of
the race. It is, therefore, a great misnomer to call it the state of
nature. Instead of being the natural state of man, it is, of all
conceivable states, the most opposed to his nature—most repugnant to his
feelings, and most incompatible with his wants. His natural state is,
the social and political—the one for which his Creator made him, and the
only one in which he can preserve and perfect his race. As, then, there
never was such a state as the, so called, state of nature, and never
can be, it follows, that men, instead of being born in it, are born in
the social and political state; and of course, instead of being born
free and equal, are born subject, not only to parental authority, but to
the laws and institutions of the country where born, and under whose
protection they draw their first breath."
John Rawls
John Rawls used what amounted to an artificial state of nature. To develop his theory of justice, Rawls places everyone in the original position. The original position is a hypothetical state of nature used as a thought experiment. People in the original position have no society and are under a veil of ignorance
that prevents them from knowing how they may benefit from society. They
lack foreknowledge of their intelligence, wealth, or abilities. Rawls
reasons that people in the original position would want a society where
they had their basic liberties protected and where they had some
economic guarantees as well. If society were to be constructed from
scratch through a social agreement between individuals, these principles
would be the expected basis of such an agreement. Thus, these
principles should form the basis of real, modern societies since
everyone should consent to them if society were organized from scratch
in fair agreements.
Robert Nozick
Rawls' Harvard colleague Robert Nozick countered the liberal A Theory of Justice with the libertarian Anarchy, State, and Utopia, also grounded in the state of nature tradition.
Nozick argued that a minimalist state of property rights and basic law
enforcement would develop out of a state of nature without violating
anyone's rights or using force. Mutual agreements among individuals
rather than social contract would lead to this minimal state.
Between nations
In
Hobbes' view, once a civil government is instituted, the state of
nature has disappeared between individuals because of the civil power
which exists to enforce contracts and the laws of nature generally.
Between nations, however, no such power exists and therefore nations
have the same rights to preserve themselves—including making war—as
individuals possessed. Such a conclusion led some writers to the idea of
an association of nations or worldwide civil society. Among them there were Immanuel Kant with his work on perpetual peace. This aim was taken up by former US President George H W Bush
in the drive to create a "New World Order" which he describes as "a
world where the rule of law, not the law of the jungle, governs the
conduct of nations".
Rawls also examines the state of nature between nations. In his work the Law of Peoples,
Rawls applies a modified version of his original position thought
experiment to international relationships. Rawls says that peoples, not
states, form the basic unit that should be examined. States should be
encouraged to follow the principles from Rawls' earlier A Theory of Justice. Democracy
seems like it would be the most logical means of accomplishing these
goals, but benign non-democracies should be seen as acceptable at the
international stage. Rawls develops eight principles for how a people
should act on an international stage.
A noble savage is a literary stock character who embodies the concept of the indigene, outsider, wild human, an "other" who has not been "corrupted" by civilization,
and therefore symbolizes humanity's innate goodness. Besides appearing
in many works of fiction and philosophy, the stereotype was also heavily
employed in early anthropological works.
In English, the phrase first appeared in the 17th century in John Dryden's heroic play The Conquest of Granada (1672), wherein it was used in reference to newly created man. "Savage" at that time could mean "wild beast" as well as "wild man". The phrase later became identified with the idealized picture of "nature's gentleman", which was an aspect of 18th-century sentimentalism. The noble savage achieved prominence as an oxymoronic rhetorical device after 1851, when used sarcastically as the title for a satirical essay by English novelist Charles Dickens, who some believe may have wished to disassociate himself from what he viewed as the "feminine" sentimentality of 18th and early 19th-century romantic primitivism.
The idea that humans are essentially good is often attributed to the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, a Whig supporter of constitutional monarchy. In his Inquiry Concerning Virtue (1699), Shaftesbury had postulated that the moral sense in humans is natural and innate and based on feelings, rather than resulting from the indoctrination of a particular religion. Shaftesbury was reacting to Thomas Hobbes's justification of an absolutist central state in his Leviathan, "Chapter XIII", in which Hobbes famously holds that the state of nature is a "war of all against all" in which men's lives are "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short". Hobbes further calls the American Indians
an example of a contemporary people living in such a state. Although
writers since antiquity had described people living in conditions
outside contemporary definitions of "civilization", Hobbes is credited
with inventing the term "State of Nature". Ross Harrison writes that "Hobbes seems to have invented this useful term."
Contrary to what is sometimes believed, Jean-Jacques Rousseau never used the phrase noble savage (French bon sauvage). However, the archetypical character that would later be termed noble savage appeared in French literature at least as early as Jacques Cartier (coloniser of Québec, speaking of the Iroquois) and Michel de Montaigne (philosopher, speaking of the Tupinamba) in the 16th century.
Tacitus' De origine et situ Germanorum (Germania), written c. 98 AD, has been described as a predecessor of the modern noble savage concept, which started in the 17th and 18th centuries in western Europeantravel literature.
Other roots are the Ten Lost Tribes and Prester John, which are objects of the colonial search for them, as primitive religious relatives, among indigenous peoples. The Mongol Khan is another example for being identified as a noble savage.
Following the discovery of America,
the phrase "savage" for indigenous peoples was used disparagingly to
justify colonialism. The concept of the savage gave Europeans the
supposed right to establish colonies without considering the possibility
of preexisting, functional societies.
During the late 16th and 17th centuries, the figure of the
"savage" — and later, increasingly, the "good savage" — was held up as a
reproach to European civilization, then in the throes of the French Wars of Religion and Thirty Years' War. In his famous essay "Of Cannibals" (1580), Michel de Montaigne — himself a Catholic — reported that the Tupinambá people
of Brazil ceremoniously eat the bodies of their dead enemies as a
matter of honour. However, he reminded his readers that Europeans behave
even more barbarously when they burn each other alive for disagreeing
about religion (he implies): "One calls 'barbarism' whatever he is not
accustomed to." Terence Cave comments:
The cannibal practices are admitted
[by Montaigne] but presented as part of a complex and balanced set of
customs and beliefs which "make sense" in their own right. They are
attached to a powerfully positive morality of valor and pride, one that
would have been likely to appeal to early modern codes of honor, and
they are contrasted with modes of behavior in the France of the wars of
religion which appear as distinctly less attractive, such as torture and
barbarous methods of execution (...)
In "Of Cannibals", Montaigne uses cultural (but not moral) relativism
for the purpose of satire. His cannibals were neither noble nor
exceptionally good, but neither were they suggested to be morally
inferior to contemporary 16th-century Europeans. In this classicalhumanist portrayal, customs
may differ but human beings in general are prone to cruelty in various
forms, a quality detested by Montaigne. David El Kenz explains:
In his Essais ... Montaigne
discussed the first three wars of religion (1562–63; 1567–68; 1568–70)
quite specifically; he had personally participated in them, on the side
of the royal army, in southwestern France. The St. Bartholomew's Day massacre
led him to retire to his lands in the Périgord region, and remain
silent on all public affairs until the 1580s. Thus, it seems that he was
traumatized by the massacre. To him, cruelty was a criterion that
differentiated the Wars of Religion from previous conflicts, which he
idealized. Montaigne considered that three factors accounted for the
shift from regular war to the carnage of civil war: popular
intervention, religious demagogy and the never-ending aspect of the
conflict..... He chose to depict cruelty through the image of hunting,
which fitted with the tradition of condemning hunting for its
association with blood and death, but it was still quite surprising, to
the extent that this practice was part of the aristocratic way of life.
Montaigne reviled hunting by describing it as an urban massacre scene.
In addition, the man-animal relationship allowed him to define virtue,
which he presented as the opposite of cruelty. … [as] a sort of natural
benevolence based on ... personal feelings. … Montaigne associated the
propensity to cruelty toward animals, with that exercised toward men.
After all, following the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre, the invented
image of Charles IX shooting Huguenots from the Louvre palace window did
combine the established reputation of the king as a hunter, with a
stigmatization of hunting, a cruel and perverted custom, did it not?
— David El Kenz, Massacres During the Wars of Religion
The treatment of indigenous peoples by Spanish Conquistadors also produced a great deal of bad conscience and recriminations. The Spanish priest Bartolomé de las Casas,
who witnessed it, may have been the first to idealize the simple life
of the indigenous Americans. He and other observers praised their simple
manners and reported that they were incapable of lying, especially in
the course of the Valladolid debate.
European angst over colonialism inspired fictional treatments such as Aphra Behn's novel Oroonoko, or the Royal Slave (1688), about a slave revolt in Surinam in the West Indies. Behn's story was not primarily a protest against slavery; rather, it was written for money, and it met readers' expectations by following the conventions of the European romance novella.
The leader of the revolt, Oroonoko, is truly noble in that he is a
hereditary African prince, and he laments his lost African homeland in
the traditional terms of a classical Golden Age. He is not a savage but dresses and behaves like a European aristocrat. Behn's story was adapted for the stage by Irish playwright Thomas Southerne,
who stressed its sentimental aspects, and as time went on, it came to
be seen as addressing the issues of slavery and colonialism, remaining
very popular throughout the 18th century.
I am as free as nature first made man,
Ere the base laws of servitude began,
When wild in woods the noble savage ran.
The hero who speaks these words in Dryden's play is here denying the
right of a prince to put him to death, on the grounds that he is not
that prince's subject. These lines were quoted by Scott as the heading
to Chapter 22 of his "A Legend of Montrose" (1819). "Savage" is better
taken here in the sense of "wild beast", so that the phrase "noble
savage" is to be read as a witty conceit meaning simply the beast that
is above the other beasts, or man.
Ethnomusicologist
Ter Ellingson believes that Dryden had picked up the expression "noble
savage" from a 1609 travelogue about Canada by the French explorer Marc Lescarbot,
in which there was a chapter with the ironic heading: "The Savages are
Truly Noble", meaning simply that they enjoyed the right to hunt game, a
privilege in France granted only to hereditary aristocrats. It is not
known if Lescarbot was aware of Montaigne's stigmatization of the
aristocratic pastime of hunting, though some authors believe he was
familiar with Montaigne. Lescarbot's familiarity with Montaigne, is
discussed by Ter Ellingson in The Myth of the Noble Savage.
In Dryden's day the word "savage" did not necessarily have the
connotations of cruelty now associated with it. Instead, as an
adjective, it could as easily mean "wild", as in a wild flower, for
example. Thus he wrote in 1697, 'the savage cherry grows. ...';.
One scholar, Audrey Smedley, believes that: "English conceptions of 'the savage' were grounded in expansionist conflicts with Irish
pastoralists and more broadly, in isolation from, and denigration of
neighboring European peoples." and Ellingson agrees that "The
ethnographic literature lends considerable support for such arguments"
In France the stock figure
that in English is called the "noble savage" has always been simply "le
bon sauvage", "the good wild man", a term without any of the
paradoxical frisson of the English one. Montaigne is generally credited for being at the origin of this myth in his Essays
(1580), especially "Of Coaches" and "Of Cannibals". This character, an
idealized portrayal of "Nature's Gentleman", was an aspect of
18th-century sentimentalism, along with other stock characters such as, the Virtuous Milkmaid, the Servant-More-Clever-than-the-Master (such as Sancho Panza and Figaro,
among countless others), and the general theme of virtue in the lowly
born. The use of stock characters (especially in theater) to express
moral truths derives from classical antiquity and goes back to Theophrastus's Characters, a work that enjoyed a great vogue in the 17th and 18th centuries and was translated by Jean de La Bruyère. The practice largely died out with advent of 19th-century realism
but lasted much longer in genre literature, such as adventure stories,
Westerns, and, arguably, science fiction. Nature's Gentleman, whether
European-born or exotic, takes his place in this cast of characters,
along with the Wise Egyptian, Persian, and Chinaman. "But now, alongside
the Good Savage, the Wise Egyptian claims his place." Some of these
types are discussed by Paul Hazard in The European Mind.
He had always existed, from the time of the Epic of Gilgamesh, where he appears as Enkidu, the wild-but-good man who lives with animals. Another instance is the untutored-but-noble medieval knight, Parsifal. The Biblical shepherd boy David
falls into this category. The association of virtue with withdrawal
from society—and specifically from cities—was a familiar theme in
religious literature.
Hayy ibn Yaqdhan, an Islamic philosophical tale (or thought experiment) by Ibn Tufail from 12th-century Andalusia, straddles the divide between the religious and the secular. The tale is of interest because it was known to the New England Puritan divine, Cotton Mather. Translated into English (from Latin) in 1686 and 1708, it tells the story of Hayy, a wild child,
raised by a gazelle, without human contact, on a deserted island in the
Indian Ocean. Purely through the use of his reason, Hayy goes through
all the gradations of knowledge before emerging into human society,
where he revealed to be a believer of natural religion, which Cotton Mather, as a Christian Divine, identified with Primitive Christianity. The figure of Hayy is both a Natural man and a Wise Persian, but not a Noble Savage.
Lo, the poor Indian! whose untutor'd mind
Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind;
His soul proud Science never taught to stray
Far as the solar walk or milky way;
Yet simple Nature to his hope has giv'n,
Behind the cloud-topp'd hill, a humbler heav'n;
Some safer world in depth of woods embrac'd,
Some happier island in the wat'ry waste,
Where slaves once more their native land behold,
No fiends torment, no Christians thirst for gold!
To be, contents his natural desire;
He asks no angel's wing, no seraph's fire:
But thinks, admitted to that equal sky,
His faithful dog shall bear him company.
To Pope, writing in 1734, the Indian was a purely abstract figure—
"poor" either meant ironically, or applied because he was uneducated and
a heathen, but also happy because he was living close to Nature. This
view reflects the typical Age of Reason belief that men are everywhere and in all times the same as well as a Deistic
conception of natural religion (although Pope, like Dryden, was
Catholic). Pope's phrase, "Lo the Poor Indian", became almost as famous
as Dryden's "noble savage" and, in the 19th century, when more people
began to have first hand knowledge of and conflict with the Indians,
would be used derisively for similar sarcastic effect.
Attributes of romantic primitivism
On
our arrival upon this coast we found there a savage race who ... lived
by hunting and by the fruits which the trees spontaneously produced.
These people ... were greatly surprised and alarmed by the sight of our
ships and arms and retired to the mountains. But since our soldiers were
curious to see the country and hunt deer, they were met by some of
these savage fugitives. The leaders of the savages accosted them thus:
"We abandoned for you, the pleasant sea-coast, so that we have nothing
left but these almost inaccessible mountains: at least it is just that
you leave us in peace and liberty. Go, and never forget that you owe
your lives to our feeling of humanity. Never forget that it was from a
people whom you call rude and savage that you receive this lesson in
gentleness and generosity. ... We abhor that brutality which, under the
gaudy names of ambition and glory, ... sheds the blood of men who are
all brothers. ... We value health, frugality, liberty, and vigor of
body and mind: the love of virtue, the fear of the gods, a natural
goodness toward our neighbors, attachment to our friends, fidelity to
all the world, moderation in prosperity, fortitude in adversity, courage
always bold to speak the truth, and abhorrence of flattery. ... If the
offended gods so far blind you as to make you reject peace, you will
find, when it is too late, that the people who are moderate and lovers
of peace are the most formidable in war.
In the 1st century AD, sterling qualities such as those enumerated
above by Fénelon (excepting perhaps belief in the brotherhood of man)
had been attributed by Tacitus in his Germania to the German barbarians, in pointed contrast to the softened, Romanized Gauls.
By inference Tacitus was criticizing his own Roman culture for getting
away from its roots—which was the perennial function of such
comparisons. Tacitus's Germans did not inhabit a "Golden Age"
of ease but were tough and inured to hardship, qualities which he saw
as preferable to the decadent softness of civilized life. In antiquity
this form of "hard primitivism", whether admired or deplored (both
attitudes were common), co-existed in rhetorical opposition to the "soft
primitivism" of visions of a lost Golden Age of ease and plenty.
There
had been, from the beginning of classical speculation, two contrasting
opinions about the natural state of man, each of them, of course, a
"Gegen-Konstruktion" to the conditions under which it was formed. One
view, termed "soft" primitivism in an illuminating book by Lovejoy and
Boas, conceives of primitive life as a golden age of plenty, innocence,
and happiness—in other words, as civilized life purged of its vices. The
other, "hard" form of primitivism conceives of primitive life as an
almost subhuman existence full of terrible hardships and devoid of all
comforts—in other words, as civilized life stripped of its virtues.
In the 18th century the debates about primitivism centered around the
examples of the people of Scotland as often as the American Indians. The
rude ways of the Highlanders were often scorned, but their toughness
also called forth a degree of admiration among "hard" primitivists, just
as that of the Spartans and the Germans had done in antiquity. One Scottish writer described his Highland countrymen this way:
They
greatly excel the Lowlanders in all the exercises that require agility;
they are incredibly abstemious, and patient of hunger and fatigue; so
steeled against the weather, that in traveling, even when the ground is
covered with snow, they never look for a house, or any other shelter but
their plaid, in which they wrap themselves up, and go to sleep under
the cope of heaven. Such people, in quality of soldiers, must be
invincible ...
Debates about "soft" and "hard" primitivism intensified with the publication in 1651 of Hobbes's Leviathan (or Commonwealth), a justification of absolute monarchy. Hobbes, a "hard Primitivist", flatly asserted that life in a state of nature was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short"—a "war of all against all":
Whatsoever therefore is consequent
to a time of War, where every man is Enemy to every man; the same is
consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security, than
what their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish them
withall. In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the
fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no
Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no
commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things
as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account
of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all,
continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man,
solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short
— Hobbes
Reacting to the wars of religion
of his own time and the previous century, he maintained that the
absolute rule of a king was the only possible alternative to the
otherwise inevitable violence and disorder of civil war. Hobbes' hard
primitivism may have been as venerable as the tradition of soft
primitivism, but his use of it was new. He used it to argue that the
state was founded on a social contract
in which men voluntarily gave up their liberty in return for the peace
and security provided by total surrender to an absolute ruler, whose
legitimacy stemmed from the Social Contract and not from God.
Hobbes' vision of the natural depravity of man inspired fervent
disagreement among those who opposed absolute government. His most
influential and effective opponent in the last decade of the 17th
century was Shaftesbury.
Shaftesbury countered that, contrary to Hobbes, humans in a state of
nature were neither good nor bad, but that they possessed a moral sense
based on the emotion of sympathy, and that this emotion was the source
and foundation of human goodness and benevolence. Like his contemporaries (all of whom who were educated by reading classical authors such as Livy, Cicero, and Horace),
Shaftesbury admired the simplicity of life of classical antiquity. He
urged a would-be author "to search for that simplicity of manners, and
innocence of behavior, which has been often known among mere savages;
ere they were corrupted by our commerce" (Advice to an Author,
Part III.iii). Shaftesbury's denial of the innate depravity of man was
taken up by contemporaries such as the popular Irish essayist Richard Steele
(1672–1729), who attributed the corruption of contemporary manners to
false education. Influenced by Shaftesbury and his followers,
18th-century readers, particularly in England, were swept up by the cult
of Sensibility that grew up around Shaftesbury's concepts of sympathy and benevolence.
Meanwhile, in France, where those who criticized government or
Church authority could be imprisoned without trial or hope of appeal,
primitivism was used primarily as a way to protest the repressive rule
of Louis XIV and XV, while avoiding censorship. Thus, in the beginning of the 18th century, a French travel writer, the Baron de Lahontan, who had actually lived among the Huron Indians, put potentially dangerously radical Deist
and egalitarian arguments in the mouth of a Canadian Indian, Adario,
who was perhaps the most striking and significant figure of the "good"
(or "noble") savage, as we understand it now, to make his appearance on
the historical stage:
Adario sings the praises of Natural
Religion. ... As against society he puts forward a sort of primitive
Communism, of which the certain fruits are Justice and a happy life. ...
He looks with compassion on poor civilized man—no courage, no strength,
incapable of providing himself with food and shelter: a degenerate, a
moral cretin, a figure of fun in his blue coat, his red hose, his
black hat, his white plume and his green ribands. He never really lives
because he is always torturing the life out of himself to clutch at
wealth and honors which, even if he wins them, will prove to be but
glittering illusions. ... For science and the arts are but the parents
of corruption. The Savage obeys the will of Nature, his kindly mother,
therefore he is happy. It is civilized folk who are the real barbarians.
— Paul Hazard, The European Mind
Published in Holland,
Lahontan's writings, with their controversial attacks on established
religion and social customs, were immensely popular. Over twenty
editions were issued between 1703 and 1741, including editions in
French, English, Dutch and German.
Interest in the remote peoples of
the earth, in the unfamiliar civilizations of the East, in the untutored
races of America and Africa, was vivid in France in the 18th century.
Everyone knows how Voltaire and Montesquieu used Hurons or Persians to
hold up the glass to Western manners and morals, as Tacitus used the
Germans to criticize the society of Rome. But very few ever look into
the seven volumes of the Abbé Raynal’s History of the Two Indies,
which appeared in 1772. It is however one of the most remarkable books
of the century. Its immediate practical importance lay in the array of
facts which it furnished to the friends of humanity in the movement
against negro slavery. But it was also an effective attack on the Church
and the sacerdotal system. ... Raynal brought home to the conscience of
Europeans the miseries which had befallen the natives of the New World
through the Christian conquerors and their priests. He was not indeed an
enthusiastic preacher of Progress. He was unable to decide between the
comparative advantages of the savage state of nature and the most highly
cultivated society. But he observes that "the human race is what we
wish to make it", that the felicity of man depends entirely on the
improvement of legislation, and ... his view is generally optimistic.
— J.B. Bury, The Idea of Progress: an Inquiry into its Origins and Growth
Atala au tombeau, by Girodet, 1808 – Musée du Louvre.
Many of the most incendiary passages in Raynal's
book, one of the bestsellers of the eighteenth century, especially in
the Western Hemisphere, are now known to have been in fact written by Diderot. Reviewing Jonathan Israel's Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights, Jeremy Jennings, notes that The History of the Two Indies,
in the opinion of Jonathan Israel, was the text that "made a world
revolution" by delivering "the most devastating single blow to the
existing order":
Usually (and incorrectly)
attributed to the pen of the Abbé Raynal, its ostensible theme of
Europe's colonial expansion allowed Diderot not only to depict the
atrocities and greed of colonialism but also to develop an argument in
defense of universal human rights, equality, and a life free from
tyranny and fanaticism. More widely read than any other work of the
Enlightenment ... it summoned people to understand the causes of their
misery and then to revolt.
— Jeremy
Jennings, Reason's Revenge: How a small group of radical philosophers
made a world revolution and lost control of it to 'Rouseauist fanatics',
Times Literary Supplement
Benjamin Franklin's Remarks Concerning the Savages of North America
The
Care and Labour of providing for Artificial and Fashionable Wants, the
sight of so many rich wallowing in Superfluous plenty, whereby so many
are kept poor and distressed for Want, the Insolence of Office ... and
restraints of Custom, all contrive to disgust [the Indians] with what we
call civil Society.
— Benjamin Franklin, marginalia in a pamphlet entitled [Matthew
Wheelock], Reflections, Moral and Political on Great Britain and Her Colonies, 1770
Benjamin Franklin, who had negotiated with the Native Americans during the French and Indian War, protested vehemently against the Paxton massacre, in which white vigilantes massacred Native American women and children at Conestoga, Pennsylvania
in December 1763. Franklin himself personally organized a Quaker
militia to control the white population and "strengthen the government".
In his pamphlet Remarks Concerning the Savages of North America (1784), Franklin deplored the use of the term "savages" for Native Americans:
Savages we call them, because their
manners differ from ours, which we think the perfection of civility;
they think the same of theirs.
Franklin used the massacres to illustrate his point that no race had a
monopoly on virtue, likening the Paxton vigilantes to "Christian White
Savages'". Franklin would invoke God
in the pamphlet, calling for divine punishment of those who carried the
Bible in one hand and the hatchet in the other: 'O ye unhappy
Perpetrators of this Horrid Wickedness!'"
Franklin praised the Indian way of life, their customs of hospitality,
their councils, which reached agreement by discussion and consensus, and
noted that many white men had voluntarily given up the purported
advantages of civilization to live among them, but that the opposite was
rare.
Franklin's writings on Native
Americans were remarkably free of ethnocentricism, although he often
used words such as "savages," which carry more prejudicial connotations
in the twentieth century than in his time. Franklin's cultural
relativism was perhaps one of the purest expressions of Enlightenment
assumptions that stressed racial equality and the universality of moral
sense among peoples. Systematic racism was not called into service until
a rapidly expanding frontier demanded that enemies be dehumanized
during the rapid, historically inevitable westward movement of the
nineteenth century. Franklin's respect for cultural diversity did not
reappear widely as an assumption in Euro-American thought until Franz
Boas and others revived it around the end of the nineteenth century.
Franklin's writings on Indians express the fascination of the
Enlightenment with nature, the natural origins of man and society, and
natural (or human) rights. They are likewise imbued with a search (which
amounted at times almost to a ransacking of the past) for alternatives
to monarchy as a form of government, and to orthodox state-recognized
churches as a form of worship.
— Bruce E. Johansen, Forgotten Founders: Benjamin Franklin, the Iroquois, and the Rationale for the American Revolution
Erroneous identification of Rousseau with the noble savage
Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
like Shaftesbury, also insisted that man was born with the potential
for goodness; and he, too, argued that civilization, with its envy and
self-consciousness, has made men bad. In his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality Among Men (1754), Rousseau maintained that man in a State of Nature had been a solitary, ape-like creature, who was not méchant
(bad), as Hobbes had maintained, but (like some other animals) had an
"innate repugnance to see others of his kind suffer" (and this natural
sympathy constituted the Natural Man's one-and-only natural virtue). It was Rousseau's fellow philosophe,
Voltaire, objecting to Rousseau's egalitarianism, who charged him with
primitivism and accused him of wanting to make people go back and walk
on all fours. Because Rousseau was the preferred philosopher of the radical Jacobins of the French Revolution,
he, above all, became tarred with the accusation of promoting the
notion of the "noble savage", especially during the polemics about Imperialism and scientific racism in the last half of the 19th century. Yet the phrase "noble savage" does not occur in any of Rousseau's writings.
In fact, Rousseau arguably shared Hobbes' pessimistic view of
humankind, except that as Rousseau saw it, Hobbes had made the error of
assigning it to too early a stage in human evolution. According to the
historian of ideas, Arthur O. Lovejoy:
The notion that Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality
was essentially a glorification of the State of Nature, and that its
influence tended to wholly or chiefly to promote "Primitivism" is one of
the most persistent historical errors.
— A. O. Lovejoy, The Supposed Primitivism of Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality (1923).
In his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, Rousseau,
anticipating the language of Darwin, states that as the animal-like
human species increased there arose a "formidable struggle for
existence" between it and other species for food. It was then, under the pressure of necessity, that le caractère spécifique de l'espèce humaine—the
specific quality that distinguished man from the
beasts—emerged—intelligence, a power, meager at first but yet capable of
an "almost unlimited development". Rousseau calls this power the faculté de se perfectionner—perfectibility.
Man invented tools, discovered fire, and in short, began to emerge from
the state of nature. Yet at this stage, men also began to compare
himself to others: "It is easy to see. ... that all our labors are
directed upon two objects only, namely, for oneself, the commodities of
life, and consideration on the part of others." Amour propre—the
desire for consideration (self regard), Rousseau calls a "factitious
feeling arising, only in society, which leads a man to think more highly
of himself than of any other." This passion began to show itself with
the first moment of human self-consciousness, which was also that of the
first step of human progress: "It is this desire for reputation,
honors, and preferment which devours us all ... this rage to be
distinguished, that we own what is best and worst in men—our virtues and
our vices, our sciences and our errors, our conquerors and our
philosophers—in short, a vast number of evil things and a small number
of good." It is this "which inspires men to all the evils which they
inflict upon one another." To be sure, Rousseau praises the newly discovered "savage" tribes (whom Rousseau does not
consider in a "state of nature"), as living a life that is simpler and
more egalitarian than that of the Europeans; and he sometimes praises
this "third stage" it in terms that could be confused with the romantic
primitivism fashionable in his times. He also identifies ancient
primitive communism under a patriarchy, such as he believes
characterized the "youth" of mankind, as perhaps the happiest state and
perhaps also illustrative of how man was intended by God to live. But
these stages are not all good, but rather are mixtures of good and bad.
According to Lovejoy, Rousseau's basic view of human nature after the
emergence of social living is basically identical to that of Hobbes.
Moreover, Rousseau does not believe that it is possible or desirable to
go back to a primitive state. It is only by acting together in civil
society and binding themselves to its laws that men become men; and only
a properly constituted society and reformed system of education could
make men good. According to Lovejoy:
For Rousseau, man's good lay in
departing from his "natural" state—but not too much; "perfectability" up
to a certain point was desirable, though beyond that point an evil. Not
its infancy but its jeunesse [youth] was the best age of the
human race. The distinction may seem to us slight enough; but in the
mid-eighteenth century it amounted to an abandonment of the stronghold
of the primitivistic position. Nor was this the whole of the difference.
As compared with the then-conventional pictures of the savage state,
Rousseau's account even of this third stage is far less idyllic; and it
is so because of his fundamentally unfavorable view of human nature quâ
human. ... His savages are quite unlike Dryden's Indians: "Guiltless
men, that danced away their time, / Fresh as the groves and happy as
their clime—" or Mrs. Aphra Behn's natives of Surinam, who represented
an absolute idea of the first state of innocence, "before men knew how
to sin." The men in Rousseau's "nascent society" already had 'bien des
querelles et des combats [many quarrels and fights]'; l'amour propre was already manifest in them ... and slights or affronts were consequently visited with vengeances terribles.
For Rousseau the remedy was not in going back to the primitive but in
reorganizing society on the basis of a properly drawn up social
compact, so as to "draw from the very evil from which we suffer [i.e.,
civilization and progress] the remedy which shall cure it." Lovejoy
concludes that Rousseau's doctrine, as expressed in his Discourse on Inequality:
declares that there is a dual
process going on through history; on the one hand, an indefinite
progress in all those powers and achievements which express merely the
potency of man's intellect; on the other hand, an increasing
estrangement of men from one another, an intensification of ill-will and
mutual fear, culminating in a monstrous epoch of universal conflict and
mutual destruction [i.e., the fourth stage in which we now find
ourselves]. And the chief cause of the latter process Rousseau,
following Hobbes and Mandeville, found, as we have seen, in that unique
passion of the self-conscious animal – pride, self esteem, le besoin de se mettre au dessus des autres
["the need to put oneself above others"]. A large survey of history
does not belie these generalizations, and the history of the period
since Rousseau wrote lends them a melancholy verisimilitude. Precisely
the two processes, which he described have ... been going on upon a
scale beyond all precedent: immense progress in man's knowledge and in
his powers over nature, and at the same time a steady increase of
rivalries, distrust, hatred and at last "the most horrible state of war"
... [Moreover Rousseau] failed to realize fully how strongly amour propre tended to assume a collective form ... in pride of race, of nationality, of class.
19th century belief in progress and the fall of the natural man
During
the 19th century the idea that men were everywhere and always the same
that had characterized both classical antiquity and the Enlightenment
was exchanged for a more organic and dynamic evolutionary concept of
human history. Advances in technology now made the indigenous man and
his simpler way of life appear, not only inferior, but also, even his
defenders agreed, foredoomed by the inexorable advance of progress
to inevitable extinction. The sentimentalized "primitive" ceased to
figure as a moral reproach to the decadence of the effete European, as
in previous centuries. Instead, the argument shifted to a discussion of
whether his demise should be considered a desirable or regrettable
eventuality. As the century progressed, native peoples and their
traditions increasingly became a foil serving to highlight the
accomplishments of Europe and the expansion of the European Imperial
powers, who justified their policies on the basis of a presumed racial
and cultural superiority.
Charles Dickens 1853 article on "The Noble Savage" in Household Words
In 1853 Charles Dickens wrote a scathingly sarcastic review in his weekly magazine Household Words of painter George Catlin's show of American Indians when it visited England. In his essay, entitled "The Noble Savage",
Dickens expressed repugnance for Indians and their way of life in no
uncertain terms, recommending that they ought to be “civilised off the
face of the earth”.
(Dickens's essay refers back to Dryden's well-known use of the term,
not to Rousseau.) Dickens's scorn for those unnamed individuals, who,
like Catlin, he alleged, misguidedly exalted the so-called "noble
savage", was limitless. In reality, Dickens maintained, Indians were
dirty, cruel, and constantly fighting among themselves. Dickens's satire
on Catlin and others like him who might find something to admire in the
American Indians or African bushmen is a notable turning point in the
history of the use of the phrase.
Like others who would henceforth write about the topic, Dickens begins by disclaiming a belief in the "noble savage":
To come to the point at once, I beg
to say that I have not the least belief in the Noble Savage. I consider
him a prodigious nuisance and an enormous superstition. ... I don't
care what he calls me. I call him a savage, and I call a savage a
something highly desirable to be civilized off the face of the earth....
The noble savage sets a king to reign over him, to whom he submits his
life and limbs without a murmur or question and whose whole life is
passed chin deep in a lake of blood; but who, after killing incessantly,
is in his turn killed by his relations and friends the moment a grey
hair appears on his head. All the noble savage's wars with his
fellow-savages (and he takes no pleasure in anything else) are wars of
extermination—which is the best thing I know of him, and the most
comfortable to my mind when I look at him. He has no moral feelings of
any kind, sort, or description; and his "mission" may be summed up as
simply diabolical.
— Charles Dickens
Dickens' essay was arguably a pose of manly, no-nonsense realism and a
defense of Christianity. At the end of it his tone becomes more
recognizably humanitarian, as he maintains that, although the virtues of
the savage are mythical and his way of life inferior and doomed, he
still deserves to be treated no differently than if he were an
Englishman of genius, such as Newton or Shakespeare:
To conclude as I began. My position
is, that if we have anything to learn from the Noble Savage, it is what
to avoid. His virtues are a fable; his happiness is a delusion; his
nobility, nonsense. We have no greater justification for being cruel to
the miserable object, than for being cruel to a WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE or
an ISAAC NEWTON; but he passes away before an immeasurably better and
higher power [i.e., that of Christianity] than ever ran wild in any
earthly woods, and the world will be all the better when this place
knows him no more.
— Charles Dickens
Scapegoating the Inuit: cannibalism and Sir John Franklin's lost expedition
Although
Charles Dickens had ridiculed positive depictions of Native Americans
as portrayals of so-called "noble" savages, he made an exception (at
least initially) in the case of the Inuit,
whom he called "loving children of the north", "forever happy with
their lot", "whether they are hungry or full", and "gentle loving
savages", who, despite a tendency to steal, have a "quiet, amiable
character" ("Our Phantom Ship on an Antediluvian Cruise", Household Words, April 16, 1851). However he soon reversed this rosy assessment, when on October 23, 1854, The Times of London published a report by explorer-physician John Rae of the discovery by Eskimos of the remains of the lost Franklin expedition along with unmistakable evidence of cannibalism among members of the party:
From the mutilated state of many of
the corpses and the contents of the kettles, it is evident that our
wretched countrymen had been driven to the last resource—cannibalism—as a
means of prolonging existence.
Franklin's widow and other surviving relatives and indeed the nation
as a whole were shocked to the core and refused to accept these reports,
which appeared to undermine the whole assumption of the cultural
superiority of the heroic white explorer-scientist and the imperial
project generally. Instead, they attacked the reliability of the Eskimos
who had made the gruesome discovery and called them liars. An editorial
in The Times called for further investigation:
to arrive at a more satisfactory
conclusion with regard to the fate of poor Franklin and his friends. ...
Is the story told by the Esquimaux the true one? Like all savages they
are liars, and certainly would not scruple at the utterance of any
falsehood which might, in their opinion, shield them from the vengeance
of the white man.
This line was energetically taken up by Dickens, who wrote in his weekly magazine:
It is impossible to form an
estimate of the character of any race of savages from their deferential
behavior to the white man while he is strong. The mistake has been made
again and again; and the moment the white man has appeared in the new
aspect of being weaker than the savage, the savage has changed and
sprung upon him. There are pious persons who, in their practice, with a
strange inconsistency, claim for every child born to civilization all
innate depravity, and for every child born to the woods and wilds all
innate virtue. We believe every savage to be in his heart covetous,
treacherous, and cruel; and we have yet to learn what knowledge the
white man—lost, houseless, shipless, apparently forgotten by his race,
plainly famine-stricken, weak frozen, helpless, and dying—has of the
gentleness of the Esquimaux nature.
— Charles Dickens, "The Lost Arctic Voyagers", Household Words, December 2, 1854.
Dr. John Rae rebutted Dickens in two articles in Household Words: "The Lost Arctic Voyagers", Household Words, No. 248 (December 23, 1854), and "Dr. Rae’s Report to the Secretary of the Admiralty", Household Words,
No. 249 (December 30, 1854). Though he did not call them noble, Dr.
Rae, who had lived among the Inuit, defended them as "dutiful" and "a
bright example to the most civilized people", comparing them favorably
with the undisciplined crew of the Franklin expedition, whom he
suggested were ill-treated and "would have mutinied under privation",
and moreover with the lower classes in England or Scotland generally.
Dickens and Wilkie Collins subsequently collaborated on a melodramatic play, "The Frozen Deep", about the menace of cannibalism in the far north, in which the villainous role assigned to the Eskimos in Household Words is assumed by a working class Scotswoman.
The Frozen Deep was performed as a benefit organized by
Dickens and attended by Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, and Emperor
Leopold II of Belgium, among others, to fund a memorial to the Franklin
Expedition. (Dr. Rae himself was Scots).
Rae's respect for the Inuit and his refusal to scapegoat them in
the Franklin affair arguably harmed his career. Lady Franklin's campaign
to glorify the dead of her husband's expedition, aided and abetted by
Dickens, resulted in his being more or less shunned by the British
establishment. Although it was not Franklin but Rae who in 1848
discovered the last link in the much-sought-after Northwest Passage,
Rae was never awarded a knighthood and died in obscurity in London. (In
comparison, fellow Scot and contemporary explorer David Livingstone was
knighted and buried with full imperial honors in Westminster Abbey.).
However, modern historians have confirmed Rae's discovery of the
Northwest Passage and the accuracy of his report on cannibalism among
Franklin's crew. Canadian author Ken McGoogan,
a specialist on Arctic exploration, states that Rae's willingness to
learn and adopt the ways of indigenous Arctic peoples made him stand out
as the foremost specialist of his time in cold-climate survival and
travel. Rae's respect for Inuit customs, traditions, and skills was
contrary to the prejudiced belief of many 19th-century Europeans that
native peoples had no valuable technical knowledge or information to
impart.
In July 2004, Orkney and Shetland MP Alistair Carmichael
introduced into the UK Parliament a motion proposing that the House
"regrets that Dr Rae was never awarded the public recognition that was
his due". In March 2009 Carmichael introduced a further motion urging
Parliament to formally state it "regrets that memorials to Sir John
Franklin outside the Admiralty headquarters and inside Westminster Abbey
still inaccurately describe Franklin as the first to discover the
[Northwest] passage, and calls on the Ministry of Defence and the Abbey
authorities to take the necessary steps to clarify the true position".
Dickens's racism, like that of many Englishmen, became markedly worse after the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857 in India.
The cruelties of the Sepoy natives
[toward the whites] have inflamed the nation to a degree unprecedented
within my memory. Peace Societies, Aborigines Protection Societies, and
societies for the reformation of criminals are silent. There is one cry
for revenge.
— Thomas Babington Macaulay, Diary
It was said that Dickens's racism "grew progressively more illiberal over the course of his career". Grace Moore, on the other hand, argues that Dickens, a staunch abolitionist
and opponent of imperialism, had views on racial matters that were a
good deal more complex than previous critics have suggested. This event, and the virtually contemporaneous occurrence of the American Civil War
(1861–1864), which threatened to, and then did, put an end to slavery,
coincided with a polarization of attitudes exemplified by the phenomenon
of scientific racism.
Scientific racism
In 1860, John Crawfurd and James Hunt mounted a defense of British imperialism based on "scientific racism". Crawfurd, in alliance with Hunt, took over the presidency of the Ethnological Society of London, which was an offshoot of the Aborigines' Protection Society, founded with the mission to defend indigenous peoples against slavery and colonial exploitation.
Invoking "science" and "realism", the two men derided their
"philanthropic" predecessors for believing in human equality and for not
recognizing that mankind was divided into superior and inferior races.
Crawfurd, who opposed Darwinian evolution,
"denied any unity to mankind, insisting on immutable, hereditary, and
timeless differences in racial character, principal amongst which was
the 'very great' difference in 'intellectual capacity'".
For Crawfurd, the races had been created separately and were different
species. Crawfurd was a Scot, and believed the Scots "race" superior to
all others; whilst Hunt, on the other hand, believed in the supremacy of
the Anglo-Saxon "race". Crawfurd and Hunt routinely accused those who
disagreed with them of believing in "Rousseau's Noble Savage". The pair
ultimately quarreled because Hunt believed in slavery and Crawfurd did
not.
"As Ter Ellingson demonstrates, Crawfurd was responsible for
re-introducing the Pre-Rousseauian concept of 'the Noble Savage' to
modern anthropology, attributing it wrongly and quite deliberately to
Rousseau." In an otherwise rather lukewarm review of Ellingson's book in Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 4:1 (Spring 2003), Frederick E. Hoxie writes:
For early modern scholars from [St.
Thomas] More to Rousseau, descriptions of Indian cultures could provide
opportunities to criticize "civilization". After Hunt and Crawfurd—or
at least at about the middle of the 19th century, when both imperial
ambition and racial ideology was hardening into national policy in
Europe and the U.S.—Indians became foils of a different kind: people
whose traditions underscored the accomplishments of Europe. The imperial
powers were now the models of human achievement. Ellingson sees this
shift and shows us how profoundly it affected popular conceptions of
Native people.
— Frederick E. Hoxie
"If Rousseau was not the inventor of the Noble Savage, who was?" writes Ellingson,
One who turns for help to [Hoxie Neale] Fairchild's 1928 study, a compendium of citations from romantic writings on the "savage" may be surprised to find [his book] The Noble Savage
almost completely lacking in references to its nominal subject. That
is, although Fairchild assembles hundreds of quotations from
ethnographers, philosophers, novelists, poets, and playwrights from the
17th century to the 19th century, showing a rich variety of ways in
which writers romanticized and idealized those who Europeans considered
"savages", almost none of them explicitly refer to something called the
"Noble Savage". Although the words, always duly capitalized, appear on
nearly every page, it turns out that in every instance, with four
possible exceptions, they are Fairchild's words and not those of the
authors cited.
Ellingson finds that any remotely positive portrayal of an indigenous (or working class)
person is apt to be characterized (out of context) as a supposedly
"unrealistic" or "romanticized" "Noble Savage". He points out that
Fairchild even includes as an example of a supposed "Noble Savage", a
picture of a Negro slave on his knees, lamenting his lost freedom.
According to Ellingson, Fairchild ends his book with a denunciation of
the (always unnamed) believers in primitivism or "The Noble Savage"—who,
he feels, are threatening to unleash the dark forces of irrationality
on civilization.
Ellingson argues that the term "noble savage", an oxymoron, is a
derogatory one, which those who oppose "soft" or romantic primitivism
use to discredit (and intimidate) their supposed opponents, whose
romantic beliefs they feel are somehow threatening to civilization.
Ellingson maintains that virtually none of those accused of believing in
the "noble savage" ever actually did so. He likens the practice of
accusing anthropologists (and other writers and artists) of belief in
the noble savage to a secularized version of the inquisition,
and he maintains that modern anthropologists have internalized these
accusations to the point where they feel they have to begin by
ritualistically disavowing any belief in "noble savage" if they wish to
attain credibility in their fields. He notes that text books with a
painting of a handsome Native American (such as the one by Benjamin West
on this page) are even given to school children with the cautionary
caption, "A painting of a Noble Savage". West's depiction is
characterized as a typical "noble savage" by art historian Vivien Green
Fryd, but her interpretation has been contested.
Opponents of primitivism
The most famous modern example of "hard" (or anti-) primitivism in books and movies was William Golding's Lord of the Flies, published in 1954. The title is said to be a reference to the Biblical devil, Beelzebub (Hebrew for "Lord of the Flies"). This book, in which a group of school boys stranded on a desert island revert to savage behavior, was a staple of high school and college required reading lists during the Cold War.
In the 1970s, film director Stanley Kubrick professed his opposition to primitivism. Like Dickens, he began with a disclaimer:
Man isn't a noble savage, he's an
ignoble savage. He is irrational, brutal, weak, silly, unable to be
objective about anything where his own interests are involved—that about
sums it up. I'm interested in the brutal and violent nature of man
because it's a true picture of him. And any attempt to create social
institutions on a false view of the nature of man is probably doomed to
failure.
The opening scene of Kubrick's movie 2001: A Space Odyssey
(1968) depicts prehistoric ape-like men wielding weapons of war, as the
tools that supposedly lifted them out of their animal state and made
them human.
Another opponent of primitivism is the Australian anthropologist Roger Sandall, who has accused other anthropologists of exalting the "noble savage".
A third is archeologist Lawrence H. Keeley, who has criticised a
"widespread myth" that "civilized humans have fallen from grace from a
simple primeval happiness, a peaceful golden age"
by uncovering archeological evidence that he claims demonstrates that
violence prevailed in the earliest human societies. Keeley argues that
the "noble savage" paradigm has warped anthropological literature to
political ends.
The noble savage is described as having a natural existence. The
term ignoble savage has an obvious negative connotation. The ignoble
savage is detested for having a cruel and primitive existence.
In fantasy and science fiction
The
"noble savage" often maps to uncorrupted races in science fiction and
fantasy genres, often deliberately as a contrast to "fallen" more
advanced cultures, in films such as Avatar and literature including Ghân-buri-Ghân in The Lord of the Rings. Examples of famous noble savage characters in fantasy and science fiction that are well known are Tarzan created by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Conan the Barbarian created by Robert E. Howard, and John from Brave New World. Ka-Zar, Thongor
and such are lesser known. Tarzan, Conan, and John are not only known
through their literature, but by movie adaptations and other licensed
material.
Other movies containing the "noble savage":
Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron (2002)
The Gods Must Be Crazy (1980)
Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002)
The Mosquito Coast (1986)
Dances With Wolves (1990)
Pocahontas (1995)
The Indian in the Cupboard (1995)
Little House on the Prairie (TV series) (1974–1982)
Noble savage idea today
According to critics like the Telegraph's
Tim Robey, romantically idealized portrayals of non-industrialized or
exotic people persist in popular films, as for example in The Lone Ranger or Dances with Wolves.
Another contemporary example is the claim in some queer theory sources that the two-spirit
phenomenon is universal among Indigenous American cultures when, in
fact, the cultural views on gender and sexuality in Indigenous American
communities vary widely from nation to nation.