noble savage

Origins

The Roman historian Tacitus' description of ancient Germanic people in his 98 AD work De origine et situ Germanorum (On the Origin and Situation of the Germans) is an early iteration of the noble savage narrative. The Germanic population is positioned as a foil for Tacitus' Roman readers, who were in the corrupt and decaying phase of their Empire. Teutonic life is described as more virtuous and virile. Tacitus' depiction is similar to Julius Caesar's in Commentarii de Bello Gallico (Gallic War, c. 46 BC).

"Thus with their virtue protected they live uncorrupted by the allurements of public shows or the stimulant of feastings. Clandestine correspondence is equally unknown to men and women. Very rare for so numerous a population is adultery [...] No one in Germany laughs at vice, nor do they call it the fashion to corrupt and to be corrupted.

Ibn Tufail's 1160 Andalusian novel Hayy ibn Yaqdhan (The Living Son of the Vigilant) explores the subject of natural theology as a means to understand the material world. The protagonist is a wild man isolated from his society, whose rustic life in harmony with Mother Nature leads him to knowledge of Allah.

The 14th century Byzantine philosopher Theodore Metochites attempted to explain the loss of Asia Minor during the Ottoman conquests by going back to the work of Tacitus. He related the idea that the "Schythians" (mainly referring to Germanic, Turkic and Mongolic peoples) were more virtuous, as they were numerous, bellicose, and unsubjugated. He claimed that was because they lived a nomadic and simple life, free of material concerns. Historian Speros Vryonis criticised this view as oversimplified, as it ignores the fact that nomadic groups possessed certain crafts, engaged in commerce and marginal agriculture, and continuously interacted with settled peoples in symbiotic relationships.

Metochites is praising the “‘noble savage’’, who living close to nature is free of the artificialities of urban life which so pervert human character. [...] Metochites similarly converted Scythian barbarity into a state of moral purity so that using it as a foil he might attack the shortcomings of his own society. [...] The parallel between Metochites and Tacitus on this one point is striking. They are both moralizing and use the noble savage as a literary device to this end.

Cultural stereotype

Kingdom of Spain

The mytheme of the savage was a helpful justification for colonization by Europeans. The conquistador mistreatment of indigenous people in Viceroyalty of New Spain eventually prompted recriminations in both Europe and North America. The Roman Catholic Bishop of Chiapas Bartolomé de las Casas was particularly horrified by conquistador tactics as well as their failure to teach Christianity to their captives.

At the Valladolid debate of 1550–1 about the enslavement of native peoples in the Spanish colonies, Bishop de las Casas argued that the pre-conquest native Americans embodied Aristotle's description of a true civil society.

Kingdom of France

In the intellectual debates of the late 16th and 17th centuries, philosophers used the racist stereotypes of the savage and the good savage as moral reproaches of the European monarchies fighting the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648) and the French Wars of Religion (1562–1598). In the essay "Of Cannibals" (1580), Michel de Montaigne reported that the Tupinambá people of Brazil ceremoniously eat the bodies of their dead enemies, as a matter of honour, whilst reminding the European reader that such wild man behavior was analogous to the religious barbarism of burning at the stake: "One calls ‘barbarism’ whatever he is not accustomed to." The academic Terence Cave further explains Montaigne's point of moral philosophy:

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.

As philosophic reportage, "Of Cannibals" applies cultural relativism to compare the civilized European to the uncivilized noble savage. Montaigne's anthropological report about cannibalism in Brazil indicated that the Tupinambá people were neither a noble nor an exceptionally good folk, yet neither were the Tupinambá culturally or morally inferior to his contemporary, 16th-century European civilization. From the perspective of Classical liberalism of Montaigne's humanist portrayal of the customs of honor of the Tupinambá people indicates Western philosophic recognition that people are people, despite their different customs, traditions, and codes of honor. The academic David El Kenz explicates Montaigne's background concerning the violence of customary morality:

In his Essais ... Montaigne discussed the first three wars of religion (1562–63; 1567–68; 1568–70) quite specifically; he had personally participated in [the wars], on the side of the [French] royal army, in southwestern France. The [anti-Protestant] St. Bartholomew's Day massacre [1572] 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 [1562–1598] 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. ...

Literature

The themes about the person and persona of the mythical noble savage are the subjects of the novel Oroonoko: Or the Royal Slave (1688), by Aphra Behn, which is the tragic love story between Oroonoko and the beautiful Imoinda, an African king and queen respectively. At Coramantien, Ghana, the protagonist is deceived and delivered into the Atlantic slave trade (16th–19th centuries), and Oroonoko becomes a slave of plantation colonists in Surinam (Dutch Guiana, 1667–1954). In the course of his enslavement, Oroonoko meets the woman who narrates to the reader the life and love of Prince Oroonoko, his enslavement, his leading a slave rebellion against the Dutch planters of Surinam, and his consequent execution by the Dutch colonialists.

Despite Behn having written the popular novel for money, Oroonoko proved to be political-protest literature against slavery, because the story, plot, and characters followed the narrative conventions of the European romance novel. In the event, the Irish playwright Thomas Southerne adapted the novel Oroonoko into the stage play Oroonoko: A Tragedy (1696) that stressed the pathos of the love story, the circumstances, and the characters, which consequently gave political importance to the play and the novel for the candid cultural representation of slave-powered European colonialism.

Uses of the stereotype

Romantic primitivism

The art historian Erwin Panofsky explains that:

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 novel The Adventures of Telemachus, Son of Ulysses (1699), in the “Encounter with the Mandurians” (Chapter IX), the theologian François Fénelon presented the noble savage stock character in conversation with civilized men from Europe about possession and ownership of Nature:

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.”

Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin was critical of government indifference to the Paxton Boys massacre of the Susquehannock in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania in December 1763. Within weeks of the murders, he published A Narrative of the Late Massacres in Lancaster County, in which he referred to the Paxton Boys as "Christian white savages" and called for judicial punishment of those who carried the Bible in one hand and a hatchet in the other.

When the Paxton Boys led an armed march on Philadelphia in February 1764, with the intent of killing the Moravian Lenape and Mohican who had been given shelter there, Franklin recruited associators including Quakers to defend the city and led a delegation that met with the Paxton leaders at Germantown outside Philadelphia. The marchers dispersed after Franklin convinced them to submit their grievances in writing to the government.

In his 1784 pamphlet Remarks Concerning the Savages of North America, Franklin especially noted the racism inherent to the colonists using the word savage as a synonym for indigenous people:

"Savages" we call them, because their manners differ from ours, which we think the perfection of civility; they think the same of theirs.

Franklin praised the way of life of indigenous people, their customs of hospitality, their councils of government, and acknowledged that while some Europeans had foregone civilization to live like a "savage", the opposite rarely occurred, because few indigenous people chose "civilization" over "savagery".

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The term "noble savage" never appears in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's writing. Ideologues accused Rousseau of unleashing the force of savagery in his role as a philosophe of the Jacobin radicals of the French Revolution (1789–1799). The linkage of Rousseau and the noble savage is one of the most persistent errors in historiography.

In Discourse on the Origins of Inequality Among Men (1754), Rousseau argued in the state of nature man was pleasant and non-moral but with an "innate repugnance to see others of his kind suffer". He felt the rise of humanity began a "formidable struggle for existence" between the species man and the other animal species of Nature. This struggle shaped a human intelligence capable of "almost unlimited development".

Having invented tools, discovered fire, and transcended the state of nature, Rousseau said that "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"; thus amour propre (self-regard) is a "factitious feeling arising, only in society, which leads a man to think more highly of himself than of any other." Therefore, "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 [things]"; that is the aspect of character "which inspires men to all the evils which they inflict upon one another."

Men become men only in a civil society based upon law, and only a reformed system of education can make men good; the academic Lovejoy explains that:

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. ... [Rousseau's] 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.

Charles Dickens

In 1839, George Catlin toured Europe with his Indian Gallery which included his oil paintings of North American natives. When poet and critic Charles Baudelaire viewed it in Paris, he praised Caitlin as "our guide among the savages" who "brought back alive the proud and free characters of these chiefs; both their nobility and manliness."

In 1853, Charles Dickens panned the exhibit in an essay titled "The Noble Savage" which ran on the front page of his weekly magazine Household Words. Dickens expressed his repugnance at American Indian culture, depicting them as dirty, cruel, and quarrelsome.

Dickens begins by dismissing the concept as a myth, "...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." He describes men whose lives are "passed chin deep in a lake of blood" due to incessant wars. Dickens cautions against a romanticized persona, "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...the world will be all the better when this place knows him no more.

The cruel tone of the essay may have been satirical, but it reflected the abolitionist Dickens' increasingly racist views.

Theories of racialism

In the 1860s, physician John Crawfurd and anthropologist James Hunt used the noble savage in their scientific racism project. As polygenists, Crawfurd and Hunt believed each race is a distinct human species and labeled critics of their argument as proponents of "Rousseau's Noble Savage". Later in his career, Crawfurd re-introduced the noble savage term to modern anthropology and deliberately ascribed coinage of the term to Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Modern perspectives

Supporters of primitivism

In "The Prehistory of Warfare: Misled by Ethnography" (2006), the researchers Jonathan Haas and Matthew Piscitelli challenged the idea that the human species is innately disposed towards being aggressive or is inclined to engage in violent conflict and propose rather that warfare is an occasional activity by a society and is not an inherent part of human culture. Moreover, the UNESCO's Seville Statement on Violence (1986) specifically rejects claims that the human propensity towards violence has a genetic basis.

Anarcho-primitivists, such as the philosopher John Zerzan, rely upon a strong ethical dualism between Anarcho-primitivism and civilization; hence, "life before domestication [and] agriculture was, in fact, largely one of leisure, intimacy with nature, sensual wisdom, sexual equality, and health." Zerzan's claims about the moral superiority of primitive societies are based on a certain reading of the works of anthropologists, such as Marshall Sahlins and Richard Borshay Lee, wherein the anthropologic category of primitive society is restricted to hunter-gatherer societies who have no domesticated animals or agriculture, e.g. the stable social hierarchy of the American Indians of the north-west North America, who live from fishing and foraging, is attributed to having domesticated dogs and the cultivation of tobacco, that animal husbandry and agriculture equal civilization.

In anthropology, the argument has been made that key tenets of the myth of the noble savage idea inform cultural investments in places seemingly removed from the Tropics, such as the Mediterranean and specifically Greece, during the debt crisis by European institutions (such as documenta) and by various commentators who found Greece to be a positive inspiration for resistance to austerity policies and the neoliberalism of the EU These commentators' positive embrace of the periphery (their mythical noble savage ideal) is the other side of the mainstream views, also dominant during that period, that stereotyped Greece and the South as lazy and corrupt.

Opponents of primitivism

In War Before Civilization: the Myth of the Peaceful Savage (1996), the archaeologist Lawrence H. Keeley said that the "widespread myth" that "civilized humans have fallen from grace from a simple, primeval happiness, a peaceful golden age" is contradicted and refuted by archeologic evidence that indicates that violence was common practice in early human societies. That the noble savage paradigm has warped anthropological literature to political ends. Moreover, the anthropologist Roger Sandall likewise accused anthropologists of exalting the mythical noble savage above civilized man, by way of designer tribalism, a form of romanticised primitivism that dehumanises Indigenous peoples into the cultural stereotype of the indigène peoples who live a primitive way of life demarcated and limited by tradition, which discouraged Indigenous peoples from cultural assimilation into the dominant Western culture.

In the 2003 book, Constant Battles: Why we fight written by Steven LeBlanc, a professor of archaeology at Harvard University who specializes in the American Southwest, LeBlanc further documents the mythical notion of primitive non-violence against foreign tribal peoples, internal strife and internecine violence, as well as violence against animals and wildlife. In many of these instances the homicide rate even rose to substantially higher levels than any seen in modernity on a proportionate basis.