The noble savage or the idea that without civilization humans are essentially good, peaceful, egalitarian and live in harmony with the environment is generally associated with romanticism and, in particular, with Rousseau's romantic philosophy. According to the French thinker nothing can be more “gentle” than man in his primitive state, the condition in which he was “made to remain”. Any ulterior improvements towards perfection, he says, are in fact steps towards the decomposition of the species. In other words, the development of civilization has modified our “natural state” and this will ultimately lead to our doom.

Although in the 20th century, the concept of the noble savage became less influential, many people still believe in it today. Indigenous communities are often seen as groups of inherently good individuals who respect nature and are victims of globalization. Their poverty outrages everybody, but it is also seen as a sign of their purity, as an indication that they are not yet “infected” by consumerism, pornography, politics, marketing and other “western maladies”. Activists fight to ensure that their traditions are respected and their lands protected even when this means excluding them from economic development or allowing the abuse of human rights. They argue that progress is a relative concept and we should not disturb their natural way of life.

But the amount of data collected by anthropologists during the last decades, exposes the noble savage as nothing more than a myth. Steven Pinker summarizes this data in “The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature”. The stories about peaceful tribes that don’t know any kind of violence such as New Guineans and Samoans appear to be nothing more than popular fiction. Anthropologist Derek Freeman describes how in Samoa fathers can beat their daughters to death if they are not virgins on their wedding night. The Kung San from the Kalahari popularized as “the harmless people” by Elizabeth Marshall have, in fact, a higher murder rate than the most violent American cities. And, the story about the Tasaday people from the Philippines that supposedly had no words for conflict, violence or guns turned out to be a hoax set up by Ferdinand Marcos to enjoy exclusive mineral and logging rights over a piece of land.

When anthropologist Lawrence Keeley analyzed the proportion of men killed in wars in different social groups, he found that while the Jivaros in South America reach 60% of deceased men, Europe and the U.S. together have less than 5% and this includes the whole of the twentieth century with its two World Wars. Also, Carol Ember, cross-cultural researcher, documented that 90% of all known tribal groups practice war and 64% have one every two years, and William T. Divale, professor of anthropology at York College, studied 99 tribes from 37 different cultures, from which, 68 were engaged in warfare, 20 have had a war in the near past and the rest have had a war in the more distant past. From this study he concluded that conflicts, violence and war are human universals. So it appears that Rousseau got it wrong and Hobbes got it right: “Life in the state of nature is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”

But despite all this research, there’s a lot of resistance to bury once and for all the myth of the noble savage. According to Pinker there are two possible explanations for this. On the one hand, there is the fear that if violence is an intrinsic aspect of human nature our most precious values such as peace, equality and fraternity will only be utopian ideals. On the other hand, there is a genuine need to condemn the image of the primitive savage that justified abuses, massacres and atrocities committed to many peoples throughout the centuries. However, Pinker argues, both rationales are based on false assumptions.

The first one assumes that if violence is part of human nature we are destined to suffer it forever. It entails a biased understanding of this nature and of the evolutionary processes that gave rise to it. Aggression evolved as a successful adaptive strategy in our primitive past, but so did cooperation, another winning tactic picked up by natural selection. War and conflicts of interest are universal but so are peace and conflict resolution. In other words, nobility and hostility are not excluding human qualities. Peace, equality and fraternity are not just ideals. They are real aspects of how humans evolved and how they organize themselves into social groups. Democracy, human rights, charities, the UN and the Red Cross, are just some examples of how these ideals materialize in everyday life. In fact, there’s evidence showing that violence has been steadily declining in the last centuries.

The other false assumption is that in order to condemn atrocities it is necessary to make of the victims nice guys. Not only this is unnecessary but it also carries the danger of judging the crimes in relation to who is the victim. Genocide is still genocide no matter what kind of people are involved. Ignoble or noble, it should always be condemned.

The following is an interesting article exposing some of Pinker’s views about the noble savage and the decline of violence.

Steven Pinker on the Decline of Violence

By Ethan Zuckerman

Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard, begins his presentation with an image of corpses on a truck, being taken from Auschwitz concentration camp. The image is one of many characteristic of the 20th century, a century that included brutality under Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot and the genocide in Rwanda. The 21st century, which has barely started, already includes the brutality of Darfur and the daily destruction in Iraq.

These sorts of images can lead us to thinking that modernity brings terrible violence. Perhaps native people lived in a state of harmony that we’ve departed from.

This, Pinker tells us, is bullshit. “Our ancestors were far more violent than we are.” We’re probably living in the most peaceful time of our species’s existence, a statement that seems almost obscene in light of Darfur and Iraq.

Complete story...

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