In 1762 Jean-Jaques Rousseau published one of the 18th century’s most influential books. He began The Social Contract with the bold statement, “Man is born free, and he is everywhere in chains.” In many ways, Rousseau was a pessimist during a century of optimism. He saw the corruption of monarchy and objected to the notion that expanding knowledge would inexorably lead to progress. His writings pointed to a disillusionment with culture and civilization.
Although Rousseau did not directly call for a return to a pre-civilized state, he often venerated what is known as the “noble savage” (i.e. man in a primitive state of nature). In his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, for example, he asked “Would you like an abridged account of almost all our wretchedness? Here it is. There existed a natural man. There was introduced into this man an artificial man; and a civil war, enduring throughout life, arose” (quoted in the Durants’ Story of Civilization vol. IX). In essence, Rousseau promoted the idea that man was naturally good but gradually became corrupted by his institutions.
French intellectuals such as the great encyclopedist, Denis Diderot, frequently made use of this concept. In his dialogue, Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville, Diderot described a fictionalized account of European explorers making contact with primitive Tahitians. One of the interlocutors in the dialogue venerates the natural lifestyle of the natives, stating that “the cruelty among them which has sometimes been observed is apparently due only to their daily need to defend themselves against wild beasts. The savage is innocent and gentle whenever his peace and security are left undisturbed. All wars spring from conflicting claims to the same property.” According to Diderot’s account, the Tahitians were primarily peaceful, even sharing their women in common. In essence, they were noble savages.
The notion of the noble savage, uncorrupted by civilization, was used to great effect by Benjamin Franklin. During his time in France he often played the part of a simple Raccoon-hatted American, despite his incredible intellectual achievements. Thus, he provided fascination to the upper-classes who had been immersed in the writings of Diderot and Rousseau.
Far from ending at the close of the 18th century, the view of primitive peoples as virtuous communitarians continues to influence modern discourse. It gained massive cultural authority in the 1980s when Marxist historian Howard Zinn presented the Native Americans as peaceful communists in his A People’s History of the United States: “So, Columbus and his successors were not coming into an empty wilderness, but into a world…where culture was complex, where human relation were more egalitarian than in Europe, and where the relations among, men women, children, and nature were more beautifully worked out than perhaps any place in the world.” Indeed, the idea of the “noble savage” is one of the most potent forces in American cultural life. The free love movement of the 1960s sought to break down the supposedly unnatural and oppressive bourgeois values that promoted monogamy and the nuclear family. In our present era, breaking down gender norms is justified on the grounds that people will be able to express their “true [or natural] selves.”
Of course, the noble savage is historically inaccurate. Pre-civilized societies were incredibly violent and warmongering. As historian Mary Grabar recounts, when Columbus reached the new world there “was a request from the cacique of Marien, the Indian chief of the northeastern part of Haiti, that Columbus establish a base there. The chief wanted the Spaniards to protect him from enemies on the island.” Far from being proto-communist flower people, tribal groups perpetrated numerous acts of violence. According to Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker “If the wars of the twentieth century had killed the same proportion of the population that die in the wars of a typical tribal society, there would have been two billion deaths, not 100 million.” In reality, the peaceful primitive society is nothing more than an intellectual construct.
But the issue of the noble savage is more than a historical dispute. Rather it introduces profound and radical disputes over human nature. Proponents of the noble savage reject traditional wisdom by holding that man is spontaneously good. Far from requiring the rules of civilization, mankind is corrupted by them.
Such an outlook is diametrically opposed to the outlook that characterized much of Western history. In the Judeo-Christian worldview, for example, man is held to be tainted by original sin. Thus, he must struggle against his unjust desires in the quest for moral improvement. The noble savage ceased to exist at the Fall. Furthermore, Plato, the great Athenian philosopher, promoted the cultivation of reason as an antidote to a chaotic and unjust soul. In the eyes of Plato, the order of a just city reflects the order of a good soul. His student, Aristotle, also argued that man is a political animal and can only achieve his end in a community. Thus, these two strands of Western thought (Jerusalem and Athens) promote a movement away from primitivism and towards moral enlightenment within a just social order.
The great political philosopher Edmund Burke also emphasized the necessity of civilizing traditions when he criticized the chaos and violence of the French Revolution. Burke believed that inherited institutions provide the basis of morality and stability. Without these traditions “No one generation could link with the other. Men would become little better than flies of a summer.” Thus, according to Burke, gratitude is required for those who have passed down time-tested laws and moral rules.
The belief in the noble savage, by contrast, promotes ingratitude. We see echoes of this idea in the prevalent scorn for the past and criticism of our ancestors that characterizes so much of modern culture. In this view, it was no great achievement to establish constitutional government, eliminate slavery, or raise the standard of living. If men are naturally good, then we should have attained these things much earlier. Those who worked to civilize and improve society were, at best, engaged in a fool’s errand. Complete revolution to overturn the social fabric would have brought these goods about much sooner and at less cost. Hence the unforgiving criticisms of the Founders for owning slaves.
Those who castigate Thomas Jefferson or George Washington as irredeemably bigoted assume (against all historical fact) that men will naturally oppose slavery. The self-righteous proponents of this belief claim that they owe nothing to the past for their moral outlook. One who understands the fallibility of man, by contrast, feels gratitude towards men like Washington and Jefferson for providing a set of values that continue to govern his conduct. The revolutionary implicitly accepts the idea of the noble savage in order to elevate his own moral standing and radically critique society. A more sober judgement looks upon the present moment with as the result of centuries of effort and sacrifice.