The Myth of the "Noble Savage" ft. Andrew

Andrew talks with Gare and Mia about how the myth of the "noble savage" has been used to delegitimize and oppress Indigenous societies.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hello and welcome. So it could happen here with me
Andrew of the YouTube channel andrewism and today I'm joined
by Garrison is here greetings, and Mia also here. Hello.
And I wanted to talk about the idea of the
noble savage. It's something that people have occasionally brought up

(00:26):
in my common section when I discuss really anything related
to hmm, maybe there's something to learn, something to be
learned from the Indigenous people of pre colonial period. There's
often this accusation levied against any sort of positive representation

(00:52):
of their society, any sort of generous reading of their
society as something to be off that, as something to
be ridiculed, as something to be you know, seen as perpetuates,
and this troope of the noble savage. And so I
was in some sort of I feels I was in

(01:13):
sort of am I got into a sort of defense mood,
and I was like, well, I really don't want to
do that, right, I don't want to want to create
this caricature of Indigenous people in my videos that you know,
falstly represents all their complexities and stuff. Obviously, every group
throughout history has had many layers to them. And then

(01:36):
in reading to one of Everything by m David Grieber
and David Wengrew ended up stumbling upon even further information
on the subject. And so that's something that I want
to talk about. You know, this idea where the idea
of noble savage came from, how it's used, and I
think how we should be approaching it today. But before

(01:58):
I even get into all of that, are all familiar
with this term and how it's used. Yeah, I mean
I think, I don't know. It is interesting in the
way that it kind of like, I don't know, there
was kind of this shift of it being used a
term to critique, sort of like racist white fantasy, to

(02:22):
being a term that's used to sort of bludge at
anytime anyone like has the temerity to suggest anything in
another society than this one could have possibly have been better,
which is a kind of grim shift, I think in
a lot of ways, and I think has done a
lot of political damage by people who sort of don't
quite understand what was going on. Yeah, and that is

(02:46):
a shift that I noticed as well, and for a
while I thought that was really how the team was
originally meant to be applied. I mean, we see it
all over this guys of anthropology and philosophy and literature,
which it could be extended to media as a whole. Right,

(03:06):
you have this sort of stock character of the noble
savage person. It's uncorrupted by civilization. Something that's a person
that symbolizes this sort of innate goodness and moral superiority,
living in harmony with nature that we don't have access
to because we've been corrupted by the influences of civilization. Right,

(03:28):
it's this idealized concept of an uncivilized or sort of
base man, right or rather person, And I mean we
see it a lot in writers discourse being used as
a tomb of derision. For example, a right being Australian
politician named Dennis Jensen once told Parliament that the Australian

(03:52):
government should not be funding people to live a noble
savage lifestyle in remote indigenous communities. Yeah, chrisis, and it's
used to mock the so called backwards lifestyles of Indigenous
people and really try to reinforce this white supremacist idea

(04:17):
of their inferiority or their backwardness, their regressiveness, whatever the
case may be. And then on the other side, in
leftist political discourse, you also see it being used as
a tomb of derision. So in both cases it's being
used as a term of derision without really a good
grasp of what the term is, where it came from.

(04:40):
For example, anarcho primitivists are criticized for upholding this troope,
and of course leftists criticize a leftists when fallen for
the troope for fallen for the troope. When describing indigenous histories, spiritualities,
and social ecologies, it seems like you can't even bring
up any sort of reciprocal gift economy based relationship the

(05:05):
land that indigenous group might have had without somebody saying, oh, well,
did you know that indigenous people also perpetuated extinctions and
genocides and this than the other. So I really don't
think that any time you learn from a society that
predates your own and may still persist, that you're doing
a noble savage. But it is something that I had

(05:30):
become very conscious of in my approach to any sort
of discussion. I feel like it sort of haunts the
discourse among other sort of stock characters and troops that
permeate inn or political conversation within media. The Troope has,
you know, come in and out of fashion. But the

(05:55):
two main forms that it appears in is one that
it life is strenuous, The life of a quote unquote
primitive is strenuous, and therefore this savage is nobly brave,
hard work and an honorable And then you have this
other depiction, which is that the savage and I can

(06:17):
it pains me to use the term every time, but
the savage is not greedy and just as now a
taste for luxury. So might you see it in instant media.
It's been a long time since I've watched The Road
to Eldorado, but if I recall, there is this sort
of idea within the movie that they're so used to

(06:41):
this the decadence and stuff of gold and whatnot, that
they don't consider it as valuable, they considered wruthless. So
there's this aspect of the Troope that treats materials traditionally
considered valuable to be something to be sort of shrugged
off or flaunted. And then, of course, because what is philosophy,

(07:03):
what is really our ontology without some sort of reference
to the story is embedded within the Christian cannon, right,
there is this sort of interpretation of the story of
the Garden of Eden as this as Adam and evep

(07:27):
and these noble savages that live in this uncorrupted innocence
and harmony with nature, and then they have to they
partaken this fruit from the tree of knowledge or you know,
they become quote unquote civilized, and then they're punished by
having to engage in agriculture and have to labor over

(07:48):
the land instead of living in harmony with it. Just
one interpretation of that story is that it's a metaphor
for the dawn of agriculture and the god have eaten
as a sort of nostalgic take. Even later on, when
Europeans first encountered hunter gatherer communities in the Americas, they

(08:11):
compared them to being living and they're sort of eaton.
And today, um, you still find comparisons to eat on
used to describe certain hunter gather societies. And of course,
as this is quite topical, you often see this criticism

(08:32):
of noble savage and whatever being lefted against Avatar, as
in the Blue People, not the not the Last Day
of benderum, because they have this sort of oh, we
are these utterly perfect you know, peace loving space hippies
all in harmony with nature, chilling vibing, we literally have

(08:53):
sex with trees kind of vibe. Um. And I haven't
seen the movie in the series. I only saw the first,
but I wouldn't be surprised if that trend continues. I
don't know, have you all seen either both of them.
I saw the first one and I was like, I, no,
nothing on earth can can call me to see the

(09:15):
second one. I have no idea how you or not. Yeah,
And I mean the concept of noble savage, it has
its roots a lot further back than European encounters with
Native Americans, Right, that's sort of the intellectual lineage of
the concept could actually be traced back to ancient Greece.

(09:37):
So if you really want to reach you could say
that even back in the Acadia and epic of Gilgamesh,
that kid as a sort of bushman was a kind
of a depiction of that contrast between hunter gatherer societies
and agricultural societies that kill damash, representing, of course, you know, civilization.

(10:00):
But if we started from ancient Greece, we could say
we're seeing Homer and Pliny and Xenophon all idealizing the
Arcadians and other groups, whether they were real or not.
And then later on in Rome you find Tacitus, for example,

(10:21):
writing of the noble Germanic and Caledonian tribes in contrast
with his view of Roman society as this sort of
corrupt and decadent place. He even wrote speeches like he
practically wrote fan fiction about liberty and honor for his
sort of caricatures of these people. Other writers would also

(10:47):
treat the Scythians comparably you've seen in the works of
Horace and Fugil and Ovid. And then further on, you know,
in the twelfth century, the polymath even Fatigue to Fail
wrote in his novel The Living Son of the Vigilant

(11:10):
this idea of this sort of stripped down back to
the roots earthy wild man who is isolated from society
and has a series of trials and tribulations that lead
him to knowledge of Allah by living this life and
harmony with Mother Nature. Basically theorizing this idea that people

(11:38):
can find can find their way to to God just
by being exposed to nature, finding a sort of a
theological understanding by understanding the natural world. All of this

(12:01):
is sort of a preamble to really what most people
point to as the origins of the concepts the modern
myth of the noble savage. It's most usually attributed to
eighteenth century Enlightenment philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau, and he believed
the original man was somebody that was free from sin,
appetite or the concept of right and wrong, and those

(12:24):
deemed savages were not brutal, but noble, or at least
this is how the story goes. The idea can also
be found in theology the founder of the Methodist Church,
for example, John Wesley. Again, just like the Andalusian novel writer,
believe that, you know, there's this idea of man in

(12:48):
the beginning at the roots connected with nature, is not
as corrupted, is more connected with nature and with God.
Paid to the so called degenerously found in eighteenth century
society compared to the disease and materialism seeing throughout the world.

(13:11):
David Grieber in one of his recent posthumous works, Pirate Enlightenment,
I don't know. In a lot of his other works
as well, he sort of grapples with this idea of
the Enlightenment right and how flowed our understanding of the
Enlictenment is how our approach the Enlightenment as a sort

(13:34):
of era unique to Europe, or this era centered upon
Europe is flawed in its approach because it leaves out
the realities of the Enlictenment occurred as a result of
European's interactions and exposure to the rest of the world.

(13:55):
You had these European explorers and colonizers and scientists venturing outs,
trading and interacting with these different groups of people, hearing
their ideas about things, and then going back and writing
best selling books about these societies and how they believe

(14:16):
and what they think, and how they organize their society.
One chronicler, for example, noted that among the Indians or
Native Americans, that land belonged to all, just like the
sun and water, mine and thine. The seeds of all
evils do not exist for those people. They live in

(14:38):
a golden age and open gardens, thought laws or books,
thought judges, and they naturally follow goodness. Rousseau, Thomas Moore
and others also idealized the naked savages as innocent of sin.
Another one wrote about how they are equal in every
respect and so in how many of their surroundings. They

(15:00):
all live justly and in conformity with the laws of nature. Basically,
we have we just found a whole continent of people
basically lived in a garden of vida. But then this
concept of ecological nobility that is perpetuated is of course flawed.
I mean, like I mentioned earlier, there were cases of

(15:23):
overexploitation and damage done to the environment. And yet we
also find a lot of indigenous groups living in compatibility
of the ecological limitations of their home area, getting familiar
with the lands that they live on and what it
takes to preserve them for the next generations. A lot

(15:48):
of what is seen as the sort of virgin landscape
was profoundly shaped by the controlled burns, the horticulture, the
hourden and other activity is done by indigenous groups throughout
the Americas, for example in the case of the Amazon rainforest,

(16:09):
and in Australia as another case where the control boons
really shaped that landscape over thousands and thousands of years.
To this day, you know, the methods used by indigenous
peoples have been found to be you know, superior to
that was used by non indigenous peoples living in the
same habitat methods like poly cropping techniques and hand soil fertility,

(16:34):
sustainable harvesting, and of course they are these culturally encoded
moreas that are you know, placed in these communities that
helped result in the preservation of these resources. Then he
also had account for the fact that no culture has stagnant.

(16:55):
Every culture changes over time, and as a result of
the capitalist market economy, there is this pressure to overexploit
the land for the sake of profit. You know, a
lot of way are these documented patterns of land cultivation

(17:17):
and land preservation are found is usually in the outskirts
and the margins of the capitalist market economy. Such practices
can be more difficult to find right in the belly
of the beast. For example, the rappapa in western Venezuela,

(17:43):
they were traditionally mobile over an extensive area plants and food,
surgeon game, and now they are stationary. Now they are settled,
and now they sort of are forced to adopt a
different lifestyle in response to their new material conditions. When
you had that lesser population density and greater freedom to roam,

(18:07):
it was easier to both satisfy subsistence needs and also
maintain the health and vitality of the ecosystem over an
extended period of time. But now that sill pluses are needed,
now that agriculture has been reduced to a very small

(18:31):
portion of the population, and that those techniques are now
expected to be more intensive in order to keep up
with the demands, those lifestyles and those cultural moras and
those practices have had to change. But back to the
idea of the noble savage, right, and particularly drilling into

(18:53):
this idea of the noble aspect of it right, because
there's some confusion, as GROUPA points out between these two
meanings associated with the word nobility. Could say, someone is
noble in the sense that they are you know, moral good,
exemplary in their behavior and their exequette in their ethical standards.

(19:22):
But you could say if somebody is noble in the
sense they have this position in a sort of a
class system, a hereditary position in a class system, and
elevated economic status. Rousseau didn't come up with the phrase,
and in fact he never used in his writings. What

(19:43):
Terre Ellingson historian discovered, or rather explored in his book
The Myth of the Noble Savage, is that the term
was coined over a century before Russo's birth by a
guy named by a French lawyers not grapher named Mark
Lescarboo and Escarboo described indigenous peoples as truly noble, not

(20:07):
having any action, but it's generous, whether we consider their
hunting or their employment in the wars. The nobility was
more so associated not with just moral qualities like generosity
and good behavior, but also nobility from a legal standpoint.

(20:34):
The lives of freedom, the privileges, and the responsibilities that
the indigenous people enjoyed were also found, according to less Carboo,
within the European nobility in Cannibals and kings nance prot
just the name of Marvin. Harris went on to explain

(20:56):
why less Carboo had recognized nobility among the Indienous people
that he visited. You know, a lot of the band
and village societies. There was a level of economic and
political freedom that very few enjoyed in his day and
even today. You know, people decided for themselves how long
they wanted to work on a particular day, what they

(21:17):
would do, or if they would even work at all.
You know, they didn't have to deal with the taxes
and rents and tribute payments that and one I could
even extend to say, debts that keep people today and
in the past so confined and restricted in their limited
life on this earth. What should have been, you know,
the sort of normal standard you know of human freedom

(21:42):
is in contrast with European society. Just like mind blow in. Yeah,
there's another David Graeber. Actually, I've been talking about There
Never Was at West a lot recently, and one of
the things that he talks about in that in The
Never Was a West is this like trick that European
writers use when they're looking at another society, which is

(22:03):
like they they present themselves as like people whose behaviors
are sort of are entirely rational, and they're solving a
logic puzzle, and then they go find, like, I don't know,
what they consider to be the weirdest thing, and so
like sorry, they go find what they consider to be
the weirdest thing that like another culture does and look

(22:26):
at it through this you know, this lens which it
draws in the reader to be doing this sort of
logic puzzle and trying to figure out, oh, how could
these people do this thing? And then you know, if
you if you pull back the lens a little bit.
Look at like what these supposedly objective European like theorists
of doing. It's like, well, okay, these guys all have
these really weird ceremonies and like they eat they they

(22:46):
eat the flesh of their God every weekend and stuff
like that, and so you get this really interesting. But
but the when when you read it through their their
sort of colonial ethnography, you get this image of both
societies that's very weird that that lets you sort of
that conceals the fact that, yeah, like when when these

(23:08):
European writers are talking about meeting indigenous people like you,
kind of the way that it's written makes it very
easy to sort of like do this colonial thing where
you forget that every single French writer who is writing
about this lives in like the most hierarchical society of
the world has ever seen. Yeah, yeah, that's so true.

(23:28):
And it's like, well, yeah, of course, like they they
went to literally any other place on Earth and talk
to people and we are like, oh my god, these
people are like are really freed. It's like, well, yeah,
it's because these guys live under the French Like they're
like French absolutism. This is like, I think Graber's line
was like that, this is a society where every single
person when they when they walk into a dining room
immediately knows the class of every single other person sitting

(23:51):
around the table by like how they hold their silverware. Yeah,
it's absurd, you know, when a lot of the rest
of the world is like, you know, living on the
generosity of the people around them, being reliable in you know,
the foundations of you know, community, not even necessarily because

(24:13):
I mean, obviously they were hierarchies to be found within
a lot of these cultures and communities, but not to
the extent that you would have you found in and
some of these European societies not even close. Yeah, these
are the European like I don't know, like Europe has
been really really I mean, you know, this is the

(24:34):
sort of organizational trend of European society for like the
last like four or five hundred years has been just
an incredible, unfathomable centralization on the level that was just
it's just sort of incomprehensible to most of the people
who've ever lived. But we treat as sort of normal
now because it's a society that we've grown up under. Yes,
it's a I'm trying to draw a comparison between Europeans

(25:00):
encountering this level of freedom and other societies and sort
of like I can't think of any specific example right now,
but you know how you know, grown up as a
child in a particular household, your house would have certain
norms that you think is just like universal, you know,

(25:21):
like everybody does this. Obviously this is just a fact
of life in the universe. But in reality, it's just
like some way a quick when any appearance had that
you just had to grow up with. Yeah, yeah, like like,
for example, this is a really weird example. But let's say,
for example, you had like ceramic dishes. Would not allow

(25:44):
it to be used ever, right, they were purely for
decoration and appearance. Tooled you that it's some grave moral
sin eat off of ceramic dishes. And then you go
to somebody's house and they have all their plates laid out,
turning and like the utterly baffled by how they're able

(26:06):
to eat off a ceramic dishes. If I could think
of a better example, but for now, yeah, that's what
I'm row with anyway, despite recognizing all of this freedom

(26:26):
and stuff. They were kind of like disgusted by it,
at least some of them, you know, some of them,
when publishing their texts in Europe, would put their own
liberal ideas into the mouths of indigenous people to say, oh,
I'm not saying this. This is obviously like trees in
US and I would never say this, but this indigenous

(26:48):
guy who I spoke to the other day, he said it,
and so I'm just publishing what he said. So that
took place sometimes. And then they're also those who would
like actually discussed by the liberty exhibited in so only societies.
But whether they saw that freedom as a positive or

(27:10):
as a negative despite all their fluffy words about intitious liberties,
that doesn't really matter for indigenous people at the end
of the day, because you know, through the centuries, empires
continued to swallow indigenous lands, and the phrase basically disappeared
for about two hundred and fifty years because the idea
of the noble savage was reversed by this stereotype of

(27:34):
the dangerous, brutal savage. Like whole day they defend their
land and way of life, right. It was until eighteen
fifty nine that the term was resurrected by a guy
named John Crawford, a white supremacist. He wanted to become president,
or rather right, he was attempted to become president of
the Ethnological Society of London, and he was very disdainful

(27:58):
of the idea emerging and anthropology and philosophy of universal
human rights, like how dare you you know? So he
introduced the phrase resurrecting after two hundred and fifty years
to make a speech to the society, and by the way,

(28:19):
he missed. He's the one who first misattributed this speech
the phrase to Rousseau, basically ridiculing using the noble savage
as a term to ridicule those who sympathized with such
quote less advanced cultures. And so that sort of fabrication
where he attributed it to Rousseau, and he built up

(28:40):
this straw man to blew it down. You know, it's
basically this myth of the myth of the noble savage.
He creates a straw band of the noble savage as
a myth, and then that's what's perpetuated. But his myth
of the noble savage was the one that was a

(29:02):
myth so it's, you know, the myth of the myth
and noble savage, and so as the British Empire was
reaching the height of its power and he was trying
to ridicule anybody who had anything nice to say about
indienous people, that straband was used to continue to advocate
for the extermination. Crawford's version of noble Savage became the
source for every citation of the myth by anthropologists from Lubbock,

(29:25):
Tyler or Boas through the scholars of the late twentieth century.
So even one hundred years later, people were still using
the term that he came up with, this rhetorical cheap
shots that he used, and to this day it continues
to polarize our discussions and obstruct any sort of nuanced

(29:47):
approach to hunt to gather life. And having discovered all
of this, I have to say, it really made me
feel like a part of history. There never was a
noble savage myth, at least on the sense of this
straw man of simple societies living in happy inner sons.

(30:13):
Travelers usually accounted for both virtues and vices. They spoke
of the positives of these societies and also things that
they weren't too fond of both the concept of the
noble savage and the concept of the brutal savage, a

(30:37):
fantasies constructions of a European mind that was intent on
boxing Indigenous people in this sort of suspended state of
either purity or evil going forward. I think it's really
silly to continue to perpetuate the term. I think it
really keeps us from engaging with history properly. And I mean,

(31:00):
even if somebody is exaggerating or expungent certain aspects of
a particular society or culture that should be engaged with directly,
you know, I don't think you should fall back on
a lazy troop popularized by a white supremacist. I mean,
we live under states now, we live on the capitalism now,

(31:22):
and I don't think I don't fail to people for
trying to imagine what life must have been like before then,
before these institutions became so all in compassing. What becomes
an issue is when we take these past societies and
we use them as the speakers of virtue, instead of

(31:43):
going back and trying to take their lessons and their
practices and adopting them and inspreting them to move forward.
There was a lot of freedom, and there still is
a lot of freedom left to be uncovered in our history.
It is obscured in our history classes. It isn't taught. Instead,
we're taught facts and figures and wars and notable, notable individuals.

(32:09):
We're taught of kings and dictators and high priests and
emperors and prime ministers and presidents and chiefs and judges
and jailers and dungeons, penitentiaries and concentration camps. This is
always a stance now, but it doesn't have to be.

(32:29):
And if we go into have an honest exploration of
our history in order to inform our future, we have
to free our imaginations of this lazy troop of the
noble savage. That's it for me for this episode. Can
check me out on YouTube dot com slash Andrewism and

(32:53):
also on Twitter at underscore Saint Drew, as well as
when Patreon dot com slash Saint Drew. This is it
could happen here. Yeah, you can find us in the
usual places on Twitter, Instagram, and Yeah, go be free.
It could happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.

(33:14):
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