Noble savage

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.Foremost among the atrocities connected with the religious conflict was the St. Batholomew's massacre (August 23-24, 1572) ... The Parisian populace inflamed by anti-Protestant preaching, and a general massacre ensued, devastating the Huguenot community of Paris. Bodies were stripped naked, mutilated, and thrown into the Seine. The massacres spread throughout France into the fall of 1572, spreading as far as Bordeaux . ... Estimates of the total number of deaths vary widely; modern historians tend to accept the approximate number of ten thousand. ... Huguenots were not entirely innocent of massacres themselvesThe cannibal practices are admitted 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 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. … 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?I am as free as nature first made man,Ere the base laws of servitude began,When wild in woods the noble savage ran.Lo, the poor Indian! whose untutor'd mindSees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind;His soul proud Science never taught to strayFar 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.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.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.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 ...Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of Warre, 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 shortAdario 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.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.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.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 with what we call civil Society.Savages we call them, because their manners differ from ours, which we think the perfection of civility; they think the same of theirs.Franklin's writings on American Indians 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.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.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 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 '; l'amour propre was already manifest in them ... and slights or affronts were consequently visited with vengeances terribles.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 . 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 . 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' ... failed to realize fully how strongly amour propre tended to assume a collective form ... in pride of race, of nationality, of class.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.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 than ever ran wild in any earthly woods, and the world will be all the better when this place knows him no more.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.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.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.The cruelties of the Sepoy natives 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.For early modern scholars from 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.One who turns for help to Fairchild's 1928 study, a compendium of citations from romantic writings on the 'savage' may be surprised to find 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.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. Concepts:Cultural examples:I have learned to appreciate better than hitherto, and to make more allowance for, the dislike, aversion, contempt wherewith Indians are usually regarded by their white neighbors, and have been since the days of the Puritans. It needs but little familiarity with the actual, palpable aborigines to convince anyone that the poetic Indian—the Indian of Cooper and Longfellow—is only visible to the poet's eye. To the prosaic observer, the average Indian of the woods and prairies is a being who does little credit to human nature—a slave of appetite and sloth, never emancipated from the tyranny of one animal passion save by the more ravenous demands of another. As I passed over those magnificent bottoms of the Kansas, which form the reservations of the Delawares, Potawatamies, etc., constituting the very best corn-lands on earth, and saw their owners sitting around the doors of their lodges at the height of the planting season and in as good, bright planting weather as sun and soil ever made, I could not help saying, 'These people must die out—there is no help for them. God has given this earth to those who will subdue and cultivate it, and it is vain to struggle against His righteous decree.' 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. 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 pre-civilized conditions, 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 character of the 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 European travel literature. During the late 16th and 17th centuries, the figure of the indigene or '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. During the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre (1572), some ten to twenty thousand men, women, and children were massacred by Catholic mobs, chiefly in Paris, but also throughout France. This horrifying breakdown of civil control was deeply disturbing to thoughtful people on both sides of the religious divide. 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.' In 'Of Cannibals', Montaigne uses cultural (but not moral) relativism for the purpose of satire. His cannibals are neither noble nor especially good, but not worse than 16th-century Europeans. In this classical humanist view, customs differ but people everywhere are prone to cruelty, a quality that Montaigne detested. The treatment of indigenous peoples by the 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.