Noble Savage

The natural state of man is one of utter depravity such that without societal structure the young would descend into savagery. Such is the imprint left on those of us who'd been exposed to William Golding's 1954 allegorical novel Lord Of The Flies. For those who might have missed this middle school rite of passage, the subsequent 1963 film adaptation depicts these young castaways in warpaint drag brandishing primitive weapons. Lest there be any confusion about the "end of innocence" message, there's the naval officer as he first confronts this band and expresses disappointment in seeing British boys exhibiting such feral and warlike behaviour -- just as he stares awkwardly at his own warship.

But, wait. The novel is a piece of fiction. Might there be something empirically based to support the thesis? That's the subject of our focus article (Lord of the Flies Revisited), a real life account of what occurred when six boys were shipwrecked for fifteen months. Their reported positive experience -- including assigned duties, self-imposed time-outs, daily song and prayer --  would seem to undercut Golding's cynical view of mankind. Let those opposing views frame our discussion.

Noble Savage connotes man's state of nature as one of innate goodness so long as it is not somehow corrupted by civilization. The use of the term Savage, reportedly first appearing in a 17th century play by John Dryden, was not meant in the pejorative sense of today but rather meant "wild" as in "I am free as nature first made man . . . . when wild in woods the noble savage ran."  

The idea that the moral sense in humans is natural and innate and based on feelings, rather than societally imposed, thereafter became the subject of great debate. Thomas Hobbes envisioned man as naturally depraved such that the absolute rule of a king was the only possible alternative to inevitable violence and disorder. Charles Dickens was even more directly unsentimental -- referring to the Indians, he suggested they should be "civilized off the face of the earth."

Others were more generous of spirit as Alexander Pope in his "Essays on Man" with his ironic "Lo, the poor Indian! . . ." reference to happiness being derived by living close to nature. Jean-Jacques Rousseau insisted man was born with the potential for goodness and argued it was civilization that corrupts spirit. 

Our own Benjamin Franklin, with the street cred of having negotiated with Native Americans during the French and Indian War, stressed racial equality and the universality of moral sense among all peoples. He praised the Indian way of life, amidst the scorn voiced by others oriented towards their wholesale dehumanisation in order to rationalize our country's aggressive manifest destiny.

But the discussion will center around where you find yourself personally on the man-corrupts-society-or-society-corrupts-man spectrum, as it plays out in politics, culture, race, and religion.

On the one hand Stanley Kubrick once professed opposition to "primitivism," suggesting man isn't a noble savage but rather an ignoble savage and any attempt to create social institutions on a false view of the nature of man is probably doomed to failure.

On the other hand, we have that wonderful line from Moby Dick citing Ishmael's characterization of Queequeg: "Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian."