Noble savage

The term noble savage expresses a romantic concept of humankind as unencumbered by civilization; the natural essence of the unfettered person. The concept symbolises the idea that without the bounds of civilization, man is essentially good. The concept has particularly associations with romantic philosophy, especially that of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and with romanticism in general. However, the phrase noble savage first appeared in a work of John Dryden in 1672.

The concept appears in many books of the 18th and 19th centuries. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein forms one of the better-known examples: her monster embodies the ideal. German author Karl May employed the idea extensively in his Wild West stories. Aldous Huxley provided a later example in his novel Brave New World (published in 1932).

Origins

Around the 15th century certain European states began expanding overseas, initially in Africa, later in Asia and in the Americas. In general, they sought mineral resources (such as silver and gold), land (for the cultivation of export crops such as rice and sugar, and the cultivation of other foodstuffs to support mining communities) and labor (to work in mines and plantations). In some cases, colonisers killed the indigenous people. In other cases, the people became incorporated into the expanding states to serve as labor.

Although Europeans recognized these people to be human beings, they had no plans to treat them as equals politically or economically, and also began to speak of them as inferior socially and psychologically. In part through this and similar processes, Europeans developed a notion of "the primitive" and "the savage" that legitimized genocide and ethnocide on the one hand, and European domination on the other. This discourse extended to people of Africa, Asia, and Oceania as European colonialism, neo-colonialism, and imperialism expanded.

The myth of the "noble savage" may have served, in part, as an attempt to re-establish the value of indigenous lifestyles and delegitimatize imperial excesses - establishing exotic humans as morally superior in order to counter-balance the perceived political and economic inferiorities.

As noted above, the idea of the "noble savage" stemmed from a highly romanticized concept, not well founded in fact. Attributes of the "noble savage" often included:

Living in harmony with Nature
Absence of crime
Innocence
Inability to lie
Physical health
Moral courage
Lack of sexual inhibitions

Noble savage

Origins

Further reading