Ter Ellingson has an interesting thesis. In The Myth of the Noble Savage, Ellingson argues that the myth of the noble savage was never widely believed–a straw man made to be universally debunked. I haven’t read Ellingson’s account, so I can’t speak much to it except that it seems to contradict the entire body of Romantic thought. The term “noble savage” first appeared in English with John Dryden in 1672, though it originated earlier, in 1609, with Lescarbot’s Histoire de la Nouvelle France. Lescarbot noted that among the Mi’kmaq, everyone was allowed to hunt–an activity enjoyed only by Europe’s nobility. This led Lescarbot to remark that “the Savages are truly noble.” However, to trace the etymology of a popular phrase is a very different problem from the history of that idea it expresses.

To justify their colonialism, and the conquest and genocide it entailed, Europeans used a number of arguments. Often, these arguments relied on blatant racism; the imagery of the bloodthirsty savage, or the godless heathen. Sometimes they appealed to fear to destroy these threats; other times, to Christian charity to convert them. Perhaps the most insidious tack, though, was to praise them.

Many accounts of indigenous peoples in the New World, Africa and Oceania follow this mold. Indigenous peoples are presented as innocent, unspoiled by civilization. They are innocent, honest, healthy, moral people living in harmony with nature and one another. The savage is like the child, innocent of the “real world” and all its concommitant iniquities. And just as children must be protected by their parents, so too must these innocent savages be protected by more mature, worldly European powers.

It is a racism that robs indigenous peoples of their right to self-determination, by denying them the adulthood they have earned. It reduces all indigenous peoples to an eternal childhood. It justifies cruelty, oppression, conquest and genocide by spinning a fairy tale of dependency. That fairy tale may even make some sense in the outdated visions of lineal cultural “progressions” in vogue in the nineteenth century, but we supposedly know better now. “Savages” survived perfectly well without Europe for millions of years, while European powers face a never-ending list of woes after only a few millennia. If any type of society has shown itself incapable of operating on its own, it’s more likely ours.

This myth of the Noble Savage is often put on the shoulders of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but it is instructive to see how imperialists and colonialists cherry-picked through Rousseau’s corpus for the parts that justified their atrocities. For example, key to Rousseau’s theory, as outlined in Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality, was his notion that all humans share that “nobility” by nature, but that we lose it because of our lives in society. Rousseau’s inability to consider the possibility of uncivilized society is unfortunate, but he’s more right than he is wrong. Humans are products of evolution, as is our natural tribal society. Evolution creates things that work, and where we see things going wrong, that is the first indication that an organism is trying to go very sharply against everything it’s evolved to do.

The fact of the matter is that there are many societies where murder, theft, deceit and treachery are virtually unknown, where sharing is not just a virtue but simply expected, and where compassion is as fundamental to daily existence as the pursuit of profit is in our own capitalist society. It is not a matter of the “nobility” of these savages; it is a matter of living in accordance with our own nature, rather than in spite of it.

Consider the issue of theft. In our own culture, there is no incentive to refrain from stealing. So, we invent such incentives in the form of laws and police. But, if you can evade those, then there is no reprecussion whatsoever, and much to gain. Laws exist in our society for precisely this reason, because the society itself suffers from such deep, systemic flaws that such rudimentary stopgaps are required to keep the entire system from falling apart in great chaos and violence.

Yet, there are other societies that have no such laws, and yet are much more peaceful than our own. In our society, sharing is considered abnormal. We thank people for sharing, and teach our children that it is good to share–which also sends a message that sharing is above and beyond the norm, something out of the ordinary, something that should not be expected. In actual point of fact, we penalize sharing. As Richard Stallman wrote on the more specific issue of sharing software:

Suppose that both you and your neighbor would find it useful to run a certain program. In ethical concern for your neighbor, you should feel that proper handling of the situation will enable both of you to use it. A proposal to permit only one of you to use the program, while restraining the other, is divisive; neither you nor your neighbor should find it acceptable.

Signing a typical software license agreement means betraying your neighbor: “I promise to deprive my neighbor of this program so that I can have a copy for myself.” People who make such choices feel internal psychological pressure to justify them, by downgrading the importance of helping one’s neighbors–thus public spirit suffers. This is psychosocial harm associated with the material harm of discouraging use of the program.

Many users unconsciously recognize the wrong of refusing to share, so they decide to ignore the licenses and laws, and share programs anyway. But they often feel guilty about doing so. They know that they must break the laws in order to be good neighbors, but they still consider the laws authoritative, and they conclude that being a good neighbor (which they are) is naughty or shameful. That is also a kind of psychosocial harm, but one can escape it by deciding that these licenses and laws have no moral force.

Stallman is considering abstract goods like software, movies or music specifically–as were the authors of the Family Entertainment and Copyright Bill of 2005, who made sharing a form of domestic terrorism punishable by harsher fines and longer jail sentences than dumping raw, toxic sewage into children’s drinking water. However, this is the only form of sharing that really requires punishment, as sharing physical resources requires one to sacrifice those resources for another. Where technology has allowed for a pure form of sharing, laws must step in to curb such behavior. For if sharing ever became commonplace, expected, then our very society would be at risk.

There are societies where sharing is just such an expectation. People do not share because it is “good,” but because there’s simply no other way to live. For them, not sharing would be as absurd as to ask one of us to go about the streets naked. It’s simply not done. No one thinks of it, no one lauds the person who shares. It’s simply the way things are. These societies are small; everyone knows everyone else. They depend on one another every day for survival. Why would anyone steal in such a society, when they can simply ask, and be assured use of whatever is at stake? There is no need for laws against theft in these societies, not because its people are inherently better, but because its system fits human nature–and ours denies it. It gives people every reason to share, and no reason to hoard; ours does precisely the opposite, and then expects a stern lecture to make us share anyway. Their societies work with people as they are; ours requires people to be better than they have ever been–and imposes flimsy, artificial punishments for those who fail to live up to that lofty ideal.

When I suggest that life prior to the Neolithic Revolution was more in keeping with human nature, and that–unsurprisingly–humans benefitted from that arrangement, I often find the “Noble Savage” thrown back at me. This straw man is easy to knock down; it is easy to show that indigenous peoples are no kinder, gentler or nobler than we. But that isn’t my argument. If it were, what hope would we have? My ancestors are European. If such “nobility” is inherent to specific “racial” groups, then I can never be saved. It is precisely because this “Noble Savage” does not exist that there is hope for us. We, too, can live a life in accordance with human nature, rather than defying it. We, too, can enjoy the same peace, freedom and liesure as they. They are the natural birthright of all humanity; not only can we have these things, we must have these things. We are dying for the dearth of them.

Tribal life is not a utopia. They have their problems, their passing worries, their gossip and their dramas. A perfect utopia is impossible, because without some struggle in life, existence would be boring, and we would pass unchanged save in flesh from birth to death. No perfect world could be boring, and any perfect world would need to include a chance for maturity. There are even some foragers–such as the Inuit–who live in regions so marginal that they even suffer from violence and other problems. But these problems are the exception, not the rule. They are not endemic to tribal life, as they are to us. Where tribes have a peppering of problems to give spice to life, our civilization is a never-ending crisis. The poor starve to death, and the rich work to death. Those who don’t die from malnutrition die from stress, and in between all we know is worry and woe. Tribal life is not a utopia, but in comparison to where we are now after 10,000 years of denying our nature, it might be fair to call it that.