Walking Away From The Noble Savage Myth

Weekend Libertarian ^ | August 16, 2011 | B.P. Terpstra

[AustralianConservative]

While popular in revolutionary leftwing Europe, the romantic myth of the “Noble Savage” couldn’t be sustained in real-life Australia. In the 1890s, a Queensland missionary wrote:

‘The Noble Savage’ may exist as a romantic ideal within the covers of a book, but that secluded within the covers of the tropical scrub, and roaming wild his native forests, unfettered by the form and fashion of civilszation, he is a being very different in reality from the fallacious painting of his picture by a poet’s imagination. [i]

Decades earlier, Captain Watkin Tench expressed his unfashionable displeasure of le bon sauvage:

A thousand times…have I wished that those European philosophers, whose closet speculations exalt a state of nature above a state of civilisation, could survey the phantom which their heated imaginations have raised; a savage romancing for prey amidst his native deserts is a creature deformed by all those passions which afflict and degrade our nature, unsoftened by the influence of religion, philosophy and legal instruction. [ii]

In fact, men from many nationalities, rejected the myth of the Noble Savage, when confronted with the realities of tribal life. For in their socially-incorrect minds, there was nothing glamorous about malnourished aboriginal women, for example. Or put frankly, the eye was more reliable than made-for-secular-Europe narratives:

Dinesh D’Souza reminds us in The End of Racism of a more realistic picture painted by Robert Hughes:

The Iora people never washed themselves, but “spent their lives coated in a mixture of rancid fish oil, animal grease, sand, dust, and sweat.”

Barbarically:

“One common form of courtship was for a man to “fix on some female of a tribe at enmity with his own…stupefy her with blows on her head, back, neck…then drag her streaming with blood…till he reaches his tribe.”

[AustralianConservative]

http://weekendlibertarian.blogspot.com/2011/08/walking-away-from-noble-savage-myth.html

[Morpheus2009]

It’s about time, especially true was the fact that Native American tribes were at war with one another prior to any visit by the white settlers. Cortez exploited the fact that the Aztecs had many enemies, which proved to gain the Spanish some allies in the fight, especially Malinche, the concubine to Cortez

[count-your-change]

When European cities were pestilential pits of disease and filth and the inhabitants equally foul and unwashed as any savage it's little wonder that a sentimental mythical creature known as a noble savage would arise in some literary imagination.

[Ruy Dias de Bivar]

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[douginthearmy]

“One common form of courtship was for a man to “fix on some female of a tribe at enmity with his own…stupefy her with blows on her head, back, neck…then drag her streaming with blood…till he reaches his tribe.”

OK, I'll admit I don't get out much, but when exactly did this go out of style?

[bajabaja]

That is courtship for you. But what do they do to divorce one another?