Article: The Myth Of The Noble Savage

“Before the engine, before the city, before the plow and the chain and the steel axe, was a time when Mankind lived in peace and simplicity. It was a hard life, certainly, often brutish and short as the phrase goes, but it was free, egalitarian and spent in constant communion with nature. From this primordial state, some peoples rose, or fell, depending on one’s view, but a few persevered. They remained unto the very threshold of modernity — some remain even unto today — the last of the “noble savages”...

...It is an effective narrative, an inviting one. Only one uncertainty remains, lurking in the back of all conversations on the topic: whether any of it is true.”

My 2024 article for Noema on the myth of the so-called ‘noble savage,’ of our supposed primordial harmony with nature, and the alleged ecological consciousness of modern-day indigenous peoples. This was a piece of which I was particularly proud.