The Return of the "Noble Savage" and the Danger of Romanticized Debate

by Nathaniel Whittemore

categories: Dissent, poptech

Published October 23, 2009 @ 07:18AM PT

At both the Opportunity Collaboration last week and in the first day of Pop!Tech yesterday, there has been an occasional tendency towards the dramatic romanticizing of the human condition in and around poverty. While there is much to learn about resilience and the joy in community from the poor, the conversation can easily detour into a modern day rehashing of the 19th century notion of the "noble savage." It's my contention that we simply don't have time for conversation on this level any more.

The original notion of the "noble savage" was a counterpoint in the Age of Reason. In a sort of reframing of "original sin," the idea was that man's original state - connected with nature, in small, simple collectives, was pure, and that it was science, technology, and living in urban societies that was corrupting.

It is, perhaps, a seductive reasoning, particularly for crowds today who are grappling with the excesses of human consumption. What's more, it plays into an increasingly vibrant topic of conversation to wonder whether our material good has actually made us happier, and whether it is happiness, not GDP that we should be measuring as an indicator of a nation's success.

I've seen it happen over and over again in the last week that people take these very good and very important questions - the excess of consumption and a reinterpretation of happiness - and unfortunately take them to their dramatic extremes.

At the Opportunity Collaboration, it manifested as a fetishism for geographically-organized community. There was an idea that came out often in the group discussions that individualism corroded the power of community. That may be, and obviously individualism taken to its extreme leaves little room for a commitment to common destiny. But how can we on the one hand rail against the accident of birth that predisposes people to poverty, health, and other injustice, yet at the same time hold up the accident of birth that roots people in a particular geographic community as the essential organizing principle of human existence?

Forgive my individualism, but had I been rooted only in the community in which I happen to have been born, I would be rotting away, buried under a lack of opportunity and unstimulating job opportunities. Community matters deeply, but geography is only one organizing principle. The power and beauty of the new world we live in is that we can carry community with us, find and connect with people we would never have met 20 years ago, and connect people across silos and sectors.

At Pop!Tech yesterday, the extremes were manifested in an argument about the inherent joy and happiness of poor people. One participant in the audience asked how we address climate change if India and China have a right to the sort of increase in quality of life that we in the West harnessed through cheap, destructive modes of production. Photographer Chris Jordan, who I blogged about yesterday and have deep respect for, responded to thundering applause that poor people's quality of life was higher than ours. He then went on to list a set of indigenous people who he had lived with who were beningly joyous, apparently all the time.

This quality of conversation has absolutely no place in our world. Seriously. In the same way that the Millennial generation has largely turned its back on the political Culture Wars, we need to turn our back on any conversation that tries to pit development versus underdevelopment, urban versus rural, modernity versus primativism, or basically other Manichean construction that somehow promises to enlighten.

No one group has it all right. The questions that matter exist on a plane simultaneously above and below the level of the diametric oppositions above. The core questions of human existence are and have remained the same for some time: what is our responsibility to others? How do we derive and understand meaning? How do we live our values? In day to day life, the name of the game is doing the best we can and constantly trying to improve, a little bit at a time, how we treat others, how we use resources, how we discover meaning in small beauty.

In his wonderful 2005 Kenyon College commencement address, author David Wallace wrote that the choice of what to think about was the real freedom of education. He said: "The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day."

Human history shows us how easy it is to wrap ourselves in totalitarian ideologies of any political, social, or economic stripe. It also shows us a road of discarded ideologies that were too inflexible for the complicated, random, vague, malleable, and ever changing reality of human society and human existence.

We live in a world which is heaving under the pressure of resource constraints, in which injustice is still rampant, in which talent and capacity is wasted over and over and over every day for no good reason. We just don't have time for conversations that drag us into a dialectic between romantic ideologies and don't advance us towards real learning, real understanding, and a greater capacity for a more healthy 21st century.

(Photo: An icon of Manichaenism, an early form of metaphysics which views the world as a dualistic opposition between the forces of good and evil. Source)