Dr. David Deming has an interesting essay on the logical flaws in modern environmentalism that are rooted in a meme known as “The Noble Savage”.
Excerpt (with my bolded quote) below:
All of this would be of academic interest only, were it not the case that the modern environmental movement and many of our public policies are based implicitly on the myth of the Noble Savage. The fountainhead of modern environmentalism is Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. The first sentence in Silent Spring invoked the Noble Savage by claiming
“there was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings.”
But the town Carson described did not exist, and her polemic, Silent Spring, introduced us to environmental alarmism based on junk science. As the years passed, Rachel Carson was elevated to sainthood and the template laid for endless spasms of hysterical fear-mongering, from the population bomb, to nuclear winter, the Alar scare, and global warming.
Human beings have not, can not, and never will live in harmony with nature. Our prosperity and health depend on technology driven by energy. We exercise our intelligence to command nature, and were admonished by Francis Bacon to exercise our dominion with “sound reason and true religion.” When we are told that our primary energy source, oil, is “making us sick,” or that we are “addicted” to oil, these are only the latest examples of otherwise rational persons descending into gibberish after swooning to the lure of the Noble Savage. This ignorant exultation of the primitive can only lead us back to the Stone Age.
Read the entire essay here
The Noble Savage and Noble Cause Corruption seem to be familiar bedfellows.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
TonyG says:
February 15, 2012 at 12:32 pm
R. Gates says:
Civilization is just a collective way one species has found to survive.
From what I see, it’s a bad choice for long-term survival. “Civilization” ultimately weakens the race, by suppressing its evolution.
————
Sort of like being self-domesticated? Time will tell if it indeed is a “bad choice” for our long term survival as a species. Civilization is certainly a product of our relatively mild Holocene climate. If we slip into a climate less docile, cooler or warmer, it will be interesting to see if the new climate would be so kind to civilization– though perhaps to your point, such a change might actually prove positive for humans as a species, even if civilization collapses.
Sacre bleu Mssr. Rousseau!
The argument presented in the essay is teleological, and predicted on facile suppositions. In short, it’s bullshit, and you ought to know it. Which leaves the blog host and the supporting commenter to be either stupid, or so driven by dogma as to be willfully ignorant. I vote for just plain stupid. It’s a fact – people who subscribe to this sort of un-American, non forward thinking garbage just tend to be…well, stupid. It’s OK. No shame in being dumber than your classmates. Some kids just are. But let’s get a grip shall we? Time to be grown ups now, and yes, the smart kids were right, and you ought to just deal with it. They are smart, and you are dumb. Deal with it – it’s OK.
David Ball says:
February 15, 2012 at 1:56 pm
R.Gates, do not pretend you care more about about nature.
_____
I care infinitely about nature, in all aspects and in every way it is manifested. To care about nature is to care about yourself and your place in the amazing universe we inhabit. But more than that, to care about nature is to care about our connectedness to the world around us– how it impacts us and how we impact it. For nature is the web of this connectedness, spanning from highest heights to the deepest ocean, with the strange and beautiful life dwelling there, and even deeper, to the internal motions of the core of the planet itself, which bring about the magnetic field that gives protection to all life on earth. This marvelous interconnectedness on this planet and well balanced harmony is nature, and to not care about it, is to be dead inside, or to be so exceedingly self-centered that you imagine that you really are an island unto yourself.
Gates you really have not been reading my posts. ….out
There’s a book called You Sane Men whose epigraph is: “This I know: Mother Nature is a maniac.”
David Ball,
I read your posts very carefully, and when I come across nonsense like this, in which you say about me:
“It is you who wish to slow development to full potential.”
It seems you’ve read none of my post, but only state things you think “someone like me” might say or believe.
The noble savage is one of those ideas so dumb that only an intellectual could have come up with it. We’ve gotten to the point where people with no ability to feed or shelter or protect themselves are telling everyone else who is working to do those things that they’re doing them all wrong.
R.Gates, the idea of the “Noble Savage” is the notion that savages are noble in the way they lived. It seems noble until you realize no one wants to live that way. NOT EVEN THE NOBLE SAVAGES.
The premise that man’s nature is not natural and that his manipulation of nature is not natural is a false premise that leads to the irrational self-fulfilling pseudo-science promulgated by ideological environmentalism and the associated CAGWism.
The correct premise wrt man’s nature is we are masters of nature through understanding and verifying nature’s behavior via observations of nature. Go for it mankind . . . nature is open as a source of plentiful changing resources . . . !!!
John
R.Gates, show me how your ideology will lead to mankind’s full potential.
The “noble savage” is a myth as much as the myth of the “noble red man”. When you read of the real behavior of native American tribes who raided one another; killed each other without mercy; used captives as target practice, filling them with arrows for target practice; raped women, usually before killing them; occasionally adopted captured children provided that they were not killed for annoying their captors by incessantly crying for their dead mothers; practiced slavery; used torture as an entertainment venue, to include roasting captives over fires etc etc.
It is the rule of law when enforced equitably in a modern, technologically developed culture that seems to have made humans seem less savage. But beneath it all there has been NO evolutionary change in our DNA that makes any significant difference to the real nature of the basic human being.