The Noble Savage is French Toast

The American Thinker ^ | January 30, 2007 | James Lewis

[Old Professer]

He's just an old meanie; and he doesn't want peace.

[CatoRenasci]

Politically Correct history is nonsense, as ordinary people have known for a long time.

The professionals have known it as well.

Indeed. I trained as an intellectual historian in the late '60s and early '70s and missed almost all of this nonsense. It was beginning to creep in with the women's historians and the whole 'history from the bottom up' crowd, but mostly everyone did pretty good history. I look at the crap that comes out these days and thank God every day that my training predated this and that the hundreds, nay thousands, of works of history, philosophy, literary criticism, and belle lettres I read over half a dozen years contained almost none of it.

[bert]

I've tried to tell you lots of times. War is nnatural selection in action.

[LexBaird]

It's interesting to note that the Americas had no slavery before the Europeans and Africans came over. Before that, they just killed everyone.

Not so. Amerinds did practice slavery and forced labor of captives. See here.

[gcruse]

"Maybe the Mayans and Aztecs were not exactly peace-loving."

Uh-oh. Straw man warning.
I don't think anyone ever accused the Aztecs of being peace-loving.

[GoLightly]

Great read. Thanx for the ping.

[IrishCatholic]

Good find. Bookmark for later printing.

[doberville]

>> I find it interesting that Katrina exposed modern day slavery – it’s called Welfare.<<

Thank you, Yoe. You have just stated in one sentence what we all saw when we watched the Superdome Disaster.

Welfare has even managed to extinguish the inherent survival instinct.

Grotesque.

[foreshadowed at waco]

I went to a Mohawk pow wow in upstate New York several years ago...there were many representative of different tribes there dancing, selling artifacts and jewelry, and just hanging out. One very handsome man was an Apache from the Southwest...as he walked by a Mohawk man that I was talking to made a gutteral sound in his throat as he walked by...my friend who is 3/4 Mohawk and 1/4 Scotch said that many tribes do not like the Apache because they used to systematically kidnap women and children from other tribes and sell them into slavery in Mexico.

[kiriath_jearim]

"Wade presents compelling evidence that humans appear to be genetically predisposed to warfare. Among ancient hunter-gatherers, "incessant warfare" was the norm, just as it is today among the Stone Age tribes of New Guinea and South America."

***
Didn't John Locke state something similar in the first part of his two-part essay on "Civil Government", i.e. man-in-nature and the differences resulting from man forming civil societies?

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks StayAt HomeMother for the link. :')

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[DieHard the Hunter]

> There is not one leftist, socialist or liberal regime that has been peaceful.

A sweeping generalization, demonstrably incorrect.

Canada and Sweden in the 1960's and 1970's were both peaceful, and both were leftist, socialist and liberal.

[driftless2]

The Civil War was about slavery. Period. Alexander Stephens said "slavery is the cornerstone of the Confederacy". Tariffs had nothing to do with it. Don't even bother to reply.

[Fred Nerks]

Pacifists only talk about being civilized; nations that defend against primitive savages actually do something about it. That makes all the difference.

and that's why we are still alive to talk about it...

[R. Scott]

But the civilized world is constantly faced with aggressive enemies willing to kill and die for some bizarre cause, from the heavenly glory of the Emperor to some Mullah's weird obsession with hanging sixteen year old girls who fall in love. Not to mention yet another Marxist scam to create a perfectly egalitarian paradise on earth, as is underway in Venezuela today.

This will get him in trouble!

[R. Scott]

Jamestown Virginia was founded in 1607
First Africans arrived in 1619 as indentured servants.
Slavery started in 1640.

[Louis Foxwell]

A sweeping generalization, demonstrably incorrect.

Thought I might get flakked for that comment.

There is a secondary qualifier that precludes the examples cited yet remains somewhat obscure. "Democracies that are socialistic" and "socialist democracies" are unique from each other.

Neither Canada nor Sweden consider themselves socialist governments. Both are democratic, leaving them open to the creation of socialized institutions.

Socialist governments are or quickly become nominally democratic. The best current example is Venezuela, a democracy whose constitutional government is being coopted by socialist forces.

A socialist government assumes dictatorial authority over otherwise private sector institutions while acting in the name of "the people." By this definition it cannot be said that either Canada or Sweden are or ever were socialist.

I readily admit that my comment was a deliberate sweeping generalization. Sometimes you just have to know what I am talking about to understand what I am saying.

[Blind Eye Jones]

You might more profitably think of Rousseau as the first Romantic.

Rousseau has given rise to the counter movements that seek to improve society: eg., communism as a corrective of bourgeois society. He's big with the left and with left leaning artists and psychologists who think that Capitalism is repressive and that the solution to what was traded by entering civil society from the state of nature can be found within the id. Freedom is defined by the liberation of the instinctual and primitive forces contained within the id, the irrational forces that are a gold mine for artists. The Rousseau assumption is that man is good by nature and civil society has corrupted him. Little do these liberators -- of the sexual, personal, political, etc. -- realize that there are also dark forces within the id, that demons do come up from the underworld through the floor boards of consciousness.

You're right that Rousseau was a romantic and gave impetus to Utopian fantasies. But in the case of the French Revolution and communist regimes throughout the world, terror usually followed as a consequence of his thinking. The road to hell is paved with good intentions...

[CatoRenasci]

Nicely put.

Of course repression (to use the Freudian term) arose for a good reason, as a way of containing the dark forces and channeling human energy in productive ways. It was a survival skill, and societies that do it best, that is to say in the least psychologically damaging ways, are successful over the longest run. (One could also argue, I suppose, that the inevitability of societal decline and decay is result of the myriad ways repression breaks down and the dark forces emerge, but I digress).

For the creative mind, it is a conundrum: how does one tap the elemental forces, of both light and dark, that are the sine qua non of creativity without unleashing their destructive power. Religious faith has been one answer only partially successful (consider Islam), another has been the personal destructiveness on individual creative artists (drink, drugs, insanity, antisocial behavior). No simple answers here.

[Tribune7]

Bump