Monday, February 15, 2010

The Noble Savage

In view of the success of the movie "Avatar," I have decided to write a sequel with the title "Abattoir." It will be about a planet called Kishkes where there is a tribe of red dwarfs called the Shochets whose main weapon is the cleaver. They run around in their little white aprons killing every animal in sight.

A group of green environmentalists invade their planet with the intention of stopping their destruction of its species. The Greens try to do a biodiversity catalog of the planet, but the nasty Shochets prevent them. As a result the Greens send one of their own dwarfs in among the Shochets and he tries to find out their plans, but over time he falls in love with a particularly vicious red dwarf, and as a consequence he turns native and tells the Shochets what the Greens plan. This makes the Shochets very mad, so they attack the Greens with their cleavers and almost annihilate them. The Greens are expelled from the planet Kishkes, muttering "we could have brought you civilization," "we wanted you all to have electric cars," "you should stop killing animals and eating them." In reply the Shochets say "we need nothing from you, we are happy here in our own planet killing as many animals as we like, go back to where you came from and tell them to leave us alone."

The moral of both these stories, that of "Avatar" and "Abattoir" is that the myth of the "noble savage" is still alive and well. In his prescient novel "Brave New World," Aldous Huxley famously had his noble savage, John the Savage commit suicide, because he could neither live in the wild world of the reservation nor the controlled futuristic World State that had developed by 2540. However, history and society have changed considerably since Huxley wrote it in 1932, both great ideologies of the nineteenth century, fascism and communism, have been defeated and have faded. Also, the advance in technology has not only conferred great power to central governments, but has also empowered the individual. Huxley could never have envisaged a world in which all totalitarian ideologies (except Islamism) had been conquered and in which everybody has a personal computer (pc) on their desk and can access the internet.

Aside from historical and technical aspects, the moral reaction to colonialism and imperialism has been a reification of the "Noble savage." In fact it is now no longer politically correct (PC) to refer to anyone as a "savage" and relative evaluations of cultures is taboo, each has a different "narrative" that circumvents comparisons. Thus, the savage treatment of the American native peoples, the Australian aborigines, the Maoris of NZ, the Black Africans in North America, in the Congo and South Africa, the decimation of the native people of Siberia, the Caribbean, and of the Incas and other Central and South American peoples, and ultimately the Jews in "civilized" Europe, leaves little scope for ennobling the debased survivors.

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