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By Newsweek Editors
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The European explorers who followed Christopher Columbus to America brought back novelties like potatoes and tobacco. But if we were to draw up a list of early American exports that changed the course of history, one of the most important was a myth: the myth of the noble savage.
The Europeans were overwhelmed by the grandeur of the lands they had reached, and were equally impressed by the people. Columbus wrote to his patrons, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain, that the natives were gentle and meek, knowing no evil and possessing no weapons. In 1580 Michel de Montaigne wrote a short essay called "On the Cannibals," in which he provided the blueprint for a whole literature and philosophy of the noble savage. Nearly 200 years later, Jean Jacques Rousseau wrote his "Discourse on the Origin of Inequality," in which he compared civilized man unfavorably with the savage, who needed no more than "food, a female and sleep." Rousseau attributed all of our ills to the bane of private property: the savage was happy because he owned nothing.
Rousseau's ideas about primitive lifestyles are difficult to take seriously now, but they were immensely influential in their time. More recently, the noble savage has been cast in a new role, as a paragon of conservation and the sustainable use of resources. According to this version of the myth, Western man rapes the environment in the selfish pursuit of personal gain while native people live in harmony with nature, preserving stocks for future generations.
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This is as false as all other fantasies. We know that native peoples were responsible for the extinction of species on a huge scale long before Europeans appeared on the scene. A whole bestiary of large mammals was wiped out in North America, including the giant sloth, giant beaver, camel and two-toed horse, before Columbus got there. The Aborigines did the same for large mammals in Australia, and the arrival of the Maoris in New Zealand was quickly followed by the extinction of 34 species of birds.
It is scarcely surprising, therefore, that attempts to preserve the environment by transferring large tracts of land to native peoples have been frustrated. Placed in the midst of abundant and valuable resources, with no private-property rights and thus no reason to hold back from immediate consumption, native tribes behave as most of us would do under similar circumstances: they grab whatever is going. The idea that native peoples should be noble ecowarriors reflects the current preoccupations of Western intellectuals, not the reality of the lives of indigenous peoples. We project onto these peoples the fads and obsessions of our contemporary lives: we expect them to live in peace, to shun class distinctions, to be kind to animals and respectful of trees. When indigenous peoples fail to live up to these stereotypes, they quickly find that their Western advocates turn against them. Environmental activists have, for example, destroyed the livelihood of thousands of Inuit with a campaign against the use of seal pelts.
By now, we should have learned from the past. It helps nobody--least of all indigenous peoples themselves--to turn them into characters in the world's largest theme parks, acting out the fantasies of Western environmentalists.
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