Noble Savages

Remember the Tasaday, that tiny Stone Age tribe living in caves deep in the Philippine jungle? According to the 1972 National Geographic article that made them famous, the Tasaday, completely isolated from civilization, had no words for war or weapon, no sense of private property. Men and women shared in food gathering and child care. Despite the two-to-one male-female ratio, there were no fights over women, and no wife sharing. They had no official leader; instead, “we decide things together,” they said. To complete their saintly profile, they ate a mostly vegetarian diet. They were the living embodiment of Rousseau’s notion of the noble savage: “Man is born good, it’s society that corrupts him.”

This was the time of the Vietnam war and of second-wave feminism, and it is no wonder that the discovery of the Tasaday made such an impression. Clad in orchid leaves, spending a mere two hours a day gathering food and the rest relaxing and telling stories, the gentle Tasaday proved that most of the evils of modern life—war, capitalist greed, sexism—were not ingrained in our DNA but artifacts of civilization, and as such could be overcome.

In subsequent years, unfortunately, the legend of the Tasaday was dismantled. Instead of genuine Stone Age survivors, they were naive puppets exploited by the Marcos regime. Prior to their “discovery,” they had lived in huts, not caves, and worn regular clothes, not orchid leaves. They had been instructed by Marcos’s officials to take off their clothes and look poor so that tourists would give them money.

I was deeply disappointed, but I didn’t give up hope that somewhere on the planet a few remnants of the noble savage survived to keep alive my faith in human nature. Take, for instance, the Amazon. Surely in those millions of acres there lurked exemplars of Rousseau’s dream?  But no: both the Wairanu, famous for their slaughter of five American missionaries in the 1950s, and the Yanomamo, profiled by Napoleon Chagnon, showed that in a state of nature man (not in the generic sense) is fierce and cruel. He is ever ready to inflict pain and death to other men in fights not over resources as anthropologists had long believed, but over women, and pain and death on women when in the grip of jealousy or suspicion.

Ok, I said to myself. It’s pretty hopeless to find the noble savage among humans. But what about among the animals? Take the rare and endangered bonobo, the so-called “feminist ape.” Close relatives of the chimpanzee, and thus of ours, bonobos live in a matriarchal society in which disputes are settled not by blows and bites, but by sex in many varieties. We have bits of bonobo in our DNA, I reminded myself, and those bits will save us. But to my distress I then learned, not long ago, that bonobo males attack each other even more frequently than chimpanzee males.

And what about chimpanzees? Having devoured everything that Jane Goodall ever wrote for popular consumption, I knew about their less than attractive qualities, their penchant for deceit, their war raids, their cannibalism. But surely they possessed some charming traits that might, after seventy years of studying them, endear them to the great Jane? Wrong again. Dame Jane’s favorite animal is not, it turns out, the chimpanzee, but the dog. Dogs are faithful, she says, and they give unconditional love. Chimpanzees, on the other hand, are a lot like people, and like people some of them “are really not nice at all.”

So here we are. Not only does the noble savage not exist among humans, but the animals that most resemble us fail to meet Rousseau’s criteria. Strangely enough, to find the noble savage we have to descend the evolutionary scale, leaving us superior primates behind, all the way down to the dog (and, I insist, the cat). But here’s a more cheerful thought: maybe the recent, gradual progress in the way we think of and treat animals is a belated recognition that the true noble savages are to be found among the “lower” creatures—not only cats and dogs but cows and pigs and chickens, and in treating them as such we are ourselves ennobled.