The Ignoble Savage
It has been said that every individual is the conscious or unconscious
follower of some influential philosopher. The belief that children have an
intrinsically unsullied spirit, damaged only by culture and society, is derived
in no small part from the eighteenth-century Genevan French philosopher
Jean-Jacques Rousseau.^82 Rousseau was a fervent believer in the corrupting
influence of human society and private ownership alike. He claimed that
nothing was so gentle and wonderful as man in his pre-civilized state. At
precisely the same time, noting his inability as a father, he abandoned five of
his children to the tender and fatal mercies of the orphanages of the time.
The noble savage Rousseau described, however, was an ideal—an
abstraction, archetypal and religious—and not the flesh-and-blood reality he
supposed. The mythologically perfect Divine Child permanently inhabits our
imagination. He’s the potential of youth, the newborn hero, the wronged
innocent, and the long-lost son of the rightful king. He’s the intimations of
immortality that accompany our earliest experiences. He’s Adam, the perfect
man, walking without sin with God in the Garden before the Fall. But human
beings are evil, as well as good, and the darkness that dwells forever in our
souls is also there in no small part in our younger selves. In general, people
improve with age, rather than worsening, becoming kinder, more
conscientious, and more emotionally stable as they mature.^83 Bullying at the
sheer and often terrible intensity of the schoolyard^84 rarely manifests itself in
grown-up society. William Golding’s dark and anarchistic Lord of the Flies is
a classic for a reason.
Furthermore, there is plenty of direct evidence that the horrors of human
behaviour cannot be so easily attributed to history and society. This was
discovered most painfully, perhaps, by the primatologist Jane Goodall,
beginning in 1974, when she learned that her beloved chimpanzees were
capable of and willing to murder each other (to use the terminology
appropriate to humans).^85 Because of its shocking nature and great
anthropological significance, she kept her observations secret for years,
fearing that her contact with the animals had led them to manifest unnatural
behaviour. Even after she published her account, many refused to believe it.