The Nomadic Alternative – Page 6

Failure to live. Progress, once divinely ordained by God, is now sanctioned by evolution. Through ingenuity and their capacity for self-improvement, men dragged themselves from a mire of taboos and ignorance and began to enjoy the rewards of settlement, instead of roaming the earth in a ceaseless struggle to keep alive. The rem-nant savages, who linger on in forgotten parts of the earth, are incompetent failures. It is the mission of the civilized to rescue them from their cultural stagnation. “Such stagnation”, wrote one expert, “is in itself very instructive and shows the slowness with which man progresses when isolated from conquering humanity.”

For the moderns, Darwin sanctioned the unflattering view of the Savage by suggesting that the Yaghan Indians of Tierra del Fuego were scarcely human. But long before, the Savage State had been mistaken for the State of Nature, cultureless and usually cannibal-istic. In Leviathan Thomas Hobbes inveighed against this imaginary condition; there was “no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation; nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no Instruments of moving and removing things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all continual fear and danger; and the life of men solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” The style and content of Hobbes’s strictures can still be found in the literature of anthropologists, who should know better. Here for example is a description of the Bushmen who live in Angola, “hungry and ragged, despised by the Negroes and voluntarily removed from the Portuguese, who have exempted them from taxes (sic) and are doing their best to uplift them materially and spiritually. Without ambition and resigned to their lot, they continue to roam through the forests and plain, looking into endless space but living in extreme misery.”*

Such a belief in the Ignoble Savage is the facile, yet comforting, excuse of conquerors, less interested in his condition than the *Almeida, The Bushmen of Angola