Reconnecting with the noble savage within us.
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Lost innocence
He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.
– Samuel Johnson
For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened,
and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.
– Genesis 3:5
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Ever since mankind began settling down into agriculture, leaving the wandering, shepherding life behind, he has yearned for the simpler life.
Following livestock or prey across the ever-changing surface of the planet, the earth gave unquestioningly, renewing itself easily as man and beast passed overhead briefly, taking what they needed and moving on. The garden had no walls – it extended from horizon to horizon.
The move to a sedentary existence brought with it true toil for the first time. When man turned the earth, bending the same plot of land again and again to his will, technology killed the old dance.
The ideas of land ownership and territorialism spawned war, classism and power struggles that do not just haunt us, they define us.
The idea that mankind was once innocent, living in a state of bliss, of balance with the world around him – when instinct reigned yet – is one of our most closely corralled myths.
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Judaism literally begins with the creation of the universe, in the book of Genesis, and swiftly jumps from cosmology to cosmogony, detailing man’s happy existence in the Garden of Eden, from which he would be expelled after eating fruit from the tree of knowledge, discovering the existence of good and evil in the world.
Jean Jacque Rousseau wrote that the natural man, or noble savage, existed in a state of instinct, indistinct from that of animals, a condition existing a priori of good and evil, or morality.
It isn’t clear when this state actually existed, or whether it ever truly did…but if it has any reality it must have been moreso when man was still wandering, not tied to any particular place, at home anywhere he roamed, connected to the landscape, the sky, and the changes.
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Maybe that is all that has really changed, after all, is our capacity to embrace change. Flux is everywhere. The universe only has two constants: the speed of light and the fact that everything changes. When we wandered, when we could see more of the world at once, taking in smells, hues and the subtle changes in our environment because we needed to in order to survive, we lived in a world of flux.
We embraced change, we became it. Today, we suffer under the auspices of Future Shock, which is nothing more than failing to cope with the rate of change of the world around us. But I wonder if our innocent ancestors could have done better, or whether they ever would have needed to. All progress isn’t necessarily progress.
The modern primitive is one who is looking for that lost innocence. They seek to embrace a life closer to the natural world, which is naturally associated with more ‘primitive’ cultures, the indigenes of North America, Australia and the Pacific islands, whose cultures were some of the last to remain uncorrupted by civilisation, uncrushed beneath the missionary fist.
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These ‘primitives’ believed in a world much more connected, a world they were a part of, not masters of. They were simply pearls in Indra’s net, connected to every other thing, living and temporarily concrete alike. The ideas of permanence, ownership and other constructs of the ‘modern’ mind eluded them, because they did not, and have not ever had any sane meaning in the world. Nothing lasts forever.
Modern primitives are latter-day transcendentalists: believers in the creed of nonconformity and, above all else, the idea that each person should reconnect with the natural world, find his place in the universe through direct experience rather than dogma or tradition.
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The flaming sword
And there are new kinds of nomads, not people who are at home everywhere,
but who are at home nowhere. I was one of them.
– Robyn Davidson, Desert Places
To be, contents his natural desire, He asks no angel’s wing, no seraph’s fire;
But thinks, admitted to that equal sky, His faithful dog shall bear him company.
– Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man, Epistle I
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To be trapped in the modern age looking back is one of the great cultural paradoxes of our time.
To be, as Rimbaud put it, “absolutely modern,” pursuing new experiences, seeing the world through post-industrialist eyes, while yearning for something lost in the exchange between naivety and civilisation is the burden of anyone who feels the subtle cracks forming in the fabric of our society.
The lone shepherd must have lived a life that we might call ‘essentially good’. While the farmer was forced to work his land, rather than having the land work for him.
There are myths to show us this dichotomy as well. Genesis doesn’t just talk about being kicked out of the garden. It talks about the battle between itinerancy and sedation, between shepherding and farming, in the murder of Abel by Cain. Cain is the farmer, his ways forcing a false morality onto him. He is jealous of how easy Abel has it, lying in the field while his sheep feed themselves, providing food and clothing for their shepherd, while Cain breaks his back on a plow.
In the end, it was agriculture that won…but the myth points to reasons other than convenience. The lesson is there: agriculturalism murdered pastoralism, just as modern-day missionaries murdered so many nascent cultures around the globe.
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These cracks have been forming for a long time. Ever since man had the ability to look back upon his former self, from the seat of civilised discourse into the cradle of our intellect, those cultures that the west stumbled upon in Papua New Guinea, the Amazon Rainforest and the Australian outback, man has seen a simpler, apparently happier life.
And in his egocentrism has stomped all over this delicate balance with his work boots, clothing the naked, as Adam and Eve clothed themselves once they understood good and evil, teaching right and wrong to a culture that needed neither distinction in its actions heretofore.
Modern man discards the past yet deifies it.
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We worship the Garden of Eden while killing the very heart of it ourselves. The flaming sword that guards the eastern gate is our own pride, our own twisted sense of progress at the expense of an innocence that can only really be understood once it is lost.
To be a modern primitive is to make sacred the profane, and to profane the sacred. To turn one’s back on his fellow man’s beliefs, on the worldview that holds up progress above all, human discontent the lowest of considerations.
When we return to the open fire blown by the unhindered wind, beneath a sky that has spoken to us since before we knew how to listen, or even to look up, we are making that first step, that first giant leap, toward something we traded too cheaply to get where we are.
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To be a modern primitive is to make sacred the profane, and to profane the sacred. To turn one’s back on his fellow man’s beliefs, on the worldview that holds up progress above all, human discontent the lowest of considerations.
When we return to the open fire blown by the unhindered wind, beneath a sky that has spoken to us since before we knew how to listen, or even to look up, we are making that first step, that first giant leap, toward something we traded too cheaply to get where we are.
And that’s the beauty of this condition. We can embrace the idea of the noble savage, that creature for whom goodness comes naturally through instinct. We can travel for the sake of travel.
We can invest in our own spirits rather than whatever plot of land we pretend we own for a few years. And we can do this without giving up the fruits of civilisation: our running water and written word, our recorded music and one of our greatest tickets to freedom, the automobile.
The modern primitive is not a luddite, but simply a seeker. It is not a condition of asceticism, but of austerity in terms of holding on to values that might just run counter to the real point of all of this stuff: happiness.
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Into the desert
It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther… And then one fine morning —
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
– F Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Because if you are fragmented and uncertain it is terrifying to find the boundaries of yourself melt. Survival in a desert, then, requires that you lose this fragmentation, and fast. It is not a mystical experience, or rather, it is dangerous to attach these sorts of words to it.
– Robyn Davidson, Tracks
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The desire to wander into the desert to find ourselves is also not a new urge in man.
The temptations of Christ occurred while that young Jewish man was out in the desert attempting to figure things out, to reconnect with the world at large, and what he called God.
Wilfred Thesiger was not seeking any kind of religious experience when he ventured into the Empty Quarter of Arabia in the 1940s, but he found the Bedouin there to be his noble savages, living closely, as close as their camels, to the desert sand. He found an innate goodness in them that bridged any racial or cultural differences, hidden behind the folds of Islam, a religion borne out of the desert, from a desert people, as soaked in blood as the drifting sands, yet inculcated with the basic understanding that the desert held something, a kind of communion with the unknown, that was untenable within civilisation.
Robyn Davidson went into the depths of the Australian outback by herself, obviously looking for something. And it’s OK if we don’t know the name of whatever she was seeking. I doubt she did either. And there’s a certain nobility in seeking things that don’t translate so well into words. The truth never really fits very well into any language.
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What she found out there was a new appreciation of a kind of society that has vanished from the surface of the planet forever. The last sane ones left a long time ago, taking balance and respect for the environment with them as they left the asylum.
But what Davidson discovered, as so many before her who looked, or were drawn to seek answers outside of the doors of the madhouse we live in, is that those primitives did not lock the doors behind them.
Travel, to the modern primitive, or the transcendentalist, or whatever label you’d like to put on those itinerant souls that seem to be looking for something, is not necessarily the end that it seems to be.
It can, in fact, be the means that are necessary for our tightly molded reality to shake loose so that we can commune directly with a new ‘old’ reality.
It matters not if we believe those rocks have a soul, so long as we understand that the very idea that rocks are solid and forever is an illusion.
Perhaps we threw the baby out with the bath water when we wiped the surface of the world with clinical zeal, obliterating any xenogenous culture, a practice that is still happening through globalization. The only question that remains now, for the status quo, is which hemisphere will dominate the coming homogenisation of the planet: east or west.
Out of this warm porridge of sameness, to quote Emerson, “whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.” We lost something in the journey between wildness and civility, yet we gained things too. Perhaps it is time to check the holes in our spiritual pockets and go back and pick up all that we have lost, while we still can.
THE END