July 23, 2024
The Noble Savage
The Enlightenment idea of the noble savage was that initially man was good, and then evil entered into him. But these ideas are outdated in the consideration that a man is always a man: we are not different from our cave-dwelling ancestors; we are different only because we live in a different world, but good and evil are in all of us, in each of us, now as then. We now reject the racist idea that we are better than savages and, equally, that we are worse.