## Definition **The Noble Savage** is the doctrine that human beings are born innately good, and that violence, greed, and cruelty are products of civilisation rather than intrinsic to human nature. In Steven Pinker's account (*The Blank Slate*, 2002), it is the second of three linked "official theories" that together form the ideological architecture opposing the scientific study of human nature. Pinker calls it the Blank Slate's "inseparable companion": if we arrive without innate content (the Blank Slate), it follows that only external corruption — society, institutions, inequality — can explain evil. ## Origins and Attribution The Noble Savage is frequently attributed to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, though Rousseau's actual position was more nuanced. The cultural force of the idea is visible in the idealised portrayal of indigenous peoples (pre-Columbian Americans, Amazonian tribes) as peaceful and uncorrupted, and in the broader Romantic valorisation of nature and rural life over civilisation. ## The Scientific Refutation Empirical evidence across multiple fields directly contradicts the Noble Savage premise: - **Archaeology and anthropology**: Skeletal evidence from pre-state societies shows rates of violent death — from warfare and murder — that are dramatically higher, proportionally, than in modern industrial states. The "pacified past" is a myth. - **Primatology**: Chimpanzees, humanity's closest relatives, engage in lethal territorial raids, infanticide, and coalition violence. Contrary to Margaret Mead-era claims, non-human primates are not "vegetarian pacifists." - **Ethnography**: Donald Brown's catalogue of human universals includes warfare, murder, rape, and in-group/out-group hostility alongside cooperation and altruism — both are universal features of human societies, not artifacts of Western civilisation. - **Twin and genetics research**: Aggression, dominance-seeking, and risk-taking have substantial heritable components; they are not merely conditioned by social environment. ## Why the Doctrine Persisted Pinker argues that both political left and right have found uses for the Noble Savage. The left uses it to attribute all social ills to capitalism, patriarchy, or colonial structures (if humans are naturally good, systemic injustice must be the cause of suffering). Some religious conservatives use it in the form of original-sin-free childlike innocence. Both motivations are moral and political rather than empirical. ## Moral Implications Like the Blank Slate, the Noble Savage doctrine carries its own dangers. It implies that removing "corrupting" institutions (the state, the market, religion) will reveal a harmonious underlying nature — a logic that motivated utopian social experiments. Pinker notes that pre-state societies were not peaceful idylls; the Hobbesian characterisation of pre-civil life as "nasty, brutish, and short" is closer to the archaeological record. This does not mean human nature is simply evil. Pinker's point is that humans are neither Noble Savages nor Hobbesian brutes — they are complex organisms with evolved capacities for both violence and cooperation, whose proportions in any society depend on institutions, incentives, and the scope of the moral circle. ## Related - [[The Blank Slate Doctrine]] - [[The Ghost in the Machine]] - [[Human Nature and Innateness]] ## Sources - [[The Blank Slate (Pinker 2002)]]