Rousseau is way off the mark, Napoleon Chagnon has found:
The important thing that I’ve discovered about the Yanomamö is the answer to the question of a lot of highly educated people in our society who say, “Oh, it would be so wonderful if we could just go back to an earlier time when life was so much simpler, and pleasant, and neighbors cooperated…” And what I found is the further back in time you go, the more that unpleasant things are ubiquitous in your environment. Violence is just around the corner, and wishing for a return to the noble savage past is possibly one of the biggest errors that one might make philosophically. I don’t think life in the state of nature was nearly as pleasant as a lot of people would like it to be.
One example I give from my travels across the United States: I happen to have been invited on a trip into the Grand Canyon by the man who was then Governor of Arizona, Fife Symington, and we had the park ranger, the archeologist for the Grand Canyon area, along with us, and he took us into parts of the Grand Canyon that most tourists don’t see. One of the most astonishing things we saw, Pueblo houses built into the edge of the Grand Canyon, with a 1,000-foot drop below, and these houses were occupied by prehistoric Indians who were so terrified of their neighbors that they’d climb down vines and ropes with their kids on their back, and firewood under their arm, and the day’s catch in their baskets, because they were just terrified of their neighbors. And that’s the way the Yanomamö live. Even the missionaries who have lived among the Yanomamö the longest have pointed out repeatedly to me and other people that these people are terrified of neighbors. It’s like Hobbe’s war of “all against all” in many respects, and Rousseau is way off the mark.
If you believe in human neurological uniformity, then yeah, the Yanomamo and Pueblo Indians prove your point.
However, does this sound familiar to anyone?
People with low future time orientation don’t stick to agreements. Living with large groups of them leads to high levels of random violence, etc. But civilization doesn’t cure any of these problems when dealing with the same population groups.
As E.O. Wilson said about communism “Nice idea, wrong species.” If you’re HBD-aware, maybe the quote about the noble savage is “Nice idea, wrong race.”
Of course, the human tribes that would make noble savages actually tend to build civilizations — specifically because they can cooperate for long term goals. Being ignoble savages is a result of their ignoble nature and not the cause of it.
This is partially right.
The assumption that the ancient peoples who created great civilisations lived as modern savages do is routinely made by anthropologists but is entirely unjustified and even absurd on the face of it.
The behaviour and social structure of Yanomamo is the reason they are still savages, and live in far away inaccessible locations. The fact that ancestors of civilised people managed to create civilisation is proof that they were quite different – or differently organized.
However, this is not exactly what Chagnon wanted to say.
This kind of savage behaviour is perfectly rational in the savage society. It is not that Yanomamo are stupid and inefficient savages, and other people – with high future time orientation – whould make better, more efficient savages.
Civilised behaviour is rational in a civilised society.
The whole point of human biodiverstiy blog-movement is that in our society, civilised behaviour and genetic traits which support it make no sense and will be shortly extinct.
Yanomamo society is no different from ours. Even if there was a village of Yanomamo with a tendency to pacifism, honesty and hard work, they would go extinct – unless they managed to change the organisation of society. In practice, this means establishing a sacred monarchy.