In 1670 English poet John Dryden penned this expression of humans in a state of nature: "I am as free as Nature first made man.../When wild in woods the noble savage ran." A century later, in 1755, French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau canonized the noble savage in Western culture by proclaiming that "nothing can be more gentle than he in his primitive state, when placed by nature at an equal distance from the stupidity of brutes and the pernicious good sense of civilized man."

From the Disneyfication of Pocahontas to Kevin Costner's eco-pacifist Native Americans in Dances with Wolves and from postmodern accusations of corruptive modernity to modern anthropological theories that indigenous people's wars are just ritualized games, the noble savage remains one of the last epic creation myths of our time.

This article was originally published with the title The Ignoble Savage.

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