The Marketer Who Went Off Consumption

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It is easy to romanticize the ideal of the noble savage, or argue that the hunter-gatherer Yanamamo tribe is happier, morally superior, or more in tune with their environment than the rest of us. It is equally easy to forget that we are only carrying forward a 10,000 year long tradition of nostalgia for the simple life. Roger Sandall, author of ‘The Culture Cult: Designer Tribalism and Other Essays‘, call it the ‘progress paradox‘ –

Life gets better, but people feel worse… people have been complaining about progress, and looking nostalgically back at the past, for as long as there’s been a past to look back at… the progress paradox has been with us for thousands of years.

One of its most striking sentimental manifestations is a widespread admiration for the tribal world. Anyone who thinks this began with Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the 18th century is deeply mistaken… there were numerous other thinkers from 2000 years ago who admired the simple life. And none of them liked stuff.

In fact, they all believed that less stuff was better than more. Socrates said that man’s basic requirements were few and easily satisfied, and Epicurus agreed. Diogenes once talked a prosperous Athenian into turning his agricultural land into sheep pastures—pastoralism has always had a special appeal with its visions of rustic tranquility—and persuaded him to throw his money into the sea. Plato’s Republic dwelt fondly on the idyllic picture of an earlier communal society, while any number of Greek thinkers were convinced that the savage Scythian tribes, somewhere beyond Thrace along the shores of the Black Sea, exemplified primitive virtue in contrast to degenerate Athens.

Reaching back a bit further we find that as early as 700 BC the Greek poet Hesiod felt humanity’s heroic days were past and that he lived in an era of lamentable decline. In the Golden Age (which Hesiod says was long before his own time)… the people were vegetarians, made everything out of wood, and because they were naturally good their communal society was free of conflict and required no lawyers.

(Finally) in Scientific American Discovering Archaeology for Jan/Feb 2000 evidence was presented from 8,500 years ago of a cult in Cyprus that, somewhat incredibly, wanted to turn the clock back. According to the author, there were people at that time who found the decadence of Anatolian life intolerable, so they sailed across the sea to Cyprus, and gave up pottery, individualism, and sex.

But from these many examples one is forced to conclude that romantic primitivism has been with us for a very long time. In round figures, it looks as if people have been gazing nostalgically backward for nearly ten thousand years. And that is highly significant. Because the last ten thousand years is exactly the epoch in which civilization itself emerged; and what it suggests is that idealizing earlier and more primitive ways of life is a fixed mental tendency, a psychological constant if you will, inseparable from the rise of civilization itself.

The values associated with the ‘noble savage’ ideal –

living in harmony with nature, generosity, selflessness, innocence, inability to lie, fidelity, physical health, disdain of luxury, moral courage and natural intelligence or innate, untutored wisdom

– are indeed the ideals ‘new marketing’ is based on.

However, even as I wonder if the noble savage might be the ideal for the post consumerist society, I cannot but wonder if at least some thinkers in every society have thought of it as the post consumerist society.