Keen Shaver

What is it about societies that in still these traits in people?

Well i was watching a show where some natives from remote distant lands came to live with people in big cities for a while. The natives come from tribes and therefore had tribal customs and traditions. They were very simple people and down to Earth. They were introduced to technology like a massage chair, shavers and cars. The westerners were pleased to have the natives as guests.

The westerners made some comments on their (the natives) characters. The westerners said that they weren’t judgmental at all, down to earth, unusually very loving, very keen on family values and time spent together.

so my question is why is that we (western civilizations) don’t have these traits (not judgmental at all, down to earth, “unusually” loving, keen on our family values)? What is it about living in cities that does this to people? To the point that someone who was very loving would be “unusual”?

There’s an idea which has been popularized in literature, anthropology and even some philosophy, known as the ideal of ‘the Noble Savage’. The basic premise of this argument is that human nature is essentially good, but our own modern society prevents us from being able to actually express our good, since it provides incentive for us to lose our innocence, and thus ‘savages’ are more noble than we are in the Western world in some ways, with a simpler morality and lifestyle. This has also been referred to as ‘Romantic Primitivism’.
These ideas all became immensely popular in the 16th and 17th centuries, in great part a response to the impressive intellect that Europeans recognized in those ‘primitive’ races they encountered during the Age of Exploration. They often found that indeed, societies were far more complex than they thought at first sight, and that many of the trappings of intellect and high society which were so essential Europe were easily exposed as artificial. For instance, there are cultures for whom literacy is unimportant, and who instead rely on oral traditions which they memorize in total, and hence many of these ‘savages’ were more aware of the last hundred years of history in the place they lived than the Westerners would have been of their own history. There is a basic quality of human behavior that is always ritualistic, and that even in cities today, there are certain behavior patterns that definitely bear a striking similarity to those which we find in less modernized societies. Perhaps in some remote village, a young man is given a hunting bow to signify the responsibility the tribe believes is warranted in the young man. In our society, we allow a driver’s license. It’s all comparative, and hints at that commonality of human values. It’s just easier to see it in someone else — and hence much of this ‘Noble Savage’ idealism is in fact just a projection of Western ideals upon non-Westerners.
It’s important not to take these ideas too seriously, since they can actually be the foundation of some rather nasty thinking which takes you right to the heart of discrimination. This can be seen as a kind of ‘positive discrimination’ — sort of like saying that ‘Africans feel rhythm more than non-Africans’ or ‘women are more sensitive to emotions’ or ‘Native Americans are more attuned to nature than non-Native Americans’.
In media, the Noble Savage became quite a staple for a while; Queequeg in Moby Dick, Friday in Robinson Crusoe, and even Jim from Huck Finn and Tonto from the Lone Ranger — in all these cases, the Noble Savage is seen as morally righteous— but also as less capable of thinking for themselves than their ‘Western’ counterpart. In fact, the Noble Savage was always a sidekick, and often someone who was simply happy to take orders and recognize that the Westerner was in some way ‘better’ (the notable exception being Huck Finn).
By the mid 1900′s, the glorification of the Noble Savage began to meet more critique. When anthropologists actually began to really study these cultures, they became quite disillusioned about the ‘inherent goodness’ of less-modernized peoples. It turns out that while it’s easy enough to find good traits in all people— like love, friendship, and community — the fact remained that non-modernized societies were often dominated with their own kinds of cruelty and discrimination. There were examples of cannibalism, of perpetual wars based on bloodlines that spanned generations, horrible mistreatment of women and children, and all manner of other social ugliness. Literature responded with such works as ‘Lord of the Flies’— showing that without social structure, we fall into that old Hobbesian nightmare of barbarism and blood-thirst.

So, to answer your question— I think we Westerners DO in fact have all the traits glorified in the behavior of other cultures; we just express them in different ways, often with more subtlety, and it’s easier to recognize that behavior in someone else. If the Westerners saw the natives as ‘unusually loving’— that’s just a judgment that the Westerners passed, not necessarily a reflection of what actually exists in the society the natives live in. After all, most people are on best behavior when in a guest’s home; the laws of hospitality are pretty universal, too. It may also be the case that in whatever culture the natives came from, there was more of an allowance to show affection than we in the West are prone to. This doesn’t mean we love any less powerfully or intensely— just that we have a different custom. I think that one of the good things about Western society, that actually promotes our advancement (and which is not limited to the West at all) is our willingness to criticize our own society, our own traditions, and the shortcomings of our culture. When we compare ourselves to cultures which are still quite bound by traditions and tribal customs, we may envy the simplicity with which we believe they go about life, not having to deal with the same stresses as we do. But they have their own stresses, many of which we are quite happy not to have to deal with. The grass is always greener on the other side, and all that.

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