Post by Kiwi Frontline on May 29, 2024 18:33:52 GMT 12
Peter Hemmingson: DECONSTRUCTING THE ‘NOBLE SAVAGE’ MYTH.
The notion of ‘The Noble Savage ’ was Rousseau's romantic conception of man as enjoying a natural and noble existence until civilisation makes him a slave to unnatural wants and corrupts him.
Rousseau believed that only the ‘uncorrupted savage’ is in possession of true virtue.
Far more apt, as the actual history of the Māori and numerous other barbarous tribal peoples makes clear, is the Hobbesian ‘State of Nature,’ in which ‘every man’s hand is against every other man’s,’ ‘no man is secure in his life or in his property’ and ‘life is nasty, brutish, and short.’
What is now New Zealand consisted, pre-Treaty, of two main land masses and some offshore islands inhabited by numerous petty warring tribes “bearing few, if any political relations to one another; and who have proved incompetent to act, or even deliberate in concert,” as Lord Normanby put it in his 1839 instructions to Captain Hobson.
The was no country until the English came and created one under the sovereignty vested in Queen Victoria by the Treaty of Waitangi.
In the absence of a universally acknowledged civil government and laws to provide for land ownership, in 1840, the various tribes owned NOTHING.
They simply used or occupied it under the constant threat of extermination until a stronger bunch of bullyboys came along and took it off them.....
breakingviewsnz.blogspot.com/2024/05/peter-hemmingson-deconstructing-noble.html
The notion of ‘The Noble Savage ’ was Rousseau's romantic conception of man as enjoying a natural and noble existence until civilisation makes him a slave to unnatural wants and corrupts him.
Rousseau believed that only the ‘uncorrupted savage’ is in possession of true virtue.
Far more apt, as the actual history of the Māori and numerous other barbarous tribal peoples makes clear, is the Hobbesian ‘State of Nature,’ in which ‘every man’s hand is against every other man’s,’ ‘no man is secure in his life or in his property’ and ‘life is nasty, brutish, and short.’
What is now New Zealand consisted, pre-Treaty, of two main land masses and some offshore islands inhabited by numerous petty warring tribes “bearing few, if any political relations to one another; and who have proved incompetent to act, or even deliberate in concert,” as Lord Normanby put it in his 1839 instructions to Captain Hobson.
The was no country until the English came and created one under the sovereignty vested in Queen Victoria by the Treaty of Waitangi.
In the absence of a universally acknowledged civil government and laws to provide for land ownership, in 1840, the various tribes owned NOTHING.
They simply used or occupied it under the constant threat of extermination until a stronger bunch of bullyboys came along and took it off them.....
breakingviewsnz.blogspot.com/2024/05/peter-hemmingson-deconstructing-noble.html