some few strokes of French character be the same with that which Caesar has ascribed to the Gauls, yet what comparison between the civility, humanity, and knowledge of the modern inhabitants of that country, and the ignorance, barbarity, and grossness of the ancient? […]
If the characters of men depended on the air and climate, the degrees of heat and cold should naturally be expected to have a mighty influence, since nothing has a greater effect on all plants and irrational animals. And indeed there is some reason to think that all nations which live beyond the polar circles or between the tropics are inferior to the rest of the species, and are utterly incapable of all the higher attainments of the human mind. The poverty and misery of the northern inhabitants of the globe, and the indolence of the southern, from their few necessities, may, perhaps, account for this remarkable difference, without our having recourse to physical causes. This however is certain, that the characters of nations are very promiscuous in the temperate climates, and that almost all the general observations, which have been formed of the more southern or more northern nations in these climates, are found to be uncertain and fallacious.1
IIC2 Jean‐Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) from ‘A Discourse on the Moral Effects of the Arts and Sciences’
Rousseau is widely associated with the concept of the ‘noble savage’ (cf. IC12). In fact he never uses the term; nonetheless, the underlying idea is at the heart of his work. His argument is the polar opposite of Hobbes, who regards the state of nature as a condition of internecine warfare (cf. IC10). For Hobbes, civilization represents progress out of that condition and requires a strong ruler to sustain it. For Rousseau, by contrast, those ills are the ills not of the state of nature but of society. The state of nature is not particularly benign, but it is not beset by the systemic violence of society. The present essay is notable for two main points. The first is that Rousseau argues forcefully for the complicity of the arts and sciences in the corrupt masquerade of civilization. To use a later terminology, for Rousseau what they do is buttress the self‐sustaining ideology of a society founded on inequality. Second is the point that Rousseau’s defence of the ‘primitive’ and the ‘barbarian’ against civilization is not a twenty‐first century argument about the complexity of such cultures. Rather, Rousseau’s point is to defend their supposed simplicity and naturalness, their very lack of cultural complexity, and turn that into a virtue compared to the artificial protocols of civilization. In this he is a precursor of the primitivism which played such a central role in the Modernist art of the early twentieth century. For Gauguin, Picasso and the Expressionists, their ‘noble savages’ were to be found in the outposts of nineteenth‐century European empires, above all in Polynesia and Africa, and their art was set against the ‘civilized’ bourgeois values of academic art (cf. IVA9 and VA passim). For Rousseau, the civilizations corrupted by art include not only classical Greece and Rome but also Egypt and China. Against them he sets, somewhat surprisingly, the ancient Persians, and, more understandably, the Scythians. Importantly, he also includes the contemporary indigenous populations of North America: those who, for Hobbes, Locke and most subsequent thinkers of the eighteenth‐century European Enlightenment, represented the acme of the primitive (cf. IC10 and 17, IIC8). The present extracts are taken from ‘A Discourse on the Moral Effects of the Arts and Sciences’ [1750] in Jean‐Jacques Rousseau. The Social Contract and Discourses, translated with an introduction by G. D. H. Cole, London: Everyman edition, 1913, pp. 120–5.
It is a noble and beautiful spectacle to see man raising himself, so to speak, from nothing by his own exertions; dissipating, by the light of reason, all the thick clouds in which he was by nature enveloped; mounting above himself; soaring in thought even to the celestial regions; like the sun, encompassing with giant strides the vast extent of the universe; and, what is still grander and more wonderful, going back into himself, there to study man and get to know his own nature, his duties and his end. All these miracles we have seen renewed within the last few generations.
Europe had relapsed into the barbarism of the earliest ages; the inhabitants of this part of the world, which is at present so highly enlightened, were plunged, some centuries ago, in a state still worse than ignorance….
Things had come to such a pass, that it required a complete revolution to bring men back to common sense. This came at last from the quarter from which it was least to be expected. It was the stupid Mussulman, the eternal scourge of letters, who was the immediate cause of their revival among us. The fall of the throne of Constantine brought to Italy the relics of ancient Greece; and with these precious spoils France in turn was enriched. The sciences soon followed literature, and the art of thinking joined that of writing: an order which may seem strange, but is perhaps only too natural. The world now began to perceive the principal advantage of an intercourse with the Muses, that of rendering mankind more sociable by inspiring them with the desire to please one another with performances worthy of their mutual approbation.
The mind, as well as the body, has its needs: those of the body are the basis of society, those of the mind its ornaments.
So long as government and law provide for the security and well‐being of men in their common life, the arts, literature, and the sciences, less despotic though perhaps more powerful, fling garlands of flowers over the chains which weigh them down. They stifle in men’s breasts that sense of original liberty, for which they seem to have been born; cause them to love their own slavery, and so make of them what is called a civilized people.
Necessity raised up thrones; the arts and sciences have made them strong. Powers of the earth, cherish all talents and protect those who cultivate them.1 Civilized peoples, cultivate such pursuits: to them, happy slaves, you owe that delicacy and exquisiteness of taste, which is so much your boast, that sweetness of disposition and urbanity of manners which make intercourse so easy and agreeable among you – in a word, the appearance of all the virtues, without being in possession of one of them. […]
Richness of apparel may proclaim the man of fortune, and elegance the man of taste; but true health and manliness are known by different signs. It is under the homespun of the labourer, and not beneath the gilt and tinsel of the courtier, that we should look for strength and vigor of body….
Before art had moulded our behaviour, and taught our passions to speak an artificial language, our morals were rude but natural; and the different ways in which we behaved proclaimed at the first glance the difference of our dispositions. Human nature was not at bottom better then than now; but men found their security in the ease with which they could see through one another, and this advantage, of which we no longer feel the value, prevented their having many vices.
In our day, now that more subtle study and a more refined taste have reduced the art of pleasing to a system, there prevails in modern manners a servile and deceptive conformity; so that one would think every mind had been cast in the same mould. Politeness requires this thing; decorum that; ceremony has its forms, and fashion its laws, and these we must always follow, never the promptings of our own nature. […]
Such is the purity to which our morals have attained; this is the virtue we have made our own. Let the arts and sciences claim the share they have had in this salutary work. I shall add but one reflection more; suppose an inhabitant of some distant country should endeavour to form an idea of European morals from the state of the sciences, the perfection of the arts, the propriety of our public entertainments, the politeness of our behaviour, the affability of our conversation, our constant professions of benevolence, and from those tumultuous assemblies of people of all ranks, who seem, from morning till night, to have no other care than to oblige one another. Such a stranger, I maintain, would arrive at a totally false view of our morality.
Where there is no effect, it is idle to look for a cause: but here the effect is certain and the depravity actual; our minds have been corrupted in proportion as the arts and sciences have improved. Will it be said, that this is a misfortune peculiar to the present age? No, gentlemen, the evils resulting from our vain curiosity are as old as the
