Surveying modern political thought, most of the important divisions have centred around the real or perceived differences between the condition and/or nature of men (sic) compared with other men. For example, in the last century or so two of the most important and catastrophic ones have revolved around considerations of socio-economic class operationalised through organisations split according their attitudes towards economic egalitarianism, and the concept of the relative inferiority and superiority in some manner of racial collectivities. More recent divisions have brought to the fore such variables as gender and sexual orientation.

Another type of division, and perhaps a more ancient one, has been based upon man's relationship with 'something else', usually god or the spirit world in some form. However, at least in much of the West, we live in a secularised age and one might have thought that this had irretrievably declined in political importance compared to the more straightforwardly sociological differences noted above. Nevertheless, within the last few decades and especially since the 1980s another such division has risen to prominence: Environmentalism or Greenism which claims to explore and explain, usually unfavourably, man's relationship with the rest of the environment.

Robert Whelan's book, another in the excellent series published by the IEA's Environment Unit, focuses on one particular aspect of the Green weltanschauung: the deployment of the 'noble savage myth' (NSM) which purports to show that 'primitives' with their supposedly more environmentally-friendly and spiritually wholesome lifestyles should be taken as exemplars for us here in the decaying, materialistic Western world.

Whilst the book itself is not presented in quite so reductionist a manner and many issues are interwoven throughout, Mr Whelan discuses a number of identifiable themes. Ultimately they all add up to one thing: than that the NSM is just that, a myth.

Looking at the rise of Greenism generally, an important factor in its recent success has been the bringing together of previously disparate fringe elements into a more coherent (sic) whole (p20). Within this, the neo-primitivists, i.e. those that adhere to the superiority of an often frankly pre-industrial age, are an important component.

It is important to note that, as Mr Whelan explains in some detail, the NSM is not a new phenomena at all. In some form it certainly stretches back to the writers of both classical and Judeo-Christian traditions, but these tended to be musings upon some hypothetical Golden Age, often irretrievably long-lost at least in this life (p5). Later, the idea of the noble savage was again deployed, but these tended to be literary devices to examine perceived, and often very real, shortcomings in the writer's own contemporary society.

The real burst of enthusiasm for the NSM as we now know it came in the post-Columbus era of European contact with primitives, most noticeably from the Americas north and south but also from Australia, New Zealand, and other such places (pp1ff). In the centuries that followed, a veritable blizzard of writings arose from authors such as Montaigne, Aphra Behn, John Cleland, but above all Jean-Jacques Rousseau (pp2-18) purporting to show the superiority of the primitives' actually existing society over the West; many of these works claimed to be based upon discussions with primitives, although most clearly were little more than, or indeed were, fiction (pp3 & 11).

Moreover, many of them, in a way similar to the more modern case of Margaret Mead noted below, often wrote in a manner which was shamelessly self-serving of their own particular hobby-horses (p13). Mr Whelan notes that in Western literature and thinking the prevalence or not of the NSM, and the form that it takes, says at least as much, and often more, about the particular epoch and certain Westerners' view of their own society than it does about any actual objective evidence that might be available concerning the primitive cultures themselves. In other words, the NSM has been deployed as a stick with which to beat domestic political opponents.

Carrying on from this, Mr Whelan agrees with other authors that different versions of the NSM have been frequently deployed by various decidedly anti-liberal writers and regimes in recent history. Says Mr Whelan: "Rousseau's attack on private property portrayed the savage as proto-communist, while the primitivist fantasies of unrestrained masculinity dreamed up by neurotics and neurasthenics like Nietzsche and D.H. Lawrence went some way towards smoothing the path to power of fascist dictators" (p19).

Turning to matters more empirical, in a number of places in the book Mr Whelan demonstrates the rather key point that the NSM is simply not true. For example, far from being 'transparent' upon the natural environment, these much-adored 'custodians of the earth' have often been, by the Green's own standards, amongst the most black-hearten of eco-villains (p34-36).

To take one example, American Indians often used a hunting technique known as the 'jump' which simply involved hunters stampeding and directing whole herds of animals over the side of cliffs. In the west of what is now the USA, sites used for this process can contain the remains of tens and sometimes hundreds of thousands of buffalo. This process was so efficient, but so grotesquely wasteful in its overkill, that a vast amount of meat was just left to rot, and there were such large bone deposits that they were later a valuable source of fertiliser. Unsurprisingly, throughout the American continent and also in Australasia and Madagascar all places where mankind was a relative late-comer compared to Europe and Africa the supposedly eco-friendly natives had managed to exterminate whole species of larger-sized fauna before the European colonists got in on the act.

In the same way, claims for the quality of life of the primitives, referring here just to empirically measurable variables such as the prevalence, or rather claimed lack of prevalence, of disease, are also not true. As Mr Whelan remarks, one might forgive this in early European explorers who themselves knew nothing about the aetiology of disease, but when such claims are still made by more modern writers who sincerely believe that primitives led lives free from illness (pp26-27) one's sympathy vanishes.

Yet another version of this is, when moving away from considerations of the purely material, the oft-recounted notion that primitives are somehow spiritually and morally superior to Westerners. Again, the evidence suggests that they have no particular tendency to be any more morally righteous than anyone else. Mr Whelan recounts the story of the rock-star Sting hawking a Kayapo Amazonian Indian chief around the West in the late 1980s with the aim of stopping the building of a hydro-electric dam, to which end the campaign was successful (pp48-50). Moreover, the Indians were given special rights over 25,000 square miles of rainforest, whereupon the Indian chiefs began forging lucrative deals with logging companies for the massive extraction of resources. The saddest part of the story was that most of the riches went to the chiefs and their families alone: the commoners still lacked basic health care and one-quarter of their children died in infancy. To his credit, Sting later acknowledged his naivety.

Incidentally, even though Mr Whelan correctly notes that the worst and most appalling cases of demographic collapse in native populations were largely due to the unwitting introduction of diseases by European colonists against which the native populations had little resistance (pp29-30), none of the book is to be taken as an exoneration of the very real crimes committed against those peoples that the Europeans encountered. Nonetheless, this population collapse has had the side-effect of giving to many the erroneous impression that the European colonisation, especially of North America, was one of large-scale invasion by mankind of virgin territory where previously there had been only small bands of natives (p30). What was perceived to be virgin forest and other wilderness was really worked land that had reverted to nature due to the massive perhaps by as much as 90% population crash.

Mr Whelan notes the absurd, one might say quasi-religious, tenacity with which adherents of the NSM cling on to their beliefs even in the face of overwhelming and irrefutable evidence to the contrary. The most infamous example of this is probably the now well-rehearsed saga of Margaret Mead's 1928 book Coming of Age in Samoa where she reported on a carefree society where crimes such as murder and rape were virtually unknown and where, free from oppressive Western morality, the young men and most definitely women passed their time engaging in guilt-free sexual intercourse (pp13-15). The worst part of the whole affair, perhaps beyond both Mead's methodological incompetence in Samoa at the time crime rates were very high and a strict code of restrictive sexual morality was enforced and also the willingness of the anthropological establishment to accept a story which so neatly fitted their own social-determinist views, was that Derek Freeman, the man who did most to expose conclusively the truth, was subjected to bitter attacks from Mead's colleagues despite, or rather because of, being shown to be unequivocally factually wrong; Mead's associates acting like, as Matt Ridley described them, "… a tribe whose cult had been attacked and shrine desecrated …" (p15).

Attitudes by the Western eco-lobby and cowed (or morally corrupt and/or stupid) politicians towards actual, existing primitives rather then their fantasy variant by can be remarkably schizophrenic. On the one hand they are sometimes allowed by the authorities to carry on with decidedly environmentally unfriendly practices which local non-primitives are prohibited from using just because they are, in fact, deemed to be damaging (p50). Examples of this include the plight of salmon and big game stocks in various parts of North America which have been devastated by permitted Indian hunting practises which others are wholly or partly prohibited from using on the grounds that they are demonstrably so destructive.

Conversely, when the Western Greens get some particularly (to them) reprehensible practice in their sights and manage to convince Western consumers to stop buying into it, then this can have a devastating impact on primitives who, under the more politically correct guise of 'indigenous peoples', these self-same Greens are usually so ready to hold up as paragons of eco-virtue (pp55-58). The highly successful campaign against the fur trade had the additional consequence of devastating the Inuit communities who relied so heavily on fur for their livelihood. As was pointed out when all of this was at its height in the late 1980s, it had only been a short time previously when these same Inuit were being held up as people living simple lives in spiritual contact with nature. It was subsequently a shock for the Greens to be attacked by such people who derided them both for their arrogance and their ignorance of genuine Inuit culture.

As Alston Chase is quoted: "hunter-gatherers …were attractive to white people only so long as they were no longer hunting or gathering" (p58). As Mr Whelan claims throughout his book, there has been a very strong tendency by Western Greens to project onto actually existing primitives their own fantasies. In the end, he says, this leads to a situation where, using here the most memorable and amusing passage from the book, "… these Westernised Indians … bore as much resemblance to the real American Indians as the 'Indian Chief' in Village People, who used to prance around in a feathered headdress singing the praises of the Young Men's Christian Association" (p46).

There is one theme in Mr Whelan's book that is from the Green perspective the most bitterly ironic, and from the free-market perspective the most delicious. Despite the long catalogue of eco-crimes that can be laid at the door of primitive peoples, they have nonetheless on occasion shown themselves to be, within their technological limitations, indeed conservers of the environment. However, this is not due to some mythical inherent conservationism on their part, instead it is just as soon as they take up those (by many Greens, especially those who originally come from a socialist or communist background) much-hated Western concepts of trading for profit, the need therefore to ensure long-term availability of tradable goods by careful husbanding and nurturing, and the corollary to all of this: property rights (pp37-39). The Montagne Indians only started acting in a consciously conservationist manner when they realised not only that they could make good money by selling beaver pelts to whites but that if they wanted to keep on doing this then they had to trap beavers in a manner which ensured a continuing supply of them, i.e. not just to slaughter all they could lay they hands on in the shortest possible time (p38). Under this type of economic and social system, the wasteful 'jump' method described above is very much less likely, to say the least.

To look at this issue from the opposite direction, the claims that primitives are necessarily better conservationists just because of their spiritual attachment to the flora and fauna is, firstly as noted above, not borne out by the facts, but anyway does not possess the seemingly incontestable logic that its proponents seem to think. To put it crudely, reverence for the kill does not make the animal any less dead (pp40-41), and, unaccompanied by those things which we know really do encourage careful husbandry such as the desire for future and continuing profit, cannot be taken as some necessarily beneficial means of carrying on.

Much of what Mr Whelan writes about deals at least in part with material issues. However, a profound philosophical one which he touches on, and which serves to highlight that Greenism really is a quasi-religion, is his claim that much of the Greenist manifesto is based on a rejection of the Judeo-Christian tradition whereby mankind, at least in a moral if not a physical sense, stands aside from nature (pp21-22). It might be added that whether this separateness comes from the possession of souls or is secularised into the possession of reasoning minds is irrelevant. To deny it is to put mankind on a level with the amoeba.

Whelan concludes with the simple but often ignored observation that it really is best if one looks at the world as it actually is and not as one would wish it to be (pp66-67). Regrettably given their current political impact, as noted above the Greens have been consistently guilty of doing the latter. But in this they are very far from the first and, I am sure, will not be the last. Much of the appeal of socialism was always its propagandists' skilful comparison of 'actually existing capitalism', albeit often using worse-case examples, with the fantasy-land of their socialist utopia. Nineteenth-century classical liberal writers such as Herbert Spencer predicted what the reality of socialism would be like, and that the more socialistic it was the worse it would be. So too, I fear, with Greenism.

Unless we keep faith with an enlightenment ethos of science and culture, whilst always honestly acknowledging its imperfect nature and the erroneous conclusions sometimes drawn, we shall find that a great many of our fellows have been enticed, as the American horror writer H.P. Lovecraft wrote in an only slightly different context, to "…flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age".

Excellently written, highly accessible books like Mr Whelan's can do much to highlight the factual inaccuracies and often straightforward mendacities of Greenism, and they can also emphasise its quasi-religious nature. I am much less optimistic about the willingness of its adherents or fellow-travellers, let alone a credulous general public, to abandon their ersatz faith simply because it is nonsense, and dangerous nonsense at that.

Nigel Meek

(Nigel Meek is a research student at the London Guildhall University)