On the Dangers of Nostalgia for the Distant Past
So, to go along with my previous post on why I would not want to time-travel back to antiquity, I was just reading in Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents a recurrent issue in European writings from the discoveries of the Americas and other places in the 1500s and 1600s through the present day really of the idea of the "noble savage" and the longing for the "state of nature." He writes, "In consequence of insufficient observation and a mistaken view of their manners and customs, they appeared to Europeans to be leading a simple, happy life of few wants, a life such as was unattainable by their visitors with their superior civilization" (Standard Edition, pp. 38-39; trans. James Strachy). Freud, much like his predecessors and contemporaries then makes a fairly standard (but methodologically problematic) maneuver of equating such non-European indigenous societies with either classical antiquity or an even earlier age: "It seems certain th...