The 'noble savage'? Am not so sure they all were.
The Amerind supposedly killed off many of the best and brightest in fierce tribal warfare, long before any pale face arrived in the West.

I agree with you basically in all your points, but...no matter how 'civilized' any tribe or people are, there is always that desire to be different, more powerful, better hunter, faster runner etc , to be noticed, and perhaps to have more control over the others.

At the root is Greed in all its forms.

And yet, I come back to page 51, which spells it out rather well.

As for our humongous blunders in our environment, I believe we don't do anything about anything until we smell the stink and hurt, but then we do act. I remember in England when 120 kinds of birds came back in the Sheffield area after having been gone for ages due to the air pollution. Same with the river Thames that you couldn't dip a toe in, now it has fish again, big ones, coming up-stream. It takes a while, but we do learn, albeit slowly.
So many parts of our world have no notion of recycling and toss anything out they no longer use, with no thought what so ever. Mass production of cheap and shoddy 'stuff' threatens to bury us alive, and yet, that is the only way some people can make a living there. Never mind that the father of the house/hut/hovel refuses to work himself and rather have his little kids do the dirty job.
In this I have some personal experience having worked with refugees from Asia, Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Somalia et al and have seen their behaviour and attitudes up close. Had I been raised in their culture I would probably not think anything of it. So I am not judging.....only evaluating ;-)

Be of good cheer, my friend! It could be a lot worse.

I must reinforce that I am not purporting a comparative noble savage concept. I disagree with some aspects of some indigenous socieites and applaud others.

I understand human nature quite well and my point re: culture, is it is incorrect in my mind to diminish what "they" may have thought culture was vis-a-vis us modernists.

In my view, pre-euro-contact indigenous poeple had as much "culture", as anything we can brag about today... but if the terms savage or primitive or unintelligent are used to denigrate/diminish their culture then a closer "true cost" examination of who we are, what we are doing, today, would reveal that we demonstrate unintelligent, wilful, brutal primitive savagery as we bomb civilians in foreign lands over corporate monopoly acquisitons of natural and very lucrative resources.

We seem to have this tendency to want to believe in our own current superiority. Our egos won't let us see that we while we have raised the bar on technical academic knowledge over our ancestors in some regards, we have also raised our level of collective barbarous socio-psychopathology to never-before-seen levels.

And the penultimate insult to injury is that much of that horrific behaviour has occured with religion as it's backbone. I am not an atheist nor pro-atheism. But organized religion has been the director of justification of much historical brutal savagery, genocide, ethnic cleansing, and other vile criminal enterprises for profit whereby the social indoctrination of "they are sub-human, we are superior".

So back to my initial point, 35,000 years ago, humanity, I believe, possessed as much "culture" as we do today (along with evil, greed) and we are not one step closer to rising above all of that. How can I assess that? Well, if we were really and truly of "the faith" of higher realms of human spirituality, it is not now present in the make-up of our socities, nor how we treat "others" in foreign lands sitting upon a treasure of resources that we "need" to continue living at our current standard of living.

So let's test that theory. Let's imagine a global fiscal melt-down where people here are without the basic necesities of lfie, say, as many people of 3rd world nations. How do you think we will behave vis-a-vis how the rest of the needy world behaves? Civil? Fair? Compassioante? Remember Hurricane Katrina?

I get little if any consolation in knowing that if it wasn't for my contributions to waste and gluttony in my world that those in impoverished nations wouldnt have rubbish to sort through to survive. That is not higher realm principles at work.

Could it be much worse? I believe not only can it be wrose, it will be, as we get closer and closer to not being able to defer the true cost of what we do unto our progeny and others' future.

After thought:

There was nothing less noble nor savage in those past indigenous societies, and, no more so, than in modern societies and it is that parallel that I see when comparing the two.
It is essentially a distinction without a difference.

However, the one outstanding difference is that we possess today, the power to destroy all of God's creation in our civilized cultured fear-based egocentric pursuits.
We never stopped building that Tower of Babel. And aside from how we see ourselves, we are also limited by that very vision, by our very human limitations, like an ape cannot grasp economic theories or debate philosophies, we may be nor more significant that the dionosaurs who came and went, or evolved into something else.

The two worst things humans ever invented were the concept that we should have dominion over everything, and a mirror.

peace, love.