I’m always on the lookout for media references to Rousseau, even if they usually perpetuate the “noble savage” myth. For some reason, I especially liked this “write-up of US tv show Tarzan”:http://tv.zap2it.com/tveditorial/tve_main/1,1002,274%7C83718%7C1%7C,00.html :
bq. In his 1755 “Discourse on the Origin of Inequality Among Men,” French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau stated, “Man in his natural state was born essentially good and free of all prejudices.”
bq. In a summer when Bravo’s “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” has attempted to tweeze, wax, massage, redecorate and redress man in his natural state in the hopes of making something more civilized out of him, Rousseau’s “noble savage” seems in danger of being replaced by the urbane metrosexual.
{ 5 comments }
Ophelia Benson 10.16.03 at 2:32 pm
Interesting; I hadn’t thought of it that way before. So we can see the Fab Five as a sort of collective le bon David, in his pretty waistcoat, so conversable and clubbable and well-liked in the salons, just what he ought to be.
Josh 10.16.03 at 9:42 pm
Well, whenever I watch Queer Eye, and hear the (by now, rather tiresome) opening theme song — something like ‘All things keep getting better’ — I’m reminded of Turgot and Condorcet. I do think one could do an interesting paper on ‘Queer Eye’ as reflecting a robustly and somewhat poignantly unabashed and undimmed expression of the Enlightenment’s faith (or at least some philosophes’ faith) in progress. (Indeed, I was thinking of doing a post on that, but I seem to have been beaten to it!)
Ophelia Benson 10.17.03 at 2:10 pm
Just so – though of course one would also (I should think) have to take a look at the somewhat debased notion of progress or ‘better’ that entails. All surface; all seeming rather than being; all appearance rather than reality; all consumerism and product placement. Which just goes to show that there’s a lot to be said for appearance – how sad.
Invisible Adjunct 10.18.03 at 3:49 am
Re: the clubbable, sociable Hume. If we’re going to gossip about le bon David, I’d like to nominate that incident with the maidservant who gave birth to an illegitimate child who was possibly (probably) the child of Hume as a likely source of scandal. Not that I would spread rumours about Hume…I’m just saying, it doesn’t sound so very metrosexual.
Thomas Wilde 10.18.03 at 3:15 pm
“metrosexual”?
They really like trains?
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