How the left use the myth of the noble savage to keep black people poor

We are often reminded that levels of poverty across the world have fallen. We need to remember that the natural state of man isn't some sort of bucolic utopia but abject, brutal, painful poverty. Before the 19th century all but a fortunate few lived in absolute poverty, the sort of 'less than a dollar a day' subsistence that is still the reality for too many in Africa, Asia and Latin America. We also need to consider that we're not so very far from returning to that terrible past - read about the decade after WW2 or take a look at Venezuela today.

There are some people, however, who (as they would doubtless put it) challenge the neoliberal narrative of poverty decline. They are, I guess, the economics version of climate change deniers:

Prior to colonisation, most people lived in subsistence economies where they enjoyed access to abundant commons – land, water, forests, livestock and robust systems of sharing and reciprocity. They had little if any money, but then they didn’t need it in order to live well – so it makes little sense to claim that they were poor.

What an idyllic description of life in Africa, India and America before bad people arrived. It's like one of those old romantic characterisations - the noble savage living a carefree life unconstrained by the hideous trappings of civilisation. From its progenitor in Rousseau through to Engels and other early socialists comes this idea that somehow man fell from a state of near perfection to a corrupt state obsessed with possessions. It is still found in literature (popular science fiction is riddled with it) and has a more troubling home in academia where it still exercises a malign influence on international aid strategies and policies.

At the heart of this argument, promoted by Oxfam as well as elite academics at top London universities, is the idea that people like subsistence agriculture (not the academics or aid workers obviously, just the darker coloured peasants). That those "robust systems of sharing and reciprocity" are in any way real. And that disease, famine, murder, rape and brutality aren't more typical of the noble savage's world. What's still more depressing is that rich white academics like Jason Hickel (whose article I took that Rousseau-esque quote from), living a lovely life among the western elite want to deny the opportunity for that life to poor black and brown people elsewhere in the world.

It is a ridiculous idea that, presented with the idea of faster travel, with piped water, with telephones and safe packaged food, people will choose to remain scraping at half an acre of garden with a blunt hoe. Yet Hickel - and so many of his fellow left-wing academics - persist with the idea that somehow there's a way to maintain the noble savage in their mythical perfection while allowing them to have (doubtless state funded) access to a few of those good things that are enjoyed by the western elite. We have an ideology so invested in opposing neoliberalism that it is prepared to use a myth, the noble savage, to justify keeping black people trapped in brutal, abject poverty.

....