Word: rousseauian
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...deny the existence of material progress, but many contend that there has not been concomitant moral progress—a sublimation of our intrinsic greed, cruelty, and penchant for violence into more a humane social ethos. Once again, as much as it may please us to romanticize the Rousseauian savage and see civilization as the source of all moral and spiritual malaise, an honest account of our ethical development cannot bear out our prelapsarian fantasies...
...although the Tasaday were not completely isolated, as Elizalde, National Geographic and others had first presented them, some of the original claims, particularly those based on linguistic evidence, cannot be easily dismissed. The only thoroughly sympathetic characters in this tale are the Tasaday themselves, who may not have been Rousseauian innocents but are certainly simple, guileless folk. Their story, however, has become exceedingly complex, revealing more about the tellers than the Tasaday themselves...