Maybe we like to strengthen the theory of the Noble Savage because it is the last hold on our childhood. That is why we skeptically accompany Peter Pan on his return to Neverland, with the purpose of recovering not time, but the lost illusion. Or we are enchanted by the Victorian archetype framed in a poem by Rudyard Kipling. When reading ‘If’, you can hardly escape from Edward Elgar’s ‘Pomps and Circumstances’, with that patina of tradition that so repels us in our own eyes and to which we succumb in the eyes of others. It is the consecration of erudition already protected by nature. Kipling is an Englishman born in India, which authorizes him to enter the depths of the jungle to look for Mowgli and Bagheera.
The Noble Savage necessarily has its reverse in that nurtured violence that perversely associates cruelty with learning. There the terrifying childish autocracy of William Golding’s ‘Lord of the Flies’ emerges; or the no less disturbing ‘Luminous Republic’, by Andrés Barba. It is misleading and blurred to consider this duality overcome, imputing to the wilderness the hotbed of base instincts. It is also adjective to adjective technology as apocalyptic, just as the Luddites did at the beginning of the 19th century. And yet, there is the germ of many of the monsters of childhood that will inevitably affect personal development.
The gap between East and West is growing, which makes finding common ground more plausible. One of them is the use of mobile phones in childhood. China wants to limit the access time for minors, while in Silicon Valley its use at school age is almost outlawed, almost grotesquely parodying Pablo Escolar’s advice to his son to stay away from drugs. And in Spain the movement of parents’ associations that point to its ban in schools is exponential – only three autonomous communities have done so, and Andalusia is not among them -, while pediatricians warn about the impact on neurodevelopment that It is assuming a misuse of mobile phones.
Perhaps these smartphones are close to the simile of speed and bullets. Its benefits cannot be anathematized, but this early and abusive expansion is another indicator of a hedonistic society, more conducive to entrusting the other with the thankless task of saying “no.” Tablets have become portable nannies that abort those annoying tantrums. Nor can the inertia of its possession be absorbed in the collective, because if you are not virtually in the world, you can sulk and question your own existence. It is at least sarcastic that connectivity escapes uprooting, like other updated vices from Pandora’s box, such as harassment, ‘cyberbullying’ or sexual assault. From the tribal totem that some teenagers enthroned in ‘Lord of the Flies’, we have moved on to a linkage of screens and thumbs to put self-esteem on trial.
Given this coming of age of technology, it is not strange to demand some act of contrition. It is already being done in the classrooms, with the return to textbooks and the smell of chalk. Many of the emerging phobias, such as ‘vamping’ or nomophobia, have a common origin in this device that changed our lives just two decades ago. Better at an early age to ensure that these tools are part of the solution and not the problem. The Noble Savage should not be left without coverage.
*Degree in Law. Graduated in Environmental Sciences. Writer