Your Turn: Tarzan

I read the Tarzan books when I was an impressionable young child and also found the idea of living in a physically demanding environment leading to superior physical development attractive and admirable.

But when I read of Tarzan teaching himself to read from the Bible, and thus also teaching himself the concept of god and theology, even I, still in elementary school, knew that Burroughs was pulling a fast one on me.

I later came to realize that the idea of a baby English Lord raised by apes in the African jungle leading to a physically and mentally superior being was complete rubbish and more than a tad racist. After all, Tarzan dismisses most of the African natives he encounters as weak or inferior, despite the fact that they have been living and adapting to the jungle for untold millennia while he, by dint of his blue blood and the wiser counsel of apes, became not just better-adapted at living in the jungle, but its king as well.

Conversely, when Tarzan is eventually found and transported back to his ancestral lands, he rapidly acquires the learning appropriate for an English lord despite the fact that in all known cases of "wild children" all have had learning difficulties due to the absence of human contact at critical stages in language development.

In retrospect, we laugh at the infantile and dangerously misguided notion of the "noble savage". We understand now that while civilization may not make one civilized, neither does life in the wild, and that the notion of the wild itself with respect to people is colonialistic and racist since most human groups developed their cultures appropriate to their own survival.

Tarzan as an individual may have had some admirable qualities, but as an idea and what he represents, he is nothing more than a childish fantasy for white imperialists with delusions of racial superiority.

Sent by John Brown | 11:17 AM | 2-5-2008