Although I appreciate the broader usage of the word "myth", I would nevertheless suggest that both "progress" (especially) and "noble savages"are more than myths. They are kinds of theories too.
Also, the idea of (unproblematic/linear) progress is clearly a very old idea --- prehistoric, ironically enough. Its antithesis, in historiography at least, is usually said to be the cyclical concept of time, which was more common in pre-modern and prehistoric societies.
Whereas the idea of the noble savage is --- paradoxically --- a modern, humanist idea and it is the antithesis of the earlier modern "savage savages" (if you like), a concept expressed most clearly by Hobbes (who, it seems, was actually projecting his angst regarding the English Civil War onto native Americans.....but I digress).
> (2) Because the myth of Progress of Mankind, as an ideology that
> serves to legitimate colonialism, capitalism, and imperialism, has
> and will continue to have far more murderous and disastrous impacts
> on the real world than the myth of the Noble Savage has or will ever
> have.
Probably true. But the historical _results_ of the debased forms of the two myths/theories have nothing to do with their explanatory abilities, just as Stalinism is not the fault of Marx, and keynesianism is not the fault of Keynes.
> (3) Because a dialectical insight (be it Aristotelian or Hegelian or
> Marxian) should lead you to recognize partial truths of the
> dialectical opposites and to seek to produce a synthesis that
> reconciles them.
Refer to my comments on (1).
> * Modern Western writers have often used the mythical figure of the
> Noble Savage as a heuristic, an invention of the mythical Other who
> exists _solely_ to help modern Western men and women of letters
> criticize their own societies by virtue of satirical contrasts.
> E.g., Michel de Montaigne laments in his essay "On Cannibals" (1580):
It actually goes back at least as far as Tacitus --- and probably further --- who attacked his "decadent" fellow Romans with the straw men of the supposedly noble Germanic tribes, which Tacitus had no personal expereince of whatsoever. (_Germania_, in modern terms at least, is a racist and cynical work; it reminded me of some stuff churned out by guilt-stricken modern liberal critics of imperialism.)
regards,
Grant.