by Corry Shores
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both images are fictions of ourselves: the first as the lonely outcast of lost paradise, the second as a savage barely emerged from a hairy, grunting animality. For the Greeks, Romans, and Christians, the Wild Man was the product of the wilderness, deficient in morality and every other human virtue, and remains the not-yet-human of the past, above whom Progress and High Culture elevate us. (135d)
The only hope to escape such gluttony, lust, and violence was through moral rigor, religious salvation, or some kind of social amelioration that would block such destructive impulses. (136a)
It is predicated instead on esthetics, on a rational ethic of biodiversity, on the concept of a protective enclave for wildlife, or as "recreation." (136b)
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