All of those commenters deconstructing my clumsy use of "Noble Savage" (I admit it's not quite the right thing) - are indeed (maybe wilfully) missing the point.

A better expression might be the "Parochialism of the present". But that doesn't quite get to it. Nor even Thomas Hobbes' flowery and overblown conceit of past life as "Nasty, brutish and short".

It's about a phenomenon of lionising a one dimensional idea of "progress" in a patently self-deceiving way.