Welcome to Unexplained Extra with me Richard McClain Smith, where for the weeks in between episodes, we look at stories and ideas that, for one reason or other, didn't make it into the previous show. In the last episode, The Boy Who, we looked at the remarkable and tragic tale of so called Caspar Houser, a teenager who in eighteen twenty eight appeared one day in the city of Nuremberg after apparently being kept prisoner in an unknown location for
most of his life. The story is fascinating on many levels. Firstly, just taken at fate's value, we have the enthralling mystery of the enigmatic Casper's true provenance and the question of whether or not he had really been locked up since he was a baby, and if so, was he imprisoned as part of an elaborate plot to deprive him of a noble inheritance, or had he simply been locked up for more prosaic, if no less tragic reasons, or had
he simply just made all of it up. However, if we look a little closer, we also find a much deeper story about human nature, or, more precisely, the question if there is such a thing of just what the natural state of a human being is. What fascinated people most about Casper, for those at least who believed he had been locked up most of his life and consequently cut off from all social influence, was his status as
essentially a noble savage. As they saw it. Today, the concept of the noble savage is widely understood to have reductive, racist, and colonialist connotations. In the eighteenth and nineteenth century, it was often used as a stakenly benign typecast for the indigenous people who were encountered in the process of exploration and colonialization. The term is said to first been used by John Dryden in his sixteen seventy play The Conquest of Grenada, although the concept can be traced much further
back to ancient Greece. However, it was philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau who really popularized the term as a way to describe an idea of a human that has not been corrupted by what some might call the modern world, and whose potentially perceived savageness should in fact be regarded as
an inherently noble quality. Used in this way, the term is problematic because it both undermines and reduces the ideologies and the processes of others, not least in regarding them as something primitive, while at the same time it romanticizes the non existent notion that there is even something objectively pure about primitive humans in the first place. However, what the concept of the noble savage is really drawing on is the question of what, at base is a human being?
In other words, how much of our behavior is dictated by nature as opposed to nurture. Is the way we
think and behave, for example, already inherent within us? Or is it something conditioned into us through our exposure to the world, Or, as some might put it, are we born pure and good and later corrupted into doing bad things by the stresses and processes of the world we inhabit, Or are we in fact born with original sin as some might have it, which is to say, born with an inherent compulsion within our nature to do bad things?
The archaic Christian notion of original sin posits that from the moment we exist, we contain within us a compulsion to do bad, sinful things. As such, proponents of the idea argue that it is our daily duty to fight this compulsion and the duty of others to help condition it out of us too. It is an idea that you might think holds little sway in what we might
describe as mainstream contemporary secular societies. However, in October earlier this year, Catherine Burbel Sink, a head teacher and recently appointed chair of the British Government's Social Mobility Commission, raised eyebrows when she responded to a tweet stating that we are all born bad with the following tweet of her own exactly original sin. Children need to be taught right
from and then habituated into choosing good over evil. That requires love and constant correction from all the adults in their lives over years. Moral formation is a good thing.
Putting aside the mind field of who determines exactly which behaviors of ours should or shouldn't be considered sinful, berbal sings comment, although no doubt well intentioned, coming from someone with significant influence in terms of shaping and asserting the prevailing attitudes of children, is hugely controversial to say the least.
Perhaps berbal Sing doesn't actually believe in the literal existence of original sin, but rather is simply alluding to the idea as a way to frame the role of the teacher as an assertive influence, someone whose principal job is to actively provide children with the tools and attitude that
will best help them succeed in later life. Verbal sings remit at the Social Mobility Commission, after all, is mainly to try and help children who have struggled with certain systems of education due to a perceived lack of discipline and opportunity, so in some ways may be framing things within the context of original sin is just a mechanism with which to highlight discipline and a strict moral code as being things that she considers key to a pupil's
success or even if she does in fact believe in the literal concept. Who's to say that when this idea is applied to educational processes by someone who holds it to be true, that it doesn't have a positive impact on the future successes of their pupils. I've not seen
the studies that might prove otherwise. Far be it from me, someone with no experience whatsoever of teaching, let alone teaching children with difficult and chaotic lives, to insist on how best to educate them and no doubt there is a lot to be said for being realistic about the world in which children are going to find themselves as adults, and that ultimately having qualifications or a sense of purpose and direction, however that is instilled, is what's fundamentally important.
But what jars about herbal sings appeal to the notion of original sin is the implication within that idea that if there is something inherently inarguably wrong with us that must be fixed, there must therefore exist a state of being that is inarguably the right way to be. But who exactly gets to decide what that right way to be is? And what if the problem is not that we aren't right for the world in which we find ourselves, but rather that the world is not right for us.
Should we be focused on conditioning people so they can better prosper in the world they find themselves in, or should we instead give them the space to recondition the world. We often talk about how the advent of streaming has revolutionized the way we engage with audio and visual content, placing countless numbers of films, TV shows, and music tracks at our fingertips, But did you know this has also
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to get sixty days of script for free. Burbal sings Tweaked regarding original sin and Casperhuser's story put me in mind of the allegory of the Cave, as presented by Plato in his famous work Republic. The allegory is a hypothetical situation in which a group of people are chained to a wall at the back of a cave where they live their entire lives. Their only sense of the world that exists outside the cave comes from a series of shadows that are projected onto the wall opposite them
from that world. To the people inside the cave. Therefore, having no idea that this outside world exists, they don't understand the shadows on the wall as consequential reflections of it. The shadows and the cave in which they live is their entire world, so anything they conceive will eternally be
limited by this small narrow band of information. Any achievements and accolades they might award each other who is the best at counting the shadows, for example, would only ever be impressive to those that also exist in this restricted
state of being. The allegory has been interpreted in numerous ways, but serves essentially as a metaphor for the way in which we mostly exist within the framework of an established order of things or the while unbeknownst to us, there could be a whole other world of possibility and knowledge
beyond what we know. Greater truth, as it were, what struck me about Casper's story in this sense, was having found this supposedly pure human, unblemished by social conventions and moraids, just how quick his guardians were to change and mold him into something that would be acceptable to their concept of what the world should be. In a way, he had been brought out of one cave only to find
himself in just another, albeit more sophisticated one. I think in many ways we create the same problem whenever we assert that there is a fixed, inarguable way to interpret the world with ideas like original sin. For example, I'm often fond of saying that I don't believe we are born good or bad, or indeed that humans can ever be said to be objectively good or bad or even evil. I believe humans merely act, and it is us who then ultimately ascribe to those acts moral labels such as
good or bad. Furthermore, such labels are in constant flux, due to not only being relative in terms of the prevailing attitudes of any one time, but also being forever at the whim of our many varied and conflicting personal points of view. All that being said, if we did want to use Casper Houser's story as a case study on whether humans are indeed born bad, with original sin and in need of instruction on how to be good.
We might find some of the ways in which Casper behaved before his effective conditioning began, quite revealing his affection and empathy towards all living creatures. For one thing, if you had indeed come to this instinctively without any influence from the outside world, is a behavioral trait worth noting. His lack of shame at his naked body is another, this shame being something he only acquired after being exposed to the modern contemporary society of the world he suddenly
found himself in. And lastly, an anecdote not mentioned in the episode that struck me as especially sad. From the moment that Casper first arrived in Nuremberg, much like a young child, he was especially drawn to bright, sparkly things like the uniforms worn by local soldiers, but also the bright, colorful clothes that were often worn by the women in
the city. He liked their clothes so much he has reported to have said he would have preferred to have been a woman, just so he didn't have to conform to the standards of what a man should be, and so he could wear the clothes traditionally worn by women of the day in a way that twas acceptable to the world. If you enjoy Unexplained and would like to help support us, you can now do so via Patreon. To receive access to add free episodes. Just go to
patron dot com Forward Slash Unexplained Pod to sign up. Unexplained, the book and audiobook, featuring ten stories that have never before been covered on the show, is now available to buy worldwide. You can purchase through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Waterstones, among other bookstores. All elements of Unexplained, including the show's music, are produced by me Richard McClain smith.
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