Speaker 1: Welcome to Unexplained Extra with me Richard McClain Smith, where
Speaker 1: for the weeks in between episodes, we look at stories
Speaker 1: and ideas that, for one reason or other, didn't make
Speaker 1: it into the previous show. In the last episode, The
Speaker 1: Boy Who, we looked at the remarkable and tragic tale
Speaker 1: of so called Caspar Houser, a teenager who in eighteen
Speaker 1: twenty eight appeared one day in the city of Nuremberg
Speaker 1: after apparently being kept prisoner in an unknown location for
Speaker 1: most of his life. The story is fascinating on many levels. Firstly,
Speaker 1: just taken at fate's value, we have the enthralling mystery
Speaker 1: of the enigmatic Casper's true provenance and the question of
Speaker 1: whether or not he had really been locked up since
Speaker 1: he was a baby, and if so, was he imprisoned
Speaker 1: as part of an elaborate plot to deprive him of
Speaker 1: a noble inheritance, or had he simply been locked up
Speaker 1: for more prosaic, if no less tragic reasons, or had
Speaker 1: he simply just made all of it up. However, if
Speaker 1: we look a little closer, we also find a much
Speaker 1: deeper story about human nature, or, more precisely, the question
Speaker 1: if there is such a thing of just what the
Speaker 1: natural state of a human being is. What fascinated people
Speaker 1: most about Casper, for those at least who believed he
Speaker 1: had been locked up most of his life and consequently
Speaker 1: cut off from all social influence, was his status as
Speaker 1: essentially a noble savage. As they saw it. Today, the
Speaker 1: concept of the noble savage is widely understood to have reductive, racist,
Speaker 1: and colonialist connotations. In the eighteenth and nineteenth century, it
Speaker 1: was often used as a stakenly benign typecast for the
Speaker 1: indigenous people who were encountered in the process of exploration
Speaker 1: and colonialization. The term is said to first been used
Speaker 1: by John Dryden in his sixteen seventy play The Conquest
Speaker 1: of Grenada, although the concept can be traced much further
Speaker 1: back to ancient Greece. However, it was philosopher Jean Jacques
Speaker 1: Rousseau who really popularized the term as a way to
Speaker 1: describe an idea of a human that has not been
Speaker 1: corrupted by what some might call the modern world, and
Speaker 1: whose potentially perceived savageness should in fact be regarded as
Speaker 1: an inherently noble quality. Used in this way, the term
Speaker 1: is problematic because it both undermines and reduces the ideologies
Speaker 1: and the processes of others, not least in regarding them
Speaker 1: as something primitive, while at the same time it romanticizes
Speaker 1: the non existent notion that there is even something objectively
Speaker 1: pure about primitive humans in the first place. However, what
Speaker 1: the concept of the noble savage is really drawing on
Speaker 1: is the question of what, at base is a human being?
Speaker 1: In other words, how much of our behavior is dictated
Speaker 1: by nature as opposed to nurture. Is the way we
Speaker 1: think and behave, for example, already inherent within us? Or
Speaker 1: is it something conditioned into us through our exposure to
Speaker 1: the world, Or, as some might put it, are we
Speaker 1: born pure and good and later corrupted into doing bad
Speaker 1: things by the stresses and processes of the world we inhabit,
Speaker 1: Or are we in fact born with original sin as
Speaker 1: some might have it, which is to say, born with
Speaker 1: an inherent compulsion within our nature to do bad things?
Speaker 1: The archaic Christian notion of original sin posits that from
Speaker 1: the moment we exist, we contain within us a compulsion
Speaker 1: to do bad, sinful things. As such, proponents of the
Speaker 1: idea argue that it is our daily duty to fight
Speaker 1: this compulsion and the duty of others to help condition
Speaker 1: it out of us too. It is an idea that
Speaker 1: you might think holds little sway in what we might
Speaker 1: describe as mainstream contemporary secular societies. However, in October earlier
Speaker 1: this year, Catherine Burbel Sink, a head teacher and recently
Speaker 1: appointed chair of the British Government's Social Mobility Commission, raised
Speaker 1: eyebrows when she responded to a tweet stating that we
Speaker 1: are all born bad with the following tweet of her
Speaker 1: own exactly original sin. Children need to be taught right
Speaker 1: from and then habituated into choosing good over evil. That
Speaker 1: requires love and constant correction from all the adults in
Speaker 1: their lives over years. Moral formation is a good thing.
Speaker 1: Putting aside the mind field of who determines exactly which
Speaker 1: behaviors of ours should or shouldn't be considered sinful, berbal
Speaker 1: sings comment, although no doubt well intentioned, coming from someone
Speaker 1: with significant influence in terms of shaping and asserting the
Speaker 1: prevailing attitudes of children, is hugely controversial to say the least.
Speaker 1: Perhaps berbal Sing doesn't actually believe in the literal existence
Speaker 1: of original sin, but rather is simply alluding to the
Speaker 1: idea as a way to frame the role of the
Speaker 1: teacher as an assertive influence, someone whose principal job is
Speaker 1: to actively provide children with the tools and attitude that
Speaker 1: will best help them succeed in later life. Verbal sings
Speaker 1: remit at the Social Mobility Commission, after all, is mainly
Speaker 1: to try and help children who have struggled with certain
Speaker 1: systems of education due to a perceived lack of discipline
Speaker 1: and opportunity, so in some ways may be framing things
Speaker 1: within the context of original sin is just a mechanism
Speaker 1: with which to highlight discipline and a strict moral code
Speaker 1: as being things that she considers key to a pupil's
Speaker 1: success or even if she does in fact believe in
Speaker 1: the literal concept. Who's to say that when this idea
Speaker 1: is applied to educational processes by someone who holds it
Speaker 1: to be true, that it doesn't have a positive impact
Speaker 1: on the future successes of their pupils. I've not seen
Speaker 1: the studies that might prove otherwise. Far be it from me,
Speaker 1: someone with no experience whatsoever of teaching, let alone teaching
Speaker 1: children with difficult and chaotic lives, to insist on how
Speaker 1: best to educate them and no doubt there is a
Speaker 1: lot to be said for being realistic about the world
Speaker 1: in which children are going to find themselves as adults,
Speaker 1: and that ultimately having qualifications or a sense of purpose
Speaker 1: and direction, however that is instilled, is what's fundamentally important.
Speaker 1: But what jars about herbal sings appeal to the notion
Speaker 1: of original sin is the implication within that idea that
Speaker 1: if there is something inherently inarguably wrong with us that
Speaker 1: must be fixed, there must therefore exist a state of
Speaker 1: being that is inarguably the right way to be. But
Speaker 1: who exactly gets to decide what that right way to
Speaker 1: be is? And what if the problem is not that
Speaker 1: we aren't right for the world in which we find ourselves,
Speaker 1: but rather that the world is not right for us.
Speaker 1: Should we be focused on conditioning people so they can
Speaker 1: better prosper in the world they find themselves in, or
Speaker 1: should we instead give them the space to recondition the world.
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Speaker 1: to get sixty days of script for free. Burbal sings
Speaker 1: Tweaked regarding original sin and Casperhuser's story put me in
Speaker 1: mind of the allegory of the Cave, as presented by
Speaker 1: Plato in his famous work Republic. The allegory is a
Speaker 1: hypothetical situation in which a group of people are chained
Speaker 1: to a wall at the back of a cave where
Speaker 1: they live their entire lives. Their only sense of the
Speaker 1: world that exists outside the cave comes from a series
Speaker 1: of shadows that are projected onto the wall opposite them
Speaker 1: from that world. To the people inside the cave. Therefore,
Speaker 1: having no idea that this outside world exists, they don't
Speaker 1: understand the shadows on the wall as consequential reflections of it.
Speaker 1: The shadows and the cave in which they live is
Speaker 1: their entire world, so anything they conceive will eternally be
Speaker 1: limited by this small narrow band of information. Any achievements
Speaker 1: and accolades they might award each other who is the
Speaker 1: best at counting the shadows, for example, would only ever
Speaker 1: be impressive to those that also exist in this restricted
Speaker 1: state of being. The allegory has been interpreted in numerous ways,
Speaker 1: but serves essentially as a metaphor for the way in
Speaker 1: which we mostly exist within the framework of an established
Speaker 1: order of things or the while unbeknownst to us, there
Speaker 1: could be a whole other world of possibility and knowledge
Speaker 1: beyond what we know. Greater truth, as it were, what
Speaker 1: struck me about Casper's story in this sense, was having
Speaker 1: found this supposedly pure human, unblemished by social conventions and moraids,
Speaker 1: just how quick his guardians were to change and mold
Speaker 1: him into something that would be acceptable to their concept
Speaker 1: of what the world should be. In a way, he
Speaker 1: had been brought out of one cave only to find
Speaker 1: himself in just another, albeit more sophisticated one. I think
Speaker 1: in many ways we create the same problem whenever we
Speaker 1: assert that there is a fixed, inarguable way to interpret
Speaker 1: the world with ideas like original sin. For example, I'm
Speaker 1: often fond of saying that I don't believe we are
Speaker 1: born good or bad, or indeed that humans can ever
Speaker 1: be said to be objectively good or bad or even evil.
Speaker 1: I believe humans merely act, and it is us who
Speaker 1: then ultimately ascribe to those acts moral labels such as
Speaker 1: good or bad. Furthermore, such labels are in constant flux,
Speaker 1: due to not only being relative in terms of the
Speaker 1: prevailing attitudes of any one time, but also being forever
Speaker 1: at the whim of our many varied and conflicting personal
Speaker 1: points of view. All that being said, if we did
Speaker 1: want to use Casper Houser's story as a case study
Speaker 1: on whether humans are indeed born bad, with original sin
Speaker 1: and in need of instruction on how to be good.
Speaker 1: We might find some of the ways in which Casper
Speaker 1: behaved before his effective conditioning began, quite revealing his affection
Speaker 1: and empathy towards all living creatures. For one thing, if
Speaker 1: you had indeed come to this instinctively without any influence
Speaker 1: from the outside world, is a behavioral trait worth noting.
Speaker 1: His lack of shame at his naked body is another,
Speaker 1: this shame being something he only acquired after being exposed
Speaker 1: to the modern contemporary society of the world he suddenly
Speaker 1: found himself in. And lastly, an anecdote not mentioned in
Speaker 1: the episode that struck me as especially sad. From the
Speaker 1: moment that Casper first arrived in Nuremberg, much like a
Speaker 1: young child, he was especially drawn to bright, sparkly things
Speaker 1: like the uniforms worn by local soldiers, but also the bright,
Speaker 1: colorful clothes that were often worn by the women in
Speaker 1: the city. He liked their clothes so much he has
Speaker 1: reported to have said he would have preferred to have
Speaker 1: been a woman, just so he didn't have to conform
Speaker 1: to the standards of what a man should be, and
Speaker 1: so he could wear the clothes traditionally worn by women
Speaker 1: of the day in a way that twas acceptable to
Speaker 1: the world. If you enjoy Unexplained and would like to
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Speaker 1: To receive access to add free episodes. Just go to
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Speaker 1: the book and audiobook, featuring ten stories that have never
Speaker 1: before been covered on the show, is now available to
Speaker 1: buy worldwide. You can purchase through Amazon, Barnes and Noble,
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Speaker 1: the show's music, are produced by me Richard McClain smith.
Speaker 1: Please subscribe and rate the show wherever you listen to podcasts,
Speaker 1: and feel free to get in touch with any thoughts
Speaker 1: or ideas regarding the stories you've heard on the show.
Speaker 1: Perhaps you have an explanation of your own you'd like
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