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Then there's Rousseau, whose Émile begins with an axiom: "that the first movements of nature are always right; there is no original perversity in the human heart." Learning from nature is at the heart of his curriculum. But to do that, children must be kept free from the complicating variables of human society. The ironies of the highly artificial environment in which Rousseau's natural pedagogy operates are not lost on Jacobs. We have, then, an education founded on the belief that our first instincts are right and good, but one that takes great pains to keep children from other natively good people out of fear that interacting with those good people will make children bad. Curious.
This should all sound fairly familiar. Intellectual history has circled around the nature/nurture debate for the last couple of centuries, and to ask about original sin is to suggest that nature remains a meaningful category. To hard-core social constructionists, Jacobs puts the question of "why the social construction of selves is so limited in its range, so unimaginatively and repetitively attached to making us cruel and selfish." You'd think we'd come up with something a bit more interesting to be and do.
The nature/nurture debate leads us inexorably to the ancient question that haunts this book: Unde hoc malum? Whence sin? So John Milton struggled to imagine sin's point of entry, given its (originally) utter novelty. The question rings existentially, too, often enough in less articulate forms—something like, "What the hell is wrong with me?" Pretty good question, that. It recognizes the labyrinthine character of sin, the sense of being caught, sin's power over us, its systemic implications, and, of course, the infernal connection. Sin is hellish.
Another answer to the "Whence?" question takes up categories of internal and external. Did the Devil make me do it? Or is it that I, myself, am a bit of a devil? Jacobs sums up a long tradition, which moves from demonology to pathology: "For if it was the genius of Prudentius and his followers [in medieval morality plays] to reach into the divided self and pull out its voices, giving them bodily substance and individual identity, it was the genius of Freud and his followers to stuff them all back into the box." Freud's move, then, is less an evasion of biblical accounts of evil than it is a rebuke of another kind of evasion, the sinfully clever attempt to get myself off the hook in the refuge of a devil who made me do it. (Don't miss Jacobs' analysis of the Tom and Jerry cartoons in which a little Tom angel and devil perch atop big Tom's shoulders.)
Hence Pascal's comment that original sin is necessary for self-knowledge. Original sin's deniers like to claim that the doctrine does bad things, or at least discourages us from doing good things. It deals death. So they tell us. But over and over in Jacobs' account, we meet well-intentioned characters, only to find their happier, gentler anthropologies turning sour, leading to (or at least abetting) anarchy, eugenics, despair. Perhaps the greatest irony in this history is the discovery that knowledge of original sin gives life—by revealing us to ourselves, yes, but also by grounding a sense of universal human kinship.
As Jacobs notes, "To identify someone as kin is to grant that person a claim upon us." Strikingly, Jacobs argues that the "confraternity" of humanity is best grounded not in our being made in the image of God but in our being made sinful in Adam: "If misery does not always love company, it surely tolerates it quite well, whereas pride demands distinction and hierarchy, and is ultimately willing to pay for those in the coin of isolation." The history of the deployment of the imago Dei is riddled with attempts to limit its application to less than the sum of humanity—further evidence for original sin.
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