CHAPTER 16
Curiosity
Maybe the Cat Got What It Had Coming
A FEW YEARS AGO I was on a British radio show that featured a panel of authors describing their new books. I was having a hard time making the case for mine in the fifteen-second turns we were allotted. A fellow panelist—let’s call him Nigel—had no such trouble. Asked by the host what relevance his book might have to current debates, he replied, “Well, Brian, a better question might be: What article of Princess Diana’s underclothing was Harrod’s magnate Dodi Fayed clutching in his teeth when their Mercedes W140 exploded in a fiery wreck in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel after a night of love and champagne at the Paris Ritz?” He gave no answer. For that you’d have to buy his book. As I recall, plenty of people did.
Nigel understood that curiosity is mighty. It is mightier than arguments. But it is, like many mighty things, hard to define. Curiosity has been little studied by men of science. Psychologists still squabble over whether to think of it as a trait (an inborn yearning for knowledge) or a state (a kind of discomfort or itch provoked by some specific mystery or temptation). Moralists have been similarly ambivalent. “The gratification of curiosity rather frees us from uneasiness than confers pleasure,” said Samuel Johnson. His contemporary Edmund Burke praised curiosity, but only faintly, calling it “the first and simplest emotion we discover in the human mind” and “the most superficial of all the affections.” It is hard to say what kind of virtue curiosity is, if indeed it is a virtue at all.
It certainly feels like one. Curiosity is associated with a lot of attributes we consider evidence of right living. One is hope, for which “curiosity is little more than another name,” as the nineteenth-century English theological writers Augustus and Julius Hare wrote. That students are more eager to learn when they are hopeful, happy, and forward-looking has been agreed upon by pedagogues since the days of Rousseau, who wrote in Emile, “There is an ardor to know which is founded only on the desire to be esteemed as learned; there is another ardor which is born of a curiosity natural to man concerning all that might have a connection, close or distant, with his interests.”
The problem is that curiosity is associated with hope even when it’s leading us into disaster. The cat that curiosity killed was filled with hope, too.
My father worked as a designer of packaging; he was distinguished in his field, and it fascinated him. In connection with his work, he was always designing novelties in his own department, acquiring others at seminars and trade shows, and bringing them home to show his delighted children: six-sided lightbulb boxes, “brick packs” (juice boxes into which you could stab a straw), ingenious blister-wrap-and-cardboard packages. But one winter night in the 1970s he brought home a truly history-changing object—one of the first plastic soft-drink bottles. I think it was a half-gallon bottle of Coca-Cola. My mother and sisters were out when he came up the steps and showed it to me, and he clearly couldn’t wait until the whole family saw it. He was right to be giddy. This was really a revolution. The centuries-long age of broken glass bottles was drawing to a close. My father went down the hall to change out of his work clothes, leaving me alone in the living room. Not quite alone, though, because I had my curiosity with me.
The bottle was sitting on the coffee table. I studied it. It occurred to me this thing probably wouldn’t break even if you dropped it. I picked the bottle up by its cap, lowered it to six inches off the living-room floor and let it go. Plunk! Nothing happened. Amazing. Now I wanted to see just how amazing. I picked the bottle up and held it a foot off the floor. The plunk! was a bit louder, loud enough to elicit an “Everything all right out there?” from my father down the hall. The Coke frothed quite a lot. Still … it was astonishing. An unbreakable soft-drink bottle! Then I dropped the bottle from two feet.
I probably don’t have to describe to you the almost deafening explosion it made as my father emerged into the living room. It drenched the two of us and ruined a rug, a newly upholstered chair, and a set of drapes. Princess Diana’s fiery wreck in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel was neither more immediate nor more incendiary than the rage my father flew into. I consoled myself, as I toweled off the wallpaper, that it had been a triumph for the scientific method.
The contemporary psychologists Todd Kashdan and Paul J. Silvia are struck by the fact that curiosity’s power can be independent of whether it flatters or gratifies the curious person. “People are often interested in unpleasant, unfamiliar, and possibly unrewarding activities,” they write. So while curiosity is related to hope, it should also overlap with humility. A hipster in the habit of eating hummus, jicama, and quinoa can make the experience of eating bad macaroni and cheese tolerable if he can summon the resources of curiosity. While this is a psychological observation, it has much in common with the old religious injunction made to Irish Catholics that, when confronted with a painful or boring thing, they “offer it up”—that is, to endure it bravely in the optimistic spirit that no suffering is without its purpose.
At its extreme, this impulse to treat adversity as something to be learned from is a form of courage—the master virtue, the one without which no other virtue can gain any purchase. Around the time of the Falklands War, I had two friends who were young officers in the Royal Welch Fusiliers. One, whom we’ll call Charlie, was preoccupied with what preoccupies most officers—the ability to get one’s men to follow one into battle—and made a study of the question. He is now in the British army’s top echelons. My other friend, Gareth, took a different approach. His virtues were of the sociable, disorganized kind that are better appreciated in civilian than in military life—getting drunk before work, for instance. I asked Charlie whether Gareth’s men would follow him into battle. He paused before saying, “Oh, yes … They’d be very curious.”
William McDougall, the Harvard professor of psychology who towered over the discipline at the turn of the twentieth century, noted a strong association between curiosity and wonder. In An Introduction to Social Psychology, McDougall identified curiosity as the distinctive mark of Western culture. He spoke of the “insatiable curiosity of the modern European and American mind that, more than anything else, distinguishes it from all others,” and mentioned wonder “as the name for the primary emotion that accompanies this impulse.” Perhaps because McDougall put this message forward as part of a defense of eugenics, his work has mostly been forgotten by historians.
But his thoughts on curiosity were profound and merit revisiting. He believed that civilizational progress was made possible only by the “coexistence and conjoint operation” of conservative religion and progressive science. A civilization lacking one or the other cannot stand, he thought. Just after the First World War he wrote, “At the present time it may seem that in one small quarter of the world, namely, Western Europe, society has achieved an organization so intrinsically stable that it may with impunity tolerate the flourishing of the spirit of inquiry and give free rein to the impulse of curiosity. But to assume that this is the case would be rash.” The sentiment is not as obscurantist as it sounds. For McDougall, it was curiosity that spurred both the scientific spirit of inquiry and the religious impulse toward reverence—and curiosity was indispensable to keeping the two in healthy balance.
Curiosity is a protean disposition. The editor Louis Kronenberger, in his memoir of a half-century as publisher, journalist, and author, remembered as one of the highlights of his career a delightful sentence he had discovered in an early draft of Charles Wertenbaker’s 1928 novel Boojum!: “He went into a restaurant and ordered twenty dollars’ worth of scrambled eggs, just to see what they looked like.” Here is curiosity at its most ambivalent. Wertenbaker’s character is indulging the silliest kind of curiosity, the kind that often comes accompanied with the adjective “idle.” But at the same time, Wertenbaker’s attempt to capture it is evidence of the highest kind of curiosity, the kind that plays the same role in culture that the profit motive does in economics. It is the driving impulse of most of literature, the stuff out of which to build a noble, honorable, and virtuous life.
There are many kinds of curiosity. Only one of them qualifies beyond any shadow of doubt as a virtue: that is intellectual curiosity, or inquisitiveness. By figuring out what we are doing in this world we can come closer to figuring out our purpose in it. Hope and humility combine to make faith—a faith that, once a commitment to discovery is made, life will yield up sense. Saint Paul believes this, writing in 1 Corinthians: “God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it.”
But it is not a purely religious thought, for Karl Marx thinks a version of it just as fervently, promising, in his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, that “mankind always takes up only such problems as it can solve…. We will always find that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation.” Curiosity is a virtue because the knowledge acquired through curiosity grounds your other virtues, while leaving to you the choice of what those virtues will be.
The problem comes when we ask what knowledge is. Knowing the first canto of Dante’s Inferno by heart is knowledge. So is knowing that your neighbor’s daughter has a bun in the oven. Most people prefer the latter kind of information to the former. They are like Noel Coward in “I’ve Been to a Marvellous Party”:
You know, if you have any mind a-tall,
Gibbon’s divine Decline and Fall—
Well, it sounds pretty flimsy,
No more than a whimsy! …
By way of contrast,
On Wednesday last,
I went to a mar-vellous party.
Or Lord Byron in Don Juan:
Don José and his lady quarrell’d—why
Not any of the many could divine,
Though several thousand people chose to try
’Twas surely no concern of theirs nor mine;
I loathe that low vice—curiosity;
But if there’s anything in which I shine,
’Tis in arranging all my friends’ affairs.
Not having, of my own, domestic cares.
In the popular mind, curiosity is less often associated with scholarship than with its ne’er-do-well siblings: gossip and prurience. The economist and psychologist George Loewenstein has written of “curiosity’s peculiar combination of superficiality and intensity.” In the older Western tradition this combination is a womanly one, as Loewenstein notes, and our literature is full of women whose desire to get to the bottom of things leads to disaster—running from Pandora through Eve to Lot’s wife and, eventually, I Love Lucy. Counterproductive nosiness is, however, a failing that afflicts all human beings. In his Confessions, Augustine writes of this inability to leave well enough alone, describing the retort of a Christian he knew who was being harassed by a questioner about what God had done before he created Heaven and Earth. Augustine quotes the man as having replied, “Scrutantibus gehennas parabat.” (He was getting hell ready for busybodies).
When people speak of “low” curiosity, they often mean gossip, but it can describe almost any kind of novelty-seeking. In a modern society built around the marketing of sensations, hedonism has increasingly laid claim to the status of … well, not knowledge, perhaps, but at least a kind of expertise. The line blurs between taste and thought, between connoisseurship and wisdom. A sentence such as He seemed open-minded but he wouldn’t smoke marijuana with us would be unintelligible to John Stuart Mill. Yet such sentiments don’t sound so odd today. It might not be considered an abuse of the word “curious” to say you’re “curious” about whether Old Overholt makes you drunker than Jim Beam or whether the videos on one pornographic website are better than the ones on another. Again, such a use of “curious” might have been odd a hundred years ago, but it hasn’t been since the release, in 1968, of I Am Curious (Yellow)—the only X-rated film to feature both Martin Luther King and assassinated Swedish prime minister Olof Palme. (Not that I’m trying to make you curious.)
There really is a hedonistic element in curiosity, in that satisfying one’s drive toward it can be a liberation or—if not handled responsibly—an enslavement. Today’s online companies understand curiosity’s compulsive power. Consider the preposterous headlines that AOL runs over what used to be a “news” site. Instead of enlightening the reader, AOL abuses him—rather than impart information, it alerts him to his deficiencies. So on Groundhog Day, when other websites pointed out that a Pennsylvania groundhog had seen his shadow, betokening six more weeks of winter, AOL headlined, “What did Punxsutawney Phil predict?”
You can tell a lot about a culture by which kinds of curiosity it fosters and which it represses. In earlier times, parents dissuaded children from idle curiosity with fairy tales, but told them to “stop, look, and listen” when it came to important matters. Today, idle curiosity, the kind that leads to clicks, hits, and tweets, is encouraged while barriers are erected to constructive curiosity. Consider the case of the pyramid schemer Bernard Madoff: His impossibly high returns drew notice from financial analysts as early as the 1990s, but financial watchdogs were dissuaded from investigating him by the real risk they would be sued.
If we consider “virtue” the name for a weakness that can be used by the worldly against those who possess it, then curiosity is certainly a virtue. In a world of “big data,” built on the tracking and inventorying of individual Internet users’ behavior, curiosity is guilelessness. The curious person reveals himself to marketers and the other authorities who shape his life and shows them he has “nothing to hide.” The virtuous citizen is one who follows his impulses wherever his own ambition or other people’s advertisements lead him. This is an inversion of traditional moral practices. “Curiosity” is a virtue in much the way that “boldness” or “insubordination” is. It is vitally important in some times and contexts. It is an outright vice in others.