Curiosity

I just finished reading Sundog, an early novel by Jim Harrison. In the book one of the characters remarks, “If you think about it long enough, you’ll find that the most exhausting part about human behavior is lack of curiosity.”

What a remarkable statement. It captures what I see as fundamental issue in contemporary American society. Certainly most people are interested in a few things, such as their family, favorite sports teams, or a hobby. Nevertheless, there are relatively few people who are broadly curious, who are hungry to see, to know, to understand the world.

The lack of curiosity seems to be a combination of ignorance and apathy. While we all are ignorant to some extent, ignorance in some people rises to the point of obliviousness—they don’t know and what’s more, they just don’t care.

Although lack of curiosity is an epidemic that cuts across society, irrespective of income, class, or age, there are some groups which manifest its symptoms in a more obvious manner. One set is older teens and young adults who are deeply involved with their own communities, using social media to engage with one another and follow the latest trends. At the other end of the age spectrum is older adults (a category into which I fall since I am well past my mid-60s), who have become ossified in their thinking and have slipped into the trap of knowing the “truth,” especially that related to the “good old days.” Specialists have a tendency as well to know their version of the “truth,” particularly those specialists in one of the so-called professions. Many engineers exemplify this as they seem to view the world as though it is a collection of machines to be manipulated quantitatively, a tendency that has generated a rich collection of engineer jokes. The syndrome is much broader than engineering, however. Accountants often interpret the world as a sort of balance sheet; attorneys and physicians likewise turn their own professional binoculars backwards so their worldview is parochial. Even some artists show a sort of aesthetic narrowness, wearing their specialty as a set of blinders.

Lack of curiosity is tied to something else we also lack as a people: empathy. Empathy requires emotional connection to others. As I wrote in my post about intimacy (www.turn-stone.com/intimacy), empathy is an example of what Martin Buber called an I-Thou relationship with the world. If people are uncurious about the world, if they fall into their own self-created reality, they cannot have enough knowledge of something to care about it, to have an I-Thou relationship with it. The external world and the people and the things comprising it are merely “Its.”

This lack of curiosity is a symptom of something darker. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote that the world is so full of a number of things that we should all be as happy as kings. Indeed, our society is full of myriad things that vie for our attention to the point of distraction, to the point of satiation. The warm glow of the new and wonderful seems to be tempered by a chill wind of alienation. Thoreau captured the same idea nearly two centuries ago when he wrote “Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end.” Perhaps this alienation is a realization of a general lack of purpose, of “an unimproved end,” of a lack of a reason for living other than merely getting and spending. Nietzsche said, “He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how.” A lack of a “why” would create a sense of alienation, deplete empathy, and sap our curiosity. Back to Harrison’s words, that would be exhausting indeed.