The Curiosity Crisis
A lesson from the late Eleanor Roosevelt
In a somewhat obscure 1935 essay titled In Defense of Curiosity, Eleanor Roosevelt laid out an argument in favour of curiosity. Roosevelt wrote on a great many subjects, but the primacy of importance she placed on curiosity is represented in a line from this article:
I think, at a child’s birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift should be curiosity.
Mrs. Roosevelt’s argument in favour of curiosity is not only that it fosters a fulfilling and meaningful life, but is a mechanism for maintaining governmental accountability to the people. Her argument has a clear feminist angle to it, that a woman’s role in tending to her home includes sufficiently understanding the geopolitics of her time to ensure her government’s politics are serving the interests of her family. Here is what she wrote:
So many of us resent what we consider the waste of war, but if in each home there is no curiosity to follow the trend of affairs in various nations and our own conduct toward them, how can we expect to understand where our interests clash or to know whether our Government’s policies are fair and just or generally selfish?
Out of the homes of our nation comes the public opinion which has to be back of every Government action. How can this public opinion be anything but a reaction to propaganda unless there is curiosity enough in each home to keep constant watch over local, state, national and international affairs?
Roosevelt’s reflection on curiosity raises the question of whether the public opinion of today is driven by a curious investigation of government policies and global foreign affairs, or if it is but a “reaction to propaganda”. In a generation with immediate access to bounds of information, there would be no excuse for a populous that is susceptible to propaganda, and yet it very much is.
In some respects, the propagandistic influence that the corporate media once held is beginning to be usurped by independent journalism; though simultaneously the fusion of government power with corporate media has never been stronger. While some are growing increasingly wary of official sources of information and curious about alternatives, many remain committed to the established sources. As the established sources ratchet up the pressure to adhere to their messaging in an attempt to dissuade or punish those who are seeking news elsewhere, two [presumably] unintended consequences are occurring: first, the messaging that the committed consumers of corporate media receive is increasingly deceptive and propagandistic, and second, the trust in those institutions among those who have already checked out is being eroded at warp speed. As the institutions lose their grip on those who have turned their backs, it tightens its grip on those who are oblivious. What has resulted is a divided world — those who continue to believe establishment sources and those who believe the opposite.
Not to be a centrist, but neither position is optimal. The optimal position is to not have a dogmatic allegiance to either of these sides that are forming. It is not that I believe the Greenwald’s/Weiss’/Taibbi’s of the world are not correct, nor that the corporate media is worth trusting, it is that it would be a mistake to ardently oppose one group of humans in favour of another. The optimal position is to oppose the ideas which do not align with your set of principles, and to support those that do. Anything less than this is dogmatism, and the only way to achieve this is through independent curiosity.
There is a serious question of how to foster curiosity, particularly in a population in which it is in short supply. Not everyone is naturally predisposed to curiosity, in fact it is probably the case that the majority of people are predisposed to opportunistic dogmatism — an allegiance to a set of values based on what is expedient or convenient rather than what is commensurate with one’s principles. To understand how to develop curiosity, it is important to understand what it even is.
Mrs. Roosevelt defined curiosity as not only the predilection for pursuing knowledge, but a lens through which one engages with the world to seek to understand it better. In her essay she shares a story from her childhood which illustrates not only the definition of curiosity, but its function:
One evening, Mlle. Souvestre, the head of the school, who was already seventy years old, gathered her pupils in her library, and after reading to us for a while, let us all enter into a discussion. I heard for the first time that night a new definition of curiosity. She turned to us and said, ‘You must cultivate curiosity, for only through curiosity can you learn, not only what there is in books, but what lies around you in the world of things and people.’ Then she showed us, one by one, how narrow our backgrounds had been, and gave us little glimpses of what we did not know, and what we might already know if we had had the curiosity, even in our past limited environments. All of us went away from that room with a new idea of what curiosity might do for us.
Curiosity is therefore what one does when seeking to understand something. Curiosity thus cannot exist where one believes to already something understand. So in order to foster curiosity, one must relinquish the notion of understanding all that there is to be understood. The next time you are listening to a political pundit or journalist, consider if they are engaging with curiosity, or if they are under the hubristic delusion of total understanding.
Curiosity is often unpopular or disadvantageous because it is fundamentally a threat to ideology. In traditional Christian theology, curiosity was considered a vice, likely for the threats that a curious individual posed to the orthodoxy of the church. In our society, curiosity is perceived as a hazard that threatens to drive an individual towards ideas that are dangerous. For example, individuals curious may encounter white supremacist material and may themselves become white supremacists, so such a threat should be cut off at the point of curiosity. Our culture is reluctant to foster curiosity for it believes itself to possess the best principles, and is intolerant to opposing values. Our culture has become captured by ideology — it is dogmatic.
The role of dogma in collective institutions is to prioritize the aims of the institution over the doubts of the individual. Take for example a business that does not dogmatically insist in the consumption of its own product. Such a business is destined to failure. A dogmatic approach to the business model is necessary for the business to succeed, and as such it is intolerant to curiosity among employees of the business. Corporations do not allow for curiosity about its own moralistic standards. Dogma allows institutions to prosper through the suppression of curiosity.
At the individual level, the suppression of curiosity can be costly. Curiosity allows one to discover that which is unknown or not understood, and without it one is vulnerable to ideological capture (such as by a cult). Curiosity facilitates social interactions with others and an expansion of one’s perspective, such that becoming trapped by the oppressive forces of an institution is less likely. What is more, the curiosity of the individual is the only force by which dogmatic institutions can be regulated. The curious individual serves as a hand-break to runaway dogmatic institutions; whereas dogmatic individuals serve as pawns to dogmatic institutions. The Government, as an institution, is thus intrinsically incentivized towards dogmatism, and without resistance from a curious populous, will tend towards excessive dogmatism, or tyranny. Loyal party members are mere dogmatic pawns of the Government.
In this frame, political polarization can be thought of as a measure of the populous’ allegiance to the Government or the anti-Government, predicated on dogmatism rather than curiosity. There is little doubt that political polarization is more severe now than it has been in the recent past. This phenomenon is not peculiar to America, and likely represents a fundamental shift in values and culture in the west. What was once a curious populous wary of Government control and overreach has now instead allied itself with one form of Government or another.
As an individual, to be dogmatic as to placate oneself with a loyalty to a political party and regard those who are loyal to a rival party as the enemy is precisely the vulnerability that Mrs. Roosevelt warned against. If we are to escape from this madness of party loyalty, Government tyranny, and polarization, it will be through individual curiosity as a fundamental value. Those of us who recognize this problem must swear an oath to curiosity, must model curiosity, and encourage those around us to do the same. Whether or not a grassroots movement of curiosity can overcome the encroaching totalitarianism in the world remains to be seen, but we have to try.
Epilogue:
Forgive me as I go a little meta here. I was curious about the discrepancy between the spelling of curious (with a ‘u’) and curiosity (without). I did a bit of digging. At first I thought it was a peculiarity of British spelling versus American, but it turns out the spelling is the same in both countries. One solution, posed by a guy named Brian Collins on Quora, is as follows:
Because curious was spelled that way in Norman French. curios is the Latin spelling however, and curiosity was spelled to reflect the Latin origin in both French and English.
The second syllable in curiosity however is pronounced different than the second syllable in curious. This is due to the fact that the syllable before -ity is stressed in English.
Sounds convincing enough, only it doesn’t seem to actually be true. According to several sources, both words are derived from the Old French words curios and curiosete and so the question becomes, why is curious spelt with a ‘u’?
Here is a better answer, from a more reliable source than Quora, which explains as follows (OED = Oxford English Dictionary):
Interesting question! Here's what the OED has to say about -ious:
a compound suffix, consisting of the suffix -ous, added to an i which is part of another suffix, repr. Latin -iōsus, French -ieux, with sense ‘characterized by, full of’. ... by false analogy in cūriōsus curious (from cūra): see -ous suffix.
and, re: -ous:
Nouns of quality from adjectives in -ous (however derived), are regularly formed in -ousness , ... a considerable number of those from Latin -ōsus have forms in -osity , as curiosity ... see -osity suffix.
and, re: -osity:
The direct reflex of Latin -ōsitāt- in Old French was -ouseté , which is found in Middle English as -ouste , forming nouns from adjectives in -ous suffix... . Loanwords of this period having the latter termination and remaining in use were subsequently re-formed with -osity (e.g. contrariosity n., curiosity n.: compare also religiousty n., voluptuousty n. with religiosity n., voluptuosity n. (all first attested in late Middle English), and hidousty n. with the much later formation hideosity n.). ...
And so, as it turns out, the difference is due to the somewhat arbitrary English rules of suffixes. It is a wonder what one can learn with a little curiosity…
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