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Curious Book Club: The Curiosity Divide

By Will Willingham 8 Comments

Curious book club - manon stone street
It is probably true that at one time I’d have gotten along swimmingly with St. Augustine. In Confessions, Augustine maintained that among the major problems with curiosity was that it was pointless. As practiced by the ancient Greeks and Romans, curiosity was something of its own reward, even a physical urge that could satisfy itself. But Augustine found curiosity to be nothing more than a distraction from the singularly noble vocation of contemplating God. Thomas Aquinas made more space for curiosity nearly a century later, but still limited to that which, as summarized by Ian Leslie, was a studious and serious pursuit of “knowledge of truth about the Creation.”

Such a purposeful, serious and studious approach to curiosity would have suited me just fine, and I’d have happily stood alongside Aquinas and Augustine in decrying the waste of following aimless, pointless rabbit trails of knowledge that did not apply itself to some worthy purpose. Of course, such a prohibitive stance didn’t actually stop me from pursuing knowledge. It just limited the field and kept me in a constant state of mental gymnastics to be able to justify the pursuit — energy that could have been better used for exploration and discovery.

It seems to me now that Augustine and Aquinas could serve as worthy scapegoats for my neglect of fiction reading until I was, well, not that much younger than I am now. In his book, Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on It, Leslie notes the return of curiosity as a virtue during the Renaissance of the 15th century, after its drought during the medieval period. And centuries later, with the arrival of Gutenberg’s printing press and literacy on the rise, he observes that Britain “embarked on a mass cognitive adventure.” The newfound access to literature made amateur scientists and inventors of ordinary people and epistemic curiosity became the “intellectual steampower of Britain’s Industrial Revolution.”

Not far behind this surge in epistemic curiosity was a growing curiosity about the thoughts and feelings of other people. Leslie reports that the major index of of the rise of empathic curiosity was literature itself, and asserts that if Galileo and Francis Bacon were the founders of epistemic curiosity, then surely Shakespeare was the founder of its empathic sibling, suggesting that Shakespeare “revolutionized the dramatic soliloquy, allowing ordinary men and women a glimpse inside the minds and hearts of kings.”

What novelist George Eliot knew — namely that “the greatest benefit we owe the artist, whether painter, poet or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies” — researchers like Raymond Mar at Canada’s York University are proving with fMRI technology. According to Leslie, such studies confirm a “substantial overlap between the neural networks we use to understand stories and the ones we use to navigate our relationships.

Novels offer us a kind of mental simulation of real-life encounters, giving us useful practice in how to interpret the intentions, motives, longings, and frustrations of friends, enemies, neighbors, and lovers.” Additional research done by the New School in New York found better performance on social and emotional intelligence tests when taken after the subjects read literary fiction.

Leslie reports in his book that philosopher Richard Rorty has called the novel the “characteristic genre of democracy.” In these times, when our social and political conventions are being tested in particularly focused ways, I find that many of my friends and associates, perhaps without even having knowledge of such research, say they are reading more books.

Some might consider that a diversion from the challenges of this reality, and perhaps it is that. But regardless of the motive, the act of reading more will bear fruit in our discourse, if we’re to believe people like Rorty, who argues that fiction does a better job than reason of bringing people together.

Leslie explains Rorty’s conclusions this way: two people on opposite ends of an ideological spectrum “might not be able to reason their way to common sympathy, and may well get into a fight, because the very methods of reasoning they relied on were parochial, born of the ‘epistemic communities’ of which they are are a part.” 

Fiction, he tells us, uniquely has the “power to cross the mental barricades, to make strangers intelligible to each other, because it moves people’s hearts as well as engaging their minds.”

I’ll cut Augustine some slack. Shakespeare hadn’t published anything yet by the time he was promoting his anti-curiosity philosophies and so perhaps his heart had not been pricked in this way. But even now I’d like to think that Augustine would judge curiosity a noble pursuit if it would stimulate us to greater empathy.

* * *

Curious book coverWe’re reading Ian Leslie’s Curious together. Are you reading along? Perhaps you would share your thoughts in the comments. Do you consider yourself to be a curious person? What kinds of things make you curious? What kinds of things make your curiosity wane?

We’ll be reading reading together on the following schedule:

February 22 – Part One: How Curiosity Works
March 1 – Part Two: The Curiosity Divide
March 8 – Part Three: Staying Curious

Buy Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on It now

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Browse our “Incidentally” series

Photo by Luz Adriana Villa, Creative Commons license via Flickr. Post by LW Lindquist.

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Will Willingham
Will Willingham
Director of Many Things; Senior Editor, Designer and Illustrator at Tweetspeak Poetry
I used to be a claims adjuster, helping people and insurance companies make sense of loss. Now, I train other folks with ladders and tape measures to go and do likewise. Sometimes, when I’m not scaling small buildings or crunching numbers with my bare hands, I read Keats upside down. My first novel is Adjustments.
Will Willingham
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About Will Willingham

I used to be a claims adjuster, helping people and insurance companies make sense of loss. Now, I train other folks with ladders and tape measures to go and do likewise. Sometimes, when I’m not scaling small buildings or crunching numbers with my bare hands, I read Keats upside down. My first novel is Adjustments.

Comments

  1. L.L. Barkat says

    March 1, 2017 at 5:07 pm

    I always find it interesting to see what directions readers go with the same book. I barely remember Augustine and Aquinas even making their appearance! 🙂 (Though it was fun to hear about the comparison of your past approach to their philosophies 🙂 ).

    Anyway, I guess I was too busy thinking about educational implications and socioeconomic status dynamics. Things like:

    1. “the nations with a higher proportion of young people in college are those whose economies tend to grow fastest”

    2. “schools that allowed their pupils higher levels of broadband use achieved worse grades than those who didn’t”

    3. “middle class children were especially likely to ask curiosity-based questions…also more likely to engage their mothers in what the authors of the study termed ‘passages of intellectual search’—a series of linked questions, each following from the other”

    4. “The more existing ideas you have in your head, the more varied and richer will be your novel combinations of them, the greater your store of reference points and analogies.”

    5. “Successful innovators and artists effortfully amass vast stores of knowledge, which they can then draw on effortlessly.”

    6. “the more we know [have memorized], the better we are at thinking.”

    7. “Long-term memory is the hidden power behind the throne of cognition.”

    8. “Knowledge makes you smarter.”

    9. “The more knowledge children acquire early on, the better they are at learning, and the more they will enjoy learning.”

    10. “progressive educational practices tend to entrench social hierarchies. They’re better for more knowledgeable learners then less knowledgeable ones”

    11. “knowledge forms the bedrock of what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu termed ‘cultural capital’—the shared reference points that smooth and deepen relationships between the powerful in any given society”

    Okay, so this is all extremely important for how we approach education and parenting—both from societal and personal standpoints.

    Also, it suggests that anyone who desires to be creative (writers, take note!) should be reading widely and deeply (and maybe spending less time on the Internet and also asking more questions 🙂 ).

    Reply
    • Will Willingham says

      March 1, 2017 at 6:42 pm

      Interesting, on #2. I know our kids need to be prepared technologically, but I’ve also said for a long time that educators might think about preparing them also to work without tech. Our reliance on it tells me that one day we may be in desperate need of people who know how to gather information and how to innovate without digital technology, and those students who learn the “old ways” will have an edge. That’s probably not all of what he meant there, but it’s a piece of it, I believe.

      And I especially like #11. 🙂

      Reply
      • L.L. Barkat says

        March 2, 2017 at 12:18 pm

        #11 reminds me of a teacher (Raemon Matthews) that Joshua Foer talks about in Moonwalking With Einstein.

        Matthews teaches in “a neighborhood where nine out of ten students are below average in reading and math, four out of five are living in poverty, and nearly half don’t graduate from high school.”

        Matthews started a group called The Talented Tenth, and they memorize, memorize, memorize in order to be able to pass the NY State Regents exam. But it’s more than that. He tells the students, “The memorization of quotes allows a person to seem more legitimate. Who are you going to be more impressed by, the person who has a litany of his own opinions, or the historian who can draw on the great thinkers before him?”

        Their 3-minute manifesto is: “We are the very best our community has to offer. We will not get lower than 95 percent on any history exam. We are the vanguard of our people. Either walk with our glory and rise to the top with us, or step aside. For when we get to the top, we will reach back and raise you up with us.”

        Cultural capital made salient, to be sure!

        Reply
  2. Megan Willome says

    March 1, 2017 at 6:20 pm

    I put L.L. Barkat’s “The Novelist” as part of the curriculum in the tea workshop 1) because tea is a character, and 2) to create empathy. Fiction does that for us in a way that nothing else can.

    (In case you’re interested, I’m currently reading a classic I somehow missed, Norton Juster’s “The Phantom Tollboth.”)

    Reply
    • Will Willingham says

      March 1, 2017 at 6:44 pm

      I love that you are using that book in your course. It’s a perfect example of the way fiction can create empathy. Such a good example. 🙂

      I read The Phantom Tollbooth as a kid and, much like how I feel about The Pushcart War, I can’t remember a thing about it except that I really liked it. The feeling lingered long after the details.

      Reply
  3. Laura Lynn Brown says

    March 2, 2017 at 1:14 pm

    I remember the feeling of The Phantom Tollbooth more than the actual story, too.

    I do consider myself curious. Sometimes I simply want to know more. Sometimes I need to know a little more to do a good job with the job at hand. Sometimes it’s a response to a “wait, that doesn’t seem right” feeling, which can make the difference between a good copy editor and a great copy editor.

    Things I’ve been curious about: the stories behind people’s tattoos (and that curiosity began when I started thinking about getting one); where my water comes from (because Megan Willome asked in her tea class, and googling led to a phone call with a guy at the water treatment plant I can see from my window); more understandable and relevant ways to express a statistic (which is how I caught, at the final proofreading stage, a whopper of an error at the related to the cost of producing Daisy air rifles); what I am eating and where it came from; a person’s trajectory from here to there (say, how a Pentecostal preacher became an Antiochian Orthodox priest, or how a philosophy major turned into a cafe proprietor).

    What makes curiosity wane is harder to answer. I do reach saturation point, boredom point, and if those moments have any similarity, it might be the point at which “found what I needed or wanted to know” is in danger of shifting into “I’m not ready/willing/able to make a commitment to this.” Sometimes it might be when the subject starts to get harder, to involve technical language or something I’m uncomfortably unfamiliar with.

    We talk about satisfying curiosity, and it has the same connotation of satisfying hunger: I might want more later, or I might not, but for now, I’ve taken in all I can hold.

    L.L, #7 stands out in neon.

    Reply
    • L.L. Barkat says

      March 2, 2017 at 1:29 pm

      You would make a good co-pilot 😉

      (If you read books like Outliers, you’ll see that the ability to be curious about the “this doesn’t seem right” thing—and then have the chutzpah to say something about it to your lead pilot—literally saves lives by preventing crashes.)

      Yes, #7 partly goes back to his Introduction, as I see it: “subjects who made a lifelong habit of a lot of reading and writing slowed their mental decline by a third compared to those who did only an average amount of those things… A lifelong investment in their cognitive reserve was paying back.”

      Reply
  4. SimplyDarlene says

    March 2, 2017 at 1:36 pm

    Regarding #2 of L.L.’s list – you should’ve heard my 13-year-old son’s squeel of delight when he walked in the door from martial arts practice to find an almost complete encyclopedia book set, first published in the 1930’s, and republished in the 1950’s, stacked on the floor. (I’d lugged the boxes home from the freebie section of the library’s foyer.) He organized ’em, wrote down the missing volumes, and said, “Momma, these books sorta smell bad, but look what’s inside of them! My word, they’re not going to be up-to-date on history either. This is awesome.”

    As a home educator, I’m thankful for our superSlow, upload/download restricted, satellite internet because our online time is limited. As a rule, both my son and I use it as a last resort for research. But, interestingly, yesterday we reserved a dozen library books on computer science, technology, and robotics as per my son’s request. He said his recent techno fascination comes from wanting to understand how and why such things work, and to see if he can master a new skill. If he was alllowed unlimited access and internet use, I wonder if he’d be as techno curious?

    And LW – I’m glad you’ve met fiction – it’s all that and a side of fries.

    Reply

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