Thinking About: Curiosity (or the Lack Thereof).

After over 50 years of experience it still surprises me, though I suppose that it really shouldn’t. After all I come across it almost every day, wherever I am and whoever I’m with. It’s the blank look that greets me whenever I say that something I’m reading or something I’ve just discovered is interesting and I have to rephrase it to ‘I find this interesting’ because the other person clearly doesn’t. As an aside it rather irritates me to have to preface things with ‘I think’ or I believe’ as if I can speak for anyone else in that regard…..

But I see that blank look a lot, too much actually. It’s sometimes like looking into the face of cattle as they chew the cud. They’re alive, they move around, they do stuff and at the same time seem to be disconnected from the world around them as if it isn’t real or doesn’t matter. OK, not everyone can be interested in everything. I’ve recognised the fact that few (if any) are interested in a wide range of things as I am. Of course there are things that hold no interest to me at all – sport being the primary example. It’s probably the only subject that I’m wilfully ignorant of. Some of my friends are (or I would describe them as) sports fanatics. It’s not just their own team they know everything about but the whole sport going back decades, and not only that particular sport but, sometimes at least, practically all sport from cricket to motor racing, golf to rugby, sailing to gymnastics. Just imagine if they spent that amount of time and effort learning something actually important (LOL). Yes, I know, horses for courses and all that. It just seems to me that this fascination with sports is a distraction something akin to the bread and circuses approach of Roman emperors in their attempts to control the mob. I do find it rather disturbing although it’s clear that I’m in a tiny minority in that belief!

So living in a semi-glass house myself it’s a little difficult to throw around stones. OK, maybe a few… little ones…. I’ve mentioned before a conversation I had with a work colleague who couldn’t understand why I would spend time reading books on a subject (Economics in this instance) that I knew almost nothing about. It’s one of the few times I’ve been reduced to speechlessness. Personally I always think (with the exception of sport naturally) that not knowing about something is a pretty good reason to read up about it. My drive is to know about the world. In that way I won’t be surprised by something nasty coming out of the woodwork that I should have known about. In my mind not knowing something important can most certainly kill you – or at least potentially ruin your day. In my mind ignorance isn’t bliss, its stress inducing and I don’t like it. What I find difficult to understand is how other people live in a world without knowing what I regard as basic stuff – like the history of your own country. OK, it might not get you a better job and it might not come up on Facebook very often but I think that knowing where you came from is pretty important.  The other side of things is when people look at me astonished when I produce an answer to something without Googling it first. How do you know this stuff, they ask rather bemused. Because I read books and remember things, I reply. It’s not that difficult. All you need is a modicum of curiosity about the world and a pinch of effort in finding out. It’s most definitely not rocket science.

But what gets me most of all is not that people don’t know things I thought everyone knows (or at least should know). I’m fully aware that it’s pretty much impossible to know everything. It’s probably impossible to even be aware of everything so I don’t have a huge issue with people being ignorant. I’m more than willing to hold my hand up and plead ignorance on a whole range of topics. No, the thing that really yanks my chain is the number of people I meet who not only don’t know stuff, not only are not interested in knowing stuff, not even those who look at me oddly for knowing stuff or even those who laugh at me for taking time to read (presumably boring) books but those who actively avoid knowing stuff and who denigrate the whole idea of knowledge and the acquisition thereof.

There are people out there, and I’ve actually met some of them, who not only don’t read but are publically proud of the idea that they don’t read. It’s not just that books are (by definition) boring but that the gaining of knowledge is completely unnecessary. You had to pick up books in school or at least pretend to whenever a teacher was in the room but after school what’s the point. No tests, no exams, no reason to read. So we are left with an increasingly ignorant population increasingly proud of their own ignorance and increasingly mistrustful of those who claim to have knowledge on any particular subject. Experts in any field are looked on with suspicion, fear and derision. Is it any wonder that the world seems to be slipping further into chaos year by year? Is it any wonder that people express their powerlessness and their anxiety of a world spinning out of control? Maybe, just maybe, if more people expressed more curiosity of what’s going on around them and tried to actually understand why things happen we might have a better handle on things? Curiosity in unlikely to have killed the cat but a lack of curiosity is likely to kill us all.