Curious Minds
I’ve been reading Zurn (2021), a philosophical study of curiosity. Specifically, Zurn is interested in the relation between curiosity and power. He writes:
Inquiries attuned to the politics of curiosity ask a unique set of questions. They ask: How are our questions inherited, trained, and cultivated, and what is the mix of the marinade? How do questions hang between things, between one human and another, between humans and the earth? How do they hit and where do they stick? What are the social conditions and effects of certain questions? That is, from whence do our questions hail and whither do they go? In what material habits and practices, customary proceedings and elocutions have certain curiosity-formations become sedimented? And what are the reigning curiosity-formations of our time—what are the privileged directionalities, architectures, and topologies of inquiry and who are the privileged inquirers? When and how have specific people groups been crafted as knowers to the exclusion of others, and as knowers over others? How has this been ancestralized? How has it become ideological, so that it is repeated and reinscribed so often as to go unnoticed? How does one scream into that silence? (p. 13)
I’ve never thought about curiosity as a political phenomenon. I think I’ve had the naive view of curiosity as something spontaneous, something that have either have or you don’t. Though the political way of thinking of curiosity gives me a different lens to view some recent social issues I’ve been thinking about.
Conspiracy theories and cranks. Given the way that the humanities are defunded and disrespected, you would think that many people simply are not curious about the Big Questions. This is wrong. People are curious about the nature of reality, ethics, and so on. Unfortunately, much of people’s curiosity is channeled into conspiracy theory forums as opposed to more reliable sources of information. I meet people who have “done their research” by Googling or using ChatGPT. Alternatively, there are philosophical cranks who know nothing about philosophy but are able to convince young men that they should all become stoics.
Reading gender gap. There’s a gap between male and female readers of fiction novels. Apparently, men read much less fiction than women. I used to think that this meant that men are simply less curious than women. Not so. Apparently, men love reading non-fiction, military histories in particular. This is a kind of gendered curiosity. Instead of channeling their curiosity about human relationships into the exploration of novels and other fictions, they go into the non-fiction realm.
I believe there has been a kind of curiosity capture. People who are curious about how things hang together, broadly speaking, are serviced by self-help books, YouTube videos, conspiracy forums, and popular science. How can academic philosophers prevent some of this curiosity capture? How we can get people to read our stuff — at least some of it — instead of the barrage of nonsense that’s out there? (It’s not all nonsense but let’s be real, it’s pretty bad.)