Read part one and part three of this series.
In the last talk, I introduced the notion that not all seeking after knowledge is good, and the older use of the term “curiosity” as a label for a disordered and sinful search for knowledge. We also looked at the first three ways we could fall prey to curiosity, by seeking after the wrong objects of knowledge.
Now what about mistakes in how we seek knowledge? The first of these is intemperate curiosity, which is simply wanting to know with too feverish a desire. Your younger siblings might be particularly prone to this—particularly on long car trips when they have a completely captive audience and can bombard you with questions until you’re ready to jump out of a moving vehicle! But of course, some of you may have fallen prey to intemperate curiosity when you spend hours playing a new video game, driven by the an uncontrollable urge to explore new levels, clues, or plot twists. Video game designers know how to make their money by exploiting intemperate curiosity.
But there’s another way in which we can err in how we seek knowledge. We might call this one impertinent curiosity—impertinent in the sense of rude or disrespectful. Of course, learning how to avoid this in human interactions is a key social skill, and the lack of it causes us to laugh in the case of small children and wince when older children make the same faux-pas. For instance, however curious you might be about an adult’s age or weight, it’s considered rude to ask. But we can be disrespectful to God or to the goods he has given us to know when we try to know them in the wrong way—for instance, seeking to know them with more certainty than they can be known. I think this is perhaps a particularly common temptation for Christians. By God’s grace, we have certainty through faith of the truth of the gospel. And so we are often tempted to think that, if God gave us certainty about this, well then why shouldn’t he give us certainty about everything else? About who to vote for in the next election, or which Christian denomination has all the answers, or how to reconcile science and the Bible when they seem to conflict. It is easy for us to think in such cases that we are animated by love of knowledge, when really we are driven by hatred of the unknown. The modern scientific enterprise is largely built on this kind of curiosity, and as a result, often forces things like art or faith into a grid of certainty and transparency that is inappropriate for them.
A related problem is something we might call shallow curiosity. This disrespects the object of knowledge by contenting itself with a superficial grasp, before moving on quickly to something else. The great modern theologian John Webster calls this “a species of intellectual promiscuity, driven by addiction to novelty and a compulsion to repeat the experience of discovery.” Addiction to novelty. Compulsion to repeat the experience. Doesn’t this perfectly capture the relationship to digital media—to apps, notifications, social media, video games, movies—that has become pervasive in our world? Here we can see a sharp contrast between studiosity, the virtue which for medieval Christians described the right search for knowledge, and curiosity. Whereas the studious are gazers, the curious are grazers. The studious know that they need to enter into an ongoing relationship with whatever it is they are seeking to know—say a tree or flower or historical event or philosophical idea—and understand that it has depths which they have not plumbed, so that they must continue in attentive study, the curious are grazers. They reduce the object of knowledge into something that they can grasp and digest whole, consuming it like fast food, and, unsatisfied, turning their gaze upon something new, or upon an intensified repetition of the same thing—like an Avengers movie.
In one of the first alarm bells sounded about the way the internet was rewiring our brains, Nicholas Carr wrote a decade ago: “When we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory readings, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning.” Of course this is not at all bad. I myself have been able to benefit enormously by being a student in the age of the internet—it is easy to get “the lay of the land” very quickly with Google and Wikipedia. But the problem is that we think that when we know this, we really know something, and there’s no need to dig deeper.
Thus, even when we are seeking after legitimate things that are good, true, and beautiful, we can sin in our search for knowledge by seeking after them in the wrong way, by failing to recognize these gifts of God for what they are, and for turning them into something for us to devour for our own fleeting pleasure.
ore it, and fix your eyes on the path ahead.
In the last talk, I introduced the notion that not all seeking after knowledge is good, and the older use of the term “curiosity” as a label for a disordered and sinful search for knowledge. We also looked at the first three ways we could fall prey to curiosity, by seeking after the wrong objects of knowledge.
Now what about mistakes in how we seek knowledge? The first of these is intemperate curiosity, which is simply wanting to know with too feverish a desire. Your younger siblings might be particularly prone to this—particularly on long car trips when they have a completely captive audience and can bombard you with questions until you’re ready to jump out of a moving vehicle! But of course, some of you may have fallen prey to intemperate curiosity when you spend hours playing a new video game, driven by the an uncontrollable urge to explore new levels, clues, or plot twists. Video game designers know how to make their money by exploiting intemperate curiosity.
But there’s another way in which we can err in how we seek knowledge. We might call this one impertinent curiosity—impertinent in the sense of rude or disrespectful. Of course, learning how to avoid this in human interactions is a key social skill, and the lack of it causes us to laugh in the case of small children and wince when older children make the same faux-pas. For instance, however curious you might be about an adult’s age or weight, it’s considered rude to ask. But we can be disrespectful to God or to the goods he has given us to know when we try to know them in the wrong way—for instance, seeking to know them with more certainty than they can be known. I think this is perhaps a particularly common temptation for Christians. By God’s grace, we have certainty through faith of the truth of the gospel. And so we are often tempted to think that, if God gave us certainty about this, well then why shouldn’t he give us certainty about everything else? About who to vote for in the next election, or which Christian denomination has all the answers, or how to reconcile science and the Bible when they seem to conflict. It is easy for us to think in such cases that we are animated by love of knowledge, when really we are driven by hatred of the unknown. The modern scientific enterprise is largely built on this kind of curiosity, and as a result, often forces things like art or faith into a grid of certainty and transparency that is inappropriate for them.
A related problem is something we might call shallow curiosity. This disrespects the object of knowledge by contenting itself with a superficial grasp, before moving on quickly to something else. The great modern theologian John Webster calls this “a species of intellectual promiscuity, driven by addiction to novelty and a compulsion to repeat the experience of discovery.” Addiction to novelty. Compulsion to repeat the experience. Doesn’t this perfectly capture the relationship to digital media—to apps, notifications, social media, video games, movies—that has become pervasive in our world? Here we can see a sharp contrast between studiosity, the virtue which for medieval Christians described the right search for knowledge, and curiosity. Whereas the studious are gazers, the curious are grazers. The studious know that they need to enter into an ongoing relationship with whatever it is they are seeking to know—say a tree or flower or historical event or philosophical idea—and understand that it has depths which they have not plumbed, so that they must continue in attentive study, the curious are grazers. They reduce the object of knowledge into something that they can grasp and digest whole, consuming it like fast food, and, unsatisfied, turning their gaze upon something new, or upon an intensified repetition of the same thing—like an Avengers movie.
In one of the first alarm bells sounded about the way the internet was rewiring our brains, Nicholas Carr wrote a decade ago: “When we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory readings, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning.” Of course this is not at all bad. I myself have been able to benefit enormously by being a student in the age of the internet—it is easy to get “the lay of the land” very quickly with Google and Wikipedia. But the problem is that we think that when we know this, we really know something, and there’s no need to dig deeper.
Thus, even when we are seeking after legitimate things that are good, true, and beautiful, we can sin in our search for knowledge by seeking after them in the wrong way, by failing to recognize these gifts of God for what they are, and for turning them into something for us to devour for our own fleeting pleasure.
Dr. Brad Littlejohn is Headmaster at Loudoun Classical School. Read his full bio here.