On "Curiositas"
And a little more on cobra farming
[Trivia: who directed the films How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000), A Beautiful Mind, The Missing, Cinderella Man, The Da Vinci Code, Frost/Nixon, Angels & Demons, The Dilemma, Rush, In the Heart of the Sea, Inferno, and Solo?]
Years ago I was introduced to the idea of the vice of curiosity, I believe by a Catholic philosopher professor. I can’t remember exactly how it was introduced. I mostly remember being very aghast at the idea of curiosity being considered a vice. It was something that I’d been given to understand my entire life to be a good thing; it was something that felt like breathing to my own personality; and it came with a morally good component too, since I understood a characteristic vice of our age to be people just failing to take an interest in the world. Like CS Lewis wrote in The Abolition of Man, “For every one pupil who needs to be guarded from a weak excess of sensibility there are three who need to be awakened from the slumber of cold vulgarity. The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts.” He was speaking of sentimentality/coldness rather than curiosity/disinterest, but the two felt pretty intertwined.
I do think I recall that this supposed vice was presented as being an instance of a “disordered desire to know/learn,” which just felt like a weird, Catholic, category error. I was familiar with the language of a “disordered desire,” where some desire that God incorporated as part of our human nature winds up supercharged and disconnected from whatever human good it’s supposed to be servicing, but that felt like something that could never apply in this case.
A couple years later, though, I was listening to someone else who brought up the same idea and drew the illustration of someone who winds up Wikipedia clicking link after link and losing all sense of what they were trying to learn or, for that matter, what hour it is.
I didn’t go looking for this cartoon. It actually showed up in my twitter feed earlier today, inspiring me to write this in the first place. That, and the other thing that happened today was—well, I came across Trump’s over-the-top rant at DeSantis, which included the line “Ron came to me in desperate shape in 2017 — he was politically dead, losing in a landslide to a very good Agriculture Commissioner, Adam Putnam . . .” And I thought, has any English speaker ever used the words “a very good Agriculture Commissioner” before? So I consulted Google, and I came across a Google Book entitled “Reauthorizing Gila Project: Hearings Before the Committee on Irrigation and Reclamation, House of Representatives, Seventy-ninth Congress, Second Session, on H.R. 5434, a Bill Reauthorizing the Gila Federal Reclamation Project.” And my brain said “Yes.” And I remembered that it’s been longer than I care to admit since I’ve finished a book. (I actually do read Greek diligently. But finishing English books has become a real challenge.)
Over time, I’ve made my peace with the idea of this vice. I do think that the word choice is an especially bad fit—old wine in a new flask. That’s one of the reasons I used “curiosities” in my title. I then learned that I’m not actually the first/only person to have that idea—mid-essay, I was searching for any other people’s perspectives that might feel worthwhile incorporating, and I came across a 2016 First Things article that articulated in so many words “let us stick to the Latin to avoid contemporary connotations.”
I actually think on the whole it’s kind of a B article, though also he spends a lot of time discussing it in the context of a novel that I’ve . . . been meaning to get around to reading, so I’m trying not to read parts of it too attentively. But anyway, I do like one point he further makes: “The virtue Aquinas opposes to curiositas is not humility, but studiousness, that is, knowledge pursued well.” For this writer, “studiousness requires the self-discipline to exclude frivolous pursuits (including the pursuit of frivolous knowledge); that the pursuit of knowledge is at its best when motivated by a genuine desire for the truth, not self-aggrandizement.” There’s also the component of having an end goal in mind. That’s not to say that knowing things for fun isn’t fine, in the same way that dessert is a totally acceptable part of life. Even being curious in learning something specific just to know still feels more like the way a healthy, well-adjusted person acts rather than something tinged with vice. But like I said, I’ve made my peace with the idea of curiositas as a vice, and it helps me make sense of my priorities. In that way, it’s one of the more practical lessons from the Medieval era I’ve learned.
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Also, a while ago I wrote about cobra farming, which was the maybe-historical practice in British India of breeding cobras so that you could turn them in to the government and collect a bounty, since the government cared that much about getting rid of them.
The real cobra farming may or may not have happened, but I found stories from the news reporting last month that “The attorney general of New York has changed the rules of a state gun buyback program, after a participant exploited the system by using a 3D printer to make firearm parts in bulk that he then exchanged for $21,000 in gift cards.”
The story gets even better—since not only had he traveled to NY from WV (apparently finding himself 100% eligible for the program), but that for each part he also received “a $100 premium, since [these 3D-printed, homemade parts] were deemed ‘ghost guns’ lacking serial numbers.” In other words, they gave you more money for running the easier scam.
The real name of the man in question isn’t public, but he’s been vocal on social media. He wrote on Twitter, for instance,
Thanks to all the people showing support for my antics. Big shout-out to @CobraEconomics for the inspiration, @2Aupdates for the heads-up, and @ctrl_pew for the files and knowledge.
F*** Gun Control, scam the s*** out of your local gun buyback.
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Answer: Ron Howard, who also recently directed Hillbilly Elegy and 13 Lives.