On Looking without Seeing

“Curiosity killed the cat,” the proverb goes, “but satisfaction brought him back.” Throughout Christian history, from Augustine and Jerome to Aquinas, curiosity has been viewed as a serious vice. In contrast, today, it represents little more than an annoying habit. The problem is all the more acute in an age where we have access to endless hours of entertainment, social media, and the internet filled with information. Far from being just a minor fault, curiosity represents a serious problem that, if left unchecked, can put our souls in just as must danger as the cat. But rather than satisfaction, it is the virtue of studiousness that will bring us back.

It must first be admitted that because of our rational nature, we each have a great desire for knowledge of the truth. As Aristotle said, “all men have a desire to know.” Just as the body is fueled by food, so the intellect is fueled by truth. Because knowledge of the truth leads to our fulfillment as rational creatures, it is a fundamental good. This is why curiosity is such a temptation and ultimately harms us.

But like the natural desire for food, the desire for knowledge must be moderated by our reason. This is where the virtue of studiousness comes in. By fostering studiousness, or the habit of study, we will refuse to feed the intellect with the junk food of mere facts, but the nutrition of truth. Just as a steady diet of junk food will leave us sluggish, a steady diet of facts leads to the sluggishness of curiosity. If we recall that acedia or sloth is a spiritual laziness by which we see a spiritual good as not really worth the effort it takes to get it, we can see why St. Thomas thought that curiosity was a daughter vice of acedia.

Curiosity is the desire for knowledge simply for the pleasure that it brings as opposed to knowing for the sake of knowledge itself (which is the virtue of studiousness). Gossip, which brings the pleasure of knowing something bad about someone else is a prime example of curiosity. On the other hand, study is the keen application of the mind to something. The studious person has no desire to gossip.

But how can we know the difference, especially when the desire for knowledge is a good thing? St. Thomas says the learning of the truth can be inordinate in four ways. First, “when a man is withdrawn by a less profitable study from a study that is an obligation incumbent upon him.” Although he did not live in an era of social media and the internet, St. Thomas is particularly prophetic here. It is curiosity that drives the social media phenomenon. A recent study by the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that the average American spends almost an hour a day on Facebook. To carry the food analogy further, this is about the same amount of time we spend eating each day. While we are there, we are bombarded with facts—both news items and personal—but it is curiosity that drives us to scroll through the feeds. That time could be better spent studying, especially given that the same study found that the average person spends less than 20 minutes a day reading. Curiosity always leads to ignorance because we do not study those things we should be studying. It is curiosity that has left us “educated” yet ignorant.

The second way in which curiosity manifests itself is through knowledge of things that are not licit. St. Thomas gives the example of fortune telling. Under the guise of harmless curiosity, many have been sucked unwittingly into the traps of the Evil One through fortune telling, Ouija boards and Tarot cards. Many young men are sucked into pornography mainly out of curiosity—hearing about it from friends or wondering what the allure is for their dad and all the time he spends on it.

Aquinas also says that curiosity rears its head when we “study about creatures without reference to the due end namely God.” By this he means that much of our modern scientific inquiry is rooted in curiosity. All science has become mechanistic rather than teleological. We collect facts through the scientific method, but do not study (or more accurately contemplate) the purpose. Studiousness is needed for science because it requires the self-discipline to exclude frivolous pursuits and those that contradict the moral law. Instead, we act without any reference to the moral law and equate the technically possible with the morally permissible. Science when governed by studiousness allows us to see how all things are connected as part of a whole, a whole that is meant to reveal the Creator.

Finally Aquinas says curiosity seeks to know the truth above the capacity of our own intelligence. All too often we fall into the Cliff Clavinesque habit of regurgitating facts merely to impress. Curiosity is about replacing the desire for truth with empty shows.

What makes curiosity so soul-deadening is that it acts as a gateway vice, leading to worse things. Earlier we used the example of pornography, but it ultimately leads to an inability to love. Recently, I witnessed a car accident when the driver hit the gas instead of the brake while pulling into a parking space and drove through a store front. Rather than rushing to help the driver, nearly all of the bystanders stood there, phones in hand, taking pictures. Deadened by curiosity, what else could they do but post photos of this poor woman’s misery to their social media accounts? No compassion or even respect, just entertainment.

It is the stoking of curiosity too that drives the news media. Each “major” event in the news cycle gets reported in painstaking details and then is quickly replaced with the next event. Curiosity drives our consumption and it leads to a profound change in us. It’s not just that we become desensitized to the suffering of others or that we waste time. It is that we lose the ability to examine things deeply. Life becomes episodic and we do not know how it all fits together because we watch rather than see.

“Curiosity killed the man and no amount of satisfaction can bring him back.”