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“The fox knows many things; the hedgehog one big thing.” — Archilochus, Greek poet
Augustine described the vice of curiositas as a disordered desire to know—exemplified by people rubbernecking when they see a bad car accident, or a motionless body (“are they dead?”) lying on the side of the road.
Curiositas does not mean “curiosity” (the Latin cognate does terrible things for comprehension); the meaning of the original Latin, as Augustine used it, is far more profound.
Curiositas is the modern internet; it is the discourse; it is the false muse. It is our wanting to know things which have absolutely no significant value. (An economist may argue otherwise—if it didn’t have value for us, why would we be paying attention in the first place? Yes, of course there is subjective value in it for us, the way there is in crack to the addict. But we are not confining ourselves to subjective value here, but entering the domain of the moral...)
The person traveling down the road on which there is a dead body presumably has a destination; they are going somewhere. But the siren song of what I like to call distracting knowledge (rather than curiositas) diverts them from where they are going. This is the evil of curiositas: it is a kind of knowing which helps us know less of what we really ought to know. It comes with very high opportunity cost.
We are finite creatures, and our time on this earth is limited; the knowledge we choose to pursue matters. Of the knowledge available to us for consumption, nearly all of which calls to us to believe that is important, far less than 1% of it will be critical in the development of our lives. Probably far less than .1% of it.
Those travelers who rubberneck have been seduced by the desire to know something which in no way serves their own good—the knowledge of which can only have downside. There is no upside in knowing the details of what happened in that car accident. And yet people have a burning desire to know.1
If we take too many detours chasing this kind of distracting knowledge, we risk consuming our lives with content that ultimately doesn’t nourish us and is instead an obstacle to the development of our personalities and to our becoming fully alive.2
My Struggle
Earlier this week I spent at least an hour going down a “rabbit hole” (we’ll come back to this term later) researching every juicy bit of gossip related to the hiring of JJ Redick as head basketball coach of the Los Angeles Lakers. What really drew me in is the backstory of how sports journalists Adrian Wojnarowski and Shams Charania, who were fighting to break the Lakers news first, put forward conflicting accounts of what happened and how it happened. Commentators (namely,
) made a compelling case that these journalists even have power over what kinds of moves are made in the NBA because of how they will be perceived and reported. (Just a couple of weeks earlier, Wojnarowski had reported on UConn coach Dan Hurley being offered the job and then turning it down, and the way the entire process unfolded was bizarre—but I will not say anything more about that, because the entire point of this essay is that you shouldn’t care, unless you earn a living knowing and writing about these things.)And then came my moment of truth when I stopped, after seeing my phone get blown up with incoming texts relating to the move that was upcoming for my father in just a few days, and asked myself: Why?
(In just two days, I was going to have to move my dad, who has Alzheimer’s disease, into a new skilled nursing facility after nearly three years of being on the waitlist, and the burden of that move falls entirely on me, his only child).
With all of my overwhelming professional and family responsibilities, here I was learning every piece of information I could about an intricate hiring process for a sports organization on the opposite coast that I care little about.
What was I hoping to accomplish? I have no idea. Learning about Redick’s hiring was simply a way for me to divert energy from what was already an exhausting week. It was my version of tuning into the Kardashians after a long day at work to watch mindless entertainment and ease my mind from the weight of serious responsibilities and the research that I really did have to do in order to ensure a smooth transition for my father.
Isn’t that interesting?
Knowing about things that don’t really matter is somehow soothing, because it relieves us of the moral responsibility of doing anything that often accompanies the kind of knowledge that does matter.
And that was before I opened up Twitter and learned a bunch of useless information like what Kyla Scanlon thinks about Federal Reserve rate cuts, or speculation about what might happen in the U.S. Presidential debate, or read another think piece about what might happen in 2070 if the birth rate doesn’t improve.
Four Traits of Curiositas
Augustine contrasted the vice of curiositas to the virtue of studiositas—which, like curiositas, does not mean like what it sounds. (It does not mean studiousness.) Rather, studiositas is a virtue of the mind which helps a person order their constant, never-ending desire to know into the things that truly matter, and tempers the mind from wandering off in a million different directions with curiosities about things that are not only damaging morally (porn, gossip, and voyeurism and schadenfreude about other people’s problems are probably the three most common today) but also things that simply have no value at all in themselves.
The desire to know is something built into all of us. As soon as our daughter Rome, left the womb, she clearly wanted to know everything that she could about the world around her. That is normal and healthy. But as adults, we have to regulate our knowing just like we regulate our desire for food and drink.
Contrary to our bodily appetite for food and drink, our intellectual appetite to know is never fully satiated. There is always more to learn. Our desire to know is always active. So, in a way, getting our curiositas under control is even more important than our physical fitness. We are desiring to know at every moment of the day. We are not necessarily desiring to eat.
The age of social media and the 24 hour news cycle is completely dominated by curiositas, by distracting knowledge, and that’s why the virtue of studiositas is more important than ever to try to cultivate.
Here are a few traits of curiositas to help you spot it when it’s happening:
1. Seeking to Know One Aspect of Reality While Neglecting the Bigger Picture
The modern day cult of experts is peculiar in that people with extremely domain-specific knowledge, like startup founders or neuroscientists, can launch podcasts commenting on literally anything and everything from geopolitics to the bioethics of IVF—and people take them seriously.
Experts in domain specific knowledge are not necessarily bad; it’s because we have generated a cult of experts that we have been subjected to the podcastization of all knowledge. If you “dialogue with the experts” in the right way, it’s as if the knowledge magically becomes yours.
We have begun treating knowledge in an acquisitive way, as if the more little tidbits one knows, the more intelligent one is—if you can rattle off factoids about 60’s rock and Russian history and the mechanics of inflation all in a single sitting, listeners are like:
We lack an understanding of intelligence as integrated wisdom. We mistake it for “having some facts and knowledge about whatever topic you might bring up.” Generative AI did not emerge out of nowhere; it is made in our image. We value it because the “information billionaire” became cool years ago, long before ChatGPT ever existed; and ChatGPT is merely the god we created in Tyler Cowen’s image. You can ask it anything, and it will have something to say.
But there is something that has always been curious to me: Some of the wisest people I know have little to say about things that simply don’t matter. They may have not followed the news, or pop culture, in months, maybe even years. Is their wisdom not valuable?
The mimetic content machine we are in contact with encourages a “niche” mentality whereby people want to own some domain of knowledge, capture all the SEO, and become the ‘subject-matter expert’.
Curiositas contents itself with fragmentary knowledge without ever desiring the whole. And our culture is rewarding this kind of fragmentary knowledge, because ours is a gnostic age in which the person who can “sell” the idea that their knowledge can save you better than the next person gains the spoils of an audience.
Here’s a description of the limiting function of curiositas by Prime Matters:
The person who masters only one aspect of things or who gains only a shallow understanding of something often thinks that he knows more than he does, and can blunder about causing serious damage. We live in an age of the expert, and our whole educational system is skewed toward knowing a great deal about a very small slice of reality. We are taught to become masters of technical detail to the exclusion of the most important matters. The result of this kind of curiositas can be seriously troubling. The economist who knows only how to manipulate stocks and whose machinations lead to economic failure and widespread suffering; the biochemist who delves into the secrets of genetics but who knows nothing of the ethical implications of the research; the computer engineer who devises clever but addictive games and apps without considering their psychological and social results; the politician who is expert at electioneering and public relations but who knows next to nothing about what is needed for a stable social order.
Sound familiar?
2. The Pursuit of Distracting Knowledge
The knowledge about JJ Redick’s hire as the new coach of the Los Angeles Lakers in no way helps me fulfill my duties and responsibilities as a husband and father, or the duties of my work and my vocation.
I recall my 27-year old self who, waking up one day to a crisis of knowledge, realized that I knew at least 100x more about options trading and the finer details of corporate finance, and had read at least 100 more books about business than I had about any other topic. I had never even cracked open a bible or read anything about history since I was in high school (when I was forced to do it). I thought to myself: “I should probably understand the foundations of civilization before I spend another 10 hours reading a book about pop physchology.” (this was before the popularity of blogs and newsletters).
I did not have much of a filter on the kinds of learning I was engaged in in those days. “The more, the better,” in my mind. And some might think: Great! You were passionately in pursuit of knowledge. But learning for the sake of learning is not an end itself, and that was precisely my problem. I had no teleology to my acquisition of knowledge. I was just gaining knowledge like power-ups in a video game.
Today I am invited to various intellectual discussions on the Internet about such varied topics as obscure literary discussions to economics forums to “debates” about human sexuality. But to what end? At what point will hearing more people talk about these issues actually help me live my life? It’s always unclear, at least in the way that these events are pitched.
I suppose each of us has to make those decisions for ourselves, but my point is simply this: the menu that each of us is confronted with as we sit down at the buffet of content on any given day presents 1,000 times more food than any of us could possibly eat. So how do we even make decisions about what to consume?
Is it driven by curiositas? What is the shiniest new object? Or is there some fundamental guiding principle, grounded in an ultimate end.
3. Seeking Knowledge About Things We Have No Right To Know
Most of us naturally think we have the right to know everything, but that makes us assume the place of an all-knowing God. The truth is: we don’t have the right to know everything.
I have written fairly extensively about the right to not have to share your conscience about a given matter, for instance. There is not a day that goes by in which I don’t receive an email from someone demanding that I share with them my thoughts on XYZ political issue, or some obscure debate within mimetic theory, or an opinion on current events; and they get upset if they don’t receive a response. They think they are entitled to knowing what I think. The sense of entitlement is outstanding.
Your conscience is your own. You can manifest it to whomever you wish, but you shouldn’t do so just because a gun is held to your head, or because someone else demands that you “respond to their remarks” about something.
And yet, the flip side of this is that many of us, including me, want to know things which we really have no right to know: things that are private, things that are between other people, things that are just none of our business.
Why do we desire to know those things? What do we have to gain from knowing? This, too, is the vice of curiositas. At best, we titillate ourselves for a short period of time by knowing that “Person X thinks Y.” At worst, we become a killer of character based on the knowledge which we had no right to know the first place.
The former website Gawker existed by disseminating knowledge that nobody had a right to know, until they finally got sued into oblivion for it.
4. Seeking Knowledge To Gain Power, Influence, and Superiority
“Knowledge is power,” wrote Francis Bacon in his Meditationes Sacrae in 1597. I won’t comment extensively on this one since it is probably an essay unto itself. But this is certainly the ethos of our era. It is a Gnostic time that we live in, in which knowledge leads not only to power but the promise of salvation.
George Gilder’s highly influential book, Knowledge & Power, immortalized what is called the “information theory” of capitalism and cemented the idea that those who have more information have more power. And rather than seeing capital as financial or physical resources, Gilder viewed capital primarily as knowledge. Entrepreneurs are constantly introducing new information into the economy, and as such are the chief producers of knowledge.
I don’t disagree with the critical role that entrepreneurs play in our society, or the importance of new information in the development of our world; however, things have gone absolutely haywire because knowledge is being completely driven by curiositas rather than as a productive resource that might help us improve our lives.
It is unclear to me how 99% of the content getting piped into our brains via the various social media mechanisms and podcasts is actually of real help to our personal development. But finding the 1% is not something anyone learned in school, and most never learned in their home, so people are in an absolute Wild West of content.
In my view, it’s a Crisis of Content. It’s a crisis of curiositas.
The Hedgehog’s Last Stand
Isaiah Berlin, drawing on the Greek poet Archilochus, wrote, "The fox knows many things; the hedgehog one big thing," to illustrate a fundamental distinction in human thinking and behavior. Berlin used this metaphor to categorize writers and thinkers into two groups: foxes, who pursue a wide variety of interests and perspectives, adapting to complex and varied experiences, and hedgehogs, who focus deeply on a single, overarching idea or principle that guides their thoughts and actions. This distinction helps explain different intellectual approaches, with foxes embodying versatility and adaptability, while hedgehogs demonstrate a deep commitment to a singular vision or idea.
My fear is that in a content saturated world, we are stretched to become hyperfoxes, exhausted in the pursuit of every new piece of content, stretched thin with knowledge and thin with desires, never able to take the time to drop down and deeply understand anything, let alone develop any thick desires.
If we have thin desires, we are more easily captivated by thin knowledge—by the million things that present themselves to us daily as worthy of knowing when in fact maybe only one of them is.
If we cultivate thick desires, however, the thickness of those desires becomes a filter for our knowledge. We desire to know that which gets us closer to the essential knowledge, and the timeless insight, that will help us live a life of meaning.
Only foxes chase rabbits; only foxes go down rabbit holes. Hedgehogs go down into dens.
Augustine would locate this drive, this desire, in the realm of concupiscence—which makes it not dissimilar from sexual lust.
Which makes it a scandalon, a scandal, which is best translated as a “stumbling block”, or obstacle.
Makes sense. The cultivation of thick desires is the key of course as our distractedness and shattered attentions are both cause and effect for thin desires. Every new shiny object must be pursued because, well, mimesis and that pursuit brings with it a further thinning because nothing satisfies us long enough...
In the continuum between hedgehogs and foxes, I aspire to being a fox in that I want to delve into a variety of sources of knowledge. It seems to me that what you're describing is the difference between depth and shallowness of knowledge rather than knowing one thing vs. many. And as you point out, a hedgehog is rarely a valuable source of insight because in knowing only one thing they usually fail to have perspective.