There Are No More Hedgehogs

When Curiositas Runs Wild, Only Exhausted Foxes Remain

When "a fall occurred in the fight, a mighty cry of the whole people struck him strongly, and overcome by curiosity Alypius opened his eyes." (Augustine’s Confessions, vi, 8)

“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 cr…