Here’s a fun, self-revealing exercise to consider: what qualities or values do you wish you could see more of in the world? Whatever the reason—personality, childhood formation, or perhaps a desire to grow beyond such formation—these are the qualities you highly appreciate in others and seek to embody yourself. The great diversity in what people most prioritize makes this world a more interesting place and offers endless opportunities for growth. As for which qualities I most value, effort, friendship, integrity, and responsibility belong in the mix, but my mind has not historically reflected on these so much as two traits in particular: curiosity and compassion.
Regarding compassion, I use this word to describe the quality of genuinely caring about people and wanting to see them flourish—especially when it means caring more about human welfare than one’s own pride, comfort (ideological, emotional, or otherwise), indulgence in misdirected passion, or desire for self-righteousness. Compassion is stronger than mere care or kindness in that it also includes, through self-examination, the removal of barriers to genuine care that lie within one’s own heart.
Regarding curiosity, many would prefer the term open-mindedness, but I believe curiosity is a more meaningful word, describing a fuller mental and emotional approach to learning which is as equally concerned with open-mindedness as it is with greater accuracy and higher quality thoughts. Curiosity is, to put it simply, the quality of genuinely seeking to understand things and/or people and therefore being truly open to learning. Heavy emphasis on “genuine,” as performative curiosity is anything but.
Curiosity requires habitual nurturing, as it is a quality that can fade with age unless continually exercised (compare a child to a middle-aged man). This striving is made all the more important by the reality that curiosity is necessary for compassion. On curiosity’s inseparableness from compassion, it is an unfortunate human tendency to engage the world with layers of motivated reasoning and predetermined conclusions. This tendency is problematic for both curiosity and compassion on multiple social levels, levels I define as societal, relational, and relationship-with-self.
On a societal level, it seems to me insufficient curiosity can trap people into being more committed to their causes or mental-frameworks than the people their causes or mental-frameworks are supposed to help. This is the opposite of compassion—genuinely caring for people isn’t limited to one’s individual actions; it’s also about whether one cares more about the welfare of people than maintaining their own ideological comfort.
On a relational level, I’ve met many people (and have myself been guilty of all this) who either 1) are more comfortable first judging differences than understanding them, or 2) want to simplify people with categories/boxes like personality tests rather than dive into a person’s complexity, or 3) tend to read their own views into other peoples’ words (an unfortunate side effect of interpreting another through one’s own way of seeing the world) rather than understand—from foundational assumptions up to expressed opinions—how the other person sees the world.
On a relationship-with-self level, the human tendency toward incuriosity is no less potent when turned toward oneself. This makes true self-evaluation incredibly difficult and painful and is why healthy relationships are so often the most productive anvils of human growth. Lying to oneself is easy, so easy all of us do so with regularity, for it is a shortcut to obtaining feelings of comfort, motivation, and self-confidence. The trade-off is short-term happiness for the long-term contentment that lies along the path of personal growth. Writing on this subject within his “How to Build a Life” column series in The Atlantic, Arthur Brooks argues “Personal integrity is absolutely necessary for personal progress, which psychologists show is a central ingredient of happiness. Progress requires knowing honestly where you are compared with where you have been. If you are willfully oblivious to your flaws, you can’t correct them.” Furthermore, “Ignorance may be bliss…but it is an irresponsible waste of a life.” That’s not to say, as Brooks argues, one should accept every opinion, positive or negative, said about them. Rather, “the key is to receive critical information without getting defensive, and to consider evidence about yourself the way you would if it were about another person.” This is damn hard though; ego-defensiveness is always temptatious.
Significantly, these three levels are not isolated. Lying-to-self can distort one’s curiosity towards others, and distorted curiosity toward others can distort one’s curiosity toward systems and causes and their effects on people. The more positive reverse is likewise true: curiosity for oneself can extend to genuine curiosity for others, and genuine curiosity for others can extend to true curiosity for systems and causes. For this reason, movements for social progress must not neglect the human condition–lest harm be replaced with newer, shinier, more celebrated harm.
As some parting words to chew on, I recommend these wonderful thoughts on curiosity from political writer Will Wilkerson:
Curiosity is very closely related to one of my most highly prized traits, what Keats called “negative capability”… “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” There’s whiff of Romantic mysticism about this, for sure, but I see it primarily as openness to complexity, comfort with ambiguity, patience with not knowing…
That’s why I’ve become suspicious of people who get strenuously ideological about truth. They strike me as not wanting truth so much as a feeling of certainty and a sense of sure-footed epistemic command. They can’t stand the dizzying fog of ambiguity. They flee from it. When they manage to find shelter from overwhelming complexity and the anxiety of not-knowing, they have a bad habit of calling it “truth.”
Man, I’ve been there. It took me a long time to really grasp that the path to understanding is paved with uncertainty, bafflement and mystification. If you roll with it long enough, keep steering into the fog, keep stepping where you slip, you may be graced with a certain clarity. But if you’re doing it right, the crispness of your new vista will also become obscure with a haze of enigmas and conundrums. Negative capability is loving the twilight. Curiosity is the drive to plunge again into the mist. It’s never really pleasant, but you can get addicted to it, as runners can get addicted to the pain of pushing through. Whatever there is worth seeing starts with not-seeing, knowing with not-knowing…
But I think there’s a trait even more fundamental and essential to truth-seeking than curiosity and negative capability. Without a certain innocent humility, something like the opposite of jadedness, which allows you to admit that you haven’t seen it all and don’t already know everything worth knowing, it’s hard to be curious enough to throw yourself into the vertiginous work of effing the ineffable. This is where I trip up constantly…Lord, it’s hard to be humble.
To wonder about possibilities, to throw off the settled familiarity of one’s experiences and behaviors, to step into change and, most importantly, into compassion, is the work of curiosity in its most ideal form.
Preaching to the Choir 