Intellectual curiosity is a vital antidote against intellectual dishonesty (and is
necessary, though not sufficient, for intellectual flourishing), whereas a lack of intellectual curiosity is an
excellent bellwether for intellectual
dishonesty (where intellectual curiosity is lacking, intellectual dishonesty is sure to be found not far away).
Supposing that might be true, what is intellectual curiosity? It’s
certainly very different from – though not necessarily incompatible with –,
say, a fondness for picking up and spouting arcane jargon. Rather, it’s a
natural inclination of healthy human beings to feel wonder in the face of things
and people and ideas and a desire to learn to properly understand and
appreciate all these things for what(ever) they truly are.
It seems to me that someone who says, “There’s no point in
us discussing such and such an issue, because we have very different
fundamental views about such and such (about the world, about truth, about
human nature, etc.)” is very likely lacking in intellectual curiosity (and thus likely prone to intellectual dishonesty). Such a
person simply doesn’t want to understand anything different from what she
already understands. She is perhaps rather similar to a skittish horse, which simply
can’t function properly – can’t placidly plod along – without blinders on to
shut out distractions and to keep its gaze focused on its given task.
Now there’s nothing really wrong with someone having a
narrow focus, so long as that person has a clearly defined job to do and she
needs to stay focused on just getting that job done. But some of the tasks
which life imposes on us are just not like that. If you have a wild horse, for
example, that needs to keep track of the rest of the herd, be on guard against
predators, etc., the horse needs to be able to look around and see what is
what, to assess, in its own horsy way of assessing things, the ‘big picture’ of
what is going on around it. Blinders are a bad idea in this kind of situation.
And this is the kind of situation that human beings are in
when they have fundamental disagreements with the other human beings with whom
they live. Whenever disagreements arise, it is always possible to just take up
arms – whether physical or verbal – and attack, or to just plug one's ears and hole up in one’s
ideological fortress. But most of us can see that this is a vicious kind of
response, not worthy of a human being. It is a corruption of our intellectual
curiosity -- even if it is one which, to some extent, inevitably occurs, given the sickness (or just feebleness) that, with varying
severity, infects every human being. But it is also something that we can commit
ourselves to working against, because, while it clearly is a sickness of our race, still, whatever
psychoses do affect us, the undeniable existence of intellectual curiosity – which
is as undeniable as the existence of children
– continues to speak to us of the metaphysical possibility and the moral necessity of
working to overcome such psychoses (that is, such losses of contact with reality).
Not that the evident existence of intellectual curiosity necessarily speaks to all of us. It is possible
to become like the Dwarfs in C.S. Lewis’ beautiful depiction in The Last Battle of the death of
intellectual curiosity. The Dwarfs decide that
they’re on their own and they will only look out for each other. They are
little skeptics who don’t want to be taken in by any grand tales (any
‘metanarratives’), who aren’t interested in serving any grand cause, so they
refuse to believe in any ‘truth’ except that “the Dwarfs are for the Dwarfs.”
They viciously and gleefully attack anyone who is outside of their clique and even when their
plight becomes evidently hopeless they refuse to receive any help from others:
“Well, at any rate there’s no Humbug here. We haven’t let anyone take us in. The Dwarfs are for the Dwarfs.”
“You see,” said Aslan. “They will not let us help them. They have chosen cunning instead of belief. Their prison is only in their own minds, yet they are in that prison; and so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out…”
The Dwarfs are beautifully depicted because they are so true to life. At first they are almost frighteningly ugly, like the recent disgustingly ugly display put on by abortion zealots in Argentina. But in the end we can see that they are simply and tragically ridiculous.* (And it strikes me as more than coincidental that you very rarely (if ever) see a Dwarf child in Narnia – and that such vitriolic contempt for the lives even of innocent little children should be found together with a similar spitting, chanting, sneering contempt for intellectual curiosity in Argentina.)
[*Even though, in Lewis' account, it's also true that they are still not entirely beyond the possibility of finally accepting redemption.]
