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Curiosity Didn’t Kill The Cat
Why curiosity is our most important but woefully under-used attribute
I remember hearing the expression “curiosity killed the cat” when I was very young, perhaps four or five years old. It puzzled me then and it puzzles me now. Curiosity is what has taken us from being merely baboons to being baboons with clever tools. And yet it is so frequently demonized.
This kind of anti-thinking attitude stretches back in history. We see it in the mythologies derived from the Yahweh cult in which proto-humans are told that they must not attempt to acquire knowledge and are subsequently punished for ignoring the admonition.
The equation thinking = bad is deeply rooted in nearly every human culture. The Catholic Inquisition famously suppressed all attempts at thought for several hundred years and in China both knowledge and thought were strongly suppressed for nearly two millennia. As we are all aware, today strict Islamic cultures regard thinking and knowledge as agents of shaitan; all that is required is mindless rote-memorization of the holy book and adherence to a ramshackle collection of medieval moeurs.
In our modern technological world we are by no means immune to the habit of attempting to extirpate independent thought. Cancel culture and political correctness are no less…
