The Vice of Curiosity?

Last summer, with Oppenheimer in the theaters, a number of commentators drew an analogy between the Manhattan Project and current debates over the threats posed by rapid developments in artificial intelligence.  Humanity, they pointed out, has developed technologies wielding apocalyptic destructive power before, and was able to realize what it had done in real time - the film depicted Oppenheimer’s famous quotation of the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds.” The response to the deployment of the bomb offers either lessons or a cautionary tale for the handling of AI, depending on one’s view of the subsequent history of nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation efforts.  But lurking in the background is a perhaps more troubling question: must man’s pursuit of knowledge constantly unearth new existential threats? Is the darker edge of the old Promethean myth on to something - does our curiosity doom us to self-destruction?

It is hard to imagine a question more central for an institution like MIT, which exists “to advance knowledge and educate students in science, technology, and other areas of scholarship that will best serve the nation and the world in the 21st century.”

The answer suggested by the ancient virtue tradition that the Octet Collaborative is exploring in this space this year, thankfully, is “no” - but not for the reason you might expect.  According to this ancient wisdom, you see, curiosity is a vice - and that turns out to be good news.

That response might elicit a double “huh?”  Curiosity is… a vice? And that’s… a good thing? Let me explain.

Start with the vicious nature of curiosity.  That, I’m sure, sounds entirely backwards.  We cherish and nurture curiosity in our children; we encourage adults to be life-long learners.  Even Ted Lasso admonishes us to “be curious, not judgmental.” What could possibly be wrong with an appetite for knowledge?

Barbecue Sauce.

Quite a lot, it turns out, because like every other appetite we have, our appetite for learning can be excessive, misdirected, or put to destructive use. A long history of Christian reflection on the virtues can help.

St. Thomas Aquinas, writing in the 13th century, was as aware as we are of the tendency to think of the pursuit of knowledge as an unalloyed good.  How, he asked, could we speak of a need to moderate our pursuit of the truth?  “However abundant knowledge of truth may be,” he wrote, “it is not evil but good.” (ST II.II.167.1.objs. 1 & 2)  Nor did he believe that the problem was with turning our intellects to “secular knowledge” rather than studying the Bible or theology; he saw “no sin in being intent on [the philosophical sciences, e.g. ‘secular’ learning].” (ST II.II.167.1.obj. 3). So where does curiosity go wrong?  He gave four answers (ST II.II.167.1.resp.)

First, he argued that curiosity could pursue knowledge for an evil purpose.  For example, someone who writes scholarly articles chiefly to satisfy his own pride at being published and making tenure has misdirected his study at sinful pride.  The purpose could be even more sinful, as in the case of someone who studies chemistry in order to construct a lethal weapon.

Second, pursuing knowledge for the sake of knowledge can be a distraction from pursuing one’s rightful obligations.  The modern example of this that comes to mind is time lost going down a Wikipedia rabbit-hole when one should be working, paying one’s bills, calling a friend, or fulfilling any number of other duties—but on a deeper level, it is a good thing for students early in their careers to ask what course of study God is calling them to and then apply themselves to it wholeheartedly, rather than fritter away their formative years chasing after every passing fancy.

Third, Aquinas, like Augustine before him, was sensitive to the ways in which the goodness of every created thing which can be studied points beyond itself to its creator - and simultaneously, of the power of many created things to captivate and capture the mind as though there were nothing beyond them.  Curiosity is “eating earth,” Augustine writes in On Genesis: A Refutation of the Manichees. Here I think of comments made by Deborah Haarsma, MIT alumna and President of BioLogos, when she was interviewed for the Octet Collaborative’s podcast, Infinite Corridor: she expressed dismay that so many of her colleagues, especially if they had been told at some point in their lives that faith and science were in conflict with one another, could see the same wonders of the cosmos that she spends her time studying as an astrophysicist and never wonder how and why such beauty could exist, never experience awe in the presence of the God who fashioned it all and delights in the delight of the scientists who get to witness it.  Curiosity that stops short of worship, in other words, is falling tragically short.

Lastly, Aquinas worries that there are topics into which humanity simply should not inquire.  “O LORD, my heart is not lifted up; my eyes are not raised too high; I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me.” (Psalm 131:1).  Where to draw those lines or whether to draw them at all is obviously a controversial question: some, but not all, would put the Manhattan Project, or AI, or certain areas of biotechnology, in the category of forbidden knowledge.  Perhaps what matters as much what we leave untouched by our curiosity is why we choose to hold back from certain intellectual pursuits:  “Curiosity snaps the reins of prohibition under the pressure of the desire to know as God knows.” (Augustine, The Literal Meaning of Genesis XI.40) As the contemporary theologian John Webster wrote, “Perfect intellect is not intellect unbounded but intellect wholly devoted to that which it has been given to discover.” (“Curiosity,” in The Domain of the Word, T&T Clark: London, 2013, p. 195) Curiosity threatens to become vicious when it simply recognizes no boundaries.

I said above that it is actually good news that curiosity—the appetite for knowledge misdirected or disordered—is a vice.  Why is this?  For this simple reason: in the tradition we have been exploring, there is no vice without a corresponding virtue.  There couldn’t be, because vices are always corruptions, and there must be something to corrupt—something good in the absence of that corruption, good because everything God made is in itself good. “Curiosity is defect, not nature”, Webster says. To call curiosity a vice is simply to say that the intellect can be corrupted; it is simultaneously to say that the intellect itself is good, even very good.

Aquinas names the virtue to which the vice of curiosity parasitically attaches itself as studiousness.  Curiosity is misdirected, or undirected; studiousness directs the intellect to its proper end (God, of course—but also all other things in relation to God; the virtue of studiousness capaciously embraces every intellectual endeavor). Curiosity may be driven by pride or malice; studiousness is directed by love of God and neighbor.  Curiosity may run to excess and distract us from our obligations; studiousness, as Aquinas understands it, is a part of the virtue of temperance, which moderates the appetites (interestingly, he also understands that there is an aspect of studiousness that impels us forward, overcoming our natural proclivity to avoid the hard work involved in learning - ST II.II.166.2.ad obj.3).

The good news, then is that the intellect is good and that it can develop in virtue, which means that the intellectual endeavors of humanity are not doomed to move us toward destruction and degradation.  This begs the question, of course, of how we might develop the virtue of studiousness—or, to put it back into the terms of MIT’s mission statement, how the advancement of knowledge can truly serve the nation and the world?  Let me conclude by offering two answers.

First, in his reflections on the conflict between studiousness and curiosity, Webster insists that the move toward virtue is always, in the end, a matter of conversion and sanctification.  Vices are more than error; they are rebellion, and they must be subdued by Christ as surely as any other sin.  The means of sanctification in the intellectual realm will be the same as in every other:  God’s Word, acting by the power of God’s Spirit.  For this reason, the Octet Collaborative’s efforts to pursue wisdom within the scientific and technological vocation of MIT will always include elements of witness to the truths of Scripture, the goodness of the law of God, and the light of Christ.

At the same time, Octet is committed to pursuing this witness within the pluralistic setting of MIT, which often means making common cause with those who do not share our faith, but who do share our commitment to human flourishing. Thankfully, there is a broad Christian tradition that joyfully receives truth from any source as God’s truth (Augustine likened receiving pagan wisdom to “plundering the Egyptians”; Aquinas argued that non-Christians could order their lives to secondary but nonetheless legitimately good virtues such as temporal justice; the reformed tradition offers its affirmation of God’s common grace to all humanity).  And here the aftermath of the Manhattan Project does offer lessons for how MIT might grapple with current questions like AI and gene editing.  In an essay published this summer in the Wall Street Journal (“J. Robert Oppenheimer’s Defense of Humanity,” July 15, 2023), David Nirenberg, Director of the Institute for Advanced Study at in Princeton, N.J., noted than when Oppenheimer directed the IAS in the years after the Second World War, he sought to make it “a place for thinking about humanistic subjects like Russian culture, medieval history, or ancient philosophy, as well as about mathematics and the theory of the atom,” because “if humanity wants to survive technology, he believed, it needs to pay attention not only to technology but also to ethics, religions, values, forms of political and social organization, and even feelings and emotions.”

Science and technology constantly expand human capacity, but in themselves they offer no way of selecting the paths that we should take and steering away from those we shouldn’t.  Curiosity becomes a vice when it is unguided and misdirected; the virtue of studiousness flourishes with guidance and direction from wisdom lying across the disciplines.