It is difficult, as a new parent, to find time to read. Admitting this may discourage the literary from procreation, so I’ll make a caveat. It is not the parent-child relationship per se—any relationship will be found inimical to reading in which party A takes party B’s inattention to party A as a moral affront and a reason to perch on party B’s head, to cover party B’s eyes with fingers greased in peanut butter, to make chicken noises at party B until he despairs; etc.
And while this occasions no great loss (most people, for most of human history, did not read (and who is Party B, with his sins, to defy the human average?)—still, it does lead to a phenomenon I’ll call Critical Displacement Syndrome, in which the habits of literary criticism, denied the usual books that inspire them, are turned upon objects that, really, could do without it. What I am trying to say, of course, is that the aesthetic and moral decline of the Curious George media empire represents the decline of humanity as a whole. The series begins:
This is George.
He lived in Africa.
He was very happy.
But he had one fault:
He was too curious.
Margaret and H. A. Rey could hardly have made a more naked attempt to dredge up, in a people soaked through with evolution, an image of man in his Edenic condition—except, perhaps, by naming George “Adam.” As in Genesis, curiosity is clearly comprehended as a vice. George, who yearned to have the Hat of Man, ends up as ensnared as Eve, who yearned to have the Mind of God. Both fulfill one of Saint Thomas Aquinas’s descriptions of curiosity, in which “a man [or monkey] studies to know a truth above the capacity of his intelligence.” Both are ejected from their respective bliss.
The Serpent made monkeys of our parents by affirming their spirit of curiosity as so much virtue—it has been his interest to make us curious ever since. And though there are many names to call our liberal, technological society, it is edifying to call it One Great Social Transvaluation of Curiosity. We are distinguished from the bulk of human history, not by being curious, but by silencing any disapproval over the fact. We have said to a thing considered evil, “be thou my good,” and turned George’s “one fault” into a compliment: who could bear to have a child who wasn’t curious?
By my count, Saint Thomas Aquinas named seven kinds of curiosity (ST II-II, Q 167, A 1). Liberal societies combine all of them into a singular form of life. Armies of researchers and scientists work to “discover” without any particular end in mind beyond “that they may take pride in their knowledge”—or at least in the publications that guarantee their employment. The fruits of this kind of curiosity are plucked and jellied by another kind: “those who study to learn something in order to sin.” (Our predominant sin is greed, and so the market, and not the pursuit of truth, determines what research shall be funded and what we shall know.) This knowledge for pride and knowledge for gain are justified by a grander unleashing of knowledge for its own sake, that curiosity in which “a man desires to know the truth about creatures, without referring his knowledge to its due end, namely, the knowledge of God.”
If another George is correct (this time not a monkey, but the Canadian philosopher George Grant), then we indulge in this latter form of curiosity because technology is the summit of our “dominating modern faith,” which exhorts us to subordinate the knowledge of creatures to the immediate end of establishing technical mastery over them for the betterment of human life, the meaning of which is always postponed: “[W]hat has been absent for us is the affirmation of a possible apprehension of the world beyond that as a field of objects considered as pragmata.”
The vast majority of us fulfill this project of mastery not by actively dominating nature through applied knowledge, but by passively by fueling this activity through two more forms of curiosity, in which our knowledge is directed to distraction and sin, respectively. Aquinas cites Augustine, for whom curiosities “distract me from some weighty thought … and unless Thou, having made me see my weakness, didst speedily admonish me, I become foolishly dull.” Of course, the foolishly dull are the ideal subjects of liberal capitalism. Distraction from weighty thought creates a people who do not know the purpose of their life, who are therefore easily induced to believe the logic of technology, which attempts to improve “quality of life” without reference to life’s final purpose. To have a purposeful existence is to check the Baconian project of indefinite mastery; it is to say, “here, I will have no technological improvement, for I have attained my purpose.” The curiosity that drives forward with indefinite technological production draws its lifeblood from this generalized, dulling curiosity, which gawks and gapes at screens so as not to think—so as not to know that the purpose of our existence is to live and die for God.
It’s funny, really, that we all thought of atheism and nihilism as philosophies of life; as brave, bold, decisions about man and his place in the cosmos. It turns out they were an ad campaign for future sales; a drawn-out effort to divorce man from his true end, Christ Jesus, so that he’ll be more likely place his hope for a meaningful existence in a Kia, or an iPhone, or a sexual identity purchased from the media conglomerates.
Margaret and H. A. Rey fled from France to America in 1941, with the manuscript of Curious George (which called curiosity his “one fault”) tucked in their belongings. They fled to America, the land of technological faith, from the wars that obliterated any lingering pretense that modernity was anything like Christianity. So it is without surprise that, by 1947, George’s “one fault” had undergone the post-Christian transvaluation of curiosity into a virtue: “He was a very good little monkey and always very curious,” reads the beginning of Curious George Takes a Job. Apparently, this shift was so necessary to the franchise that not only subsequent stories but new printings of the original Curious George, from the 1969 edition onwards, now appear with the corrected words: “and he was always very curious.” They reached in and changed the words, and, as far as I can tell, no one has mentioned the fact.
After the death of the authors and the apotheosis of George into a profitable token, curiosity was assured its place in the pantheon of virtue. The Man in the Yellow Hat stopped admonishing George not to be “too curious” and began telling George to “stay out of trouble.” Which is simply to say what we all say of our technological age, that the indefinite pursuit of knowledge is a good only made problematic if it gets us into trouble—trouble that, inevitably, could be avoided with more curiosity and more technology. The PBS TV series of Curious George handily illustrates this. In every episode, George’s curiosity first gets him into trouble and then rescues him from it, and all those who were angry with the little monkey confess that, after all, it was good that he was so curious. The “moral” of each story is the moral we keep whispering to ourselves in the age of nuclear weapons, man-made plagues, and universal internet addictions: that the benefits outweigh the dangers, and that with just a little more knowledge of creatures, we will get over our need for God.
Curiosity killed the cat. I wish it had killed the monkey. To this end, I am working on a bootleg edition of the original Curious George series, written especially for Catholics. It re-inserts the original text to each beginning and inserts, into the last book Margaret and H.A. Rey wrote, an account of George’s last moments, in which he applies the spirit of curiosity to an exposed wire, or maybe a bottle of arsenic. Interested parents may apply for this insert by letter to the editor.