Weak Curiosity

Featured

Apr 24

by Jason Peters

If you are dimly aware of a thing called “national politics,” and if you are also dimly aware that a lot of people are getting very red in the face over them, then you might, stifling a yawn, walk over to your bookshelf and pull down a collection of Emerson’s essays.

Now Emerson must be forgiven for being a Unitarian and a bore, but he did write some splendid sentences, one of which is this: “the power men possess to annoy me I give them by a weak curiosity.”

This weak curiosity, it seems to me, is one of the great pestilential but undiagnosed maladies of our times. It is all-havoc-wreaking. It elevates to dangerous levels the blood pressure of the political philosophers on The View. It puts Sean Hannity’s inanities on continuous loop. It strikes Rachel Maddow with a case of raging Mad Cow. And it turns the listeners of all of these distinguished luminaries into a race of Furies, a veritable swarm of hornet-mad Maenads and Allectos.

But there are ways to fortify yourself against the malady of a weak curiosity.

To illustrate: years ago a friend, trustworthy in almost all matters, would sometimes endure from me a little gentle abuse about being on Facebook, which is surely a scourge if ever there were one, especially if its reach includes what is nowadays called a “grown-ass man.” (Facebook was invented by a college sophomore; its effect, not surprisingly, is to make millions of people, including “adults,” behave sophomorically.) Then one day he confessed to me that he was off Facebook and couldn’t believe how much happier he was. It was an Emersonian moment: if a weak curiosity gives others power to annoy, remove the curiosity and watch the annoyance vanish.

In the interest of friendship, which is sacred, I denied myself the Valley-Girl reply (Well, duh!) and I listened to his assessment of his newfound freedom from one of the many anxiety-inducing noise machines we’re being attacked by. (Or are they more like Trojan Horses that we, accomplices in our own destruction, willing drag into our apparently pregnable citadels?) What he said had the ring of my own experience in being willfully indifferent to news outlets, whether printed or aired, and the peace I have long enjoyed by shutting out the likes of Dr. Whoopi Goldberg and Professor Joe Scarborough, both of whom one suspects of never having read Tocqueville or cracked the Stagirite’s Politics. If I suspect the chatterers and the journalists beholden to advertisers to be, like our government, partisan or mendacious or both, why, I wonder, should I or anyone else listen to these chuckleheads? What kind of person, grown-ass or not, prefers the noise of “news” or “commentary” or Facebook to the peace and quiet and freedom from annoyance that ignoring them affords?

And as for NPR—well, the tone says it all. No one who’s that precious (“precious” one thing the P stands for) could ever have a thought worth giving a penny for. Plus you just can’t start that many sentences with the word “so,” or greet that many radio guests with the word “hey,” and expect to be taken seriously.

But already I digress. My topic isn’t truth. It’s eudaemonia: happiness, blessedness, and that includes freedom from annoyance.

I will be told that I “need to know what’s going on in the world.” This is nonsense. It is nonsense so long as someone else gets to decide “what’s going on in the world,” or how to frame it, or what the lede will be, especially if that someone is a chucklehead.

Moreover, whose “world”?

Indifference has benefits that are legion. There’s a palpable liberation, not to mention clarity, available to anyone who regards national politics and the whole rotten tribe of yammerers obsessed with them as unworthy of mere animal, let alone human, sentience. This you can get with a simple study in contrasts: instead of starting your day with the Village Explainers who put out the New York Times daily newsletter, try the Psalter. See what happens when you get your head going in a good direction at least for a few minutes before someone else, a half-witted wonk, for example, sends it in a bad one. And even if the Psalmist’s concerns are no part of your moral furnishings, at least there’s the stately poetry to feast on and the sounds and cadences of Coverdale’s English translation. Do you want instead the Fourth Estate’s “Sources say …” or “Experts agree …” when you can at least have the felicitous “Then cried I unto thee, O Lord; and gat me to my Lord right humbly”? One archaism is worth a hundred episodes of Odd Things Considered or Fetid Air, the nauseating mainstays of National Partisan Radio (“partisan” being another thing the P in NPR stands for; “puerile” will also answer, as will “pernicious” and “pusillanimous”).

Now there is a ripple-effect of this great pestilential and undiagnosed malady, and it is a serious matter. Its destructive power is wide-ranging. It is a power, and an evil one, and it is tearing apart friendships; it is putting marriages asunder.

I suppose there have always been people unwilling to keep national politics or even small disagreements out of friendship, but now, almost of a sudden, small disagreements and disputes about candidates have the wasting power formerly reserved for such treacheries as adultery. Can actual adults of the aforementioned grown-ass type, whether male or female, really give a rat’s arse about such dull and desultory disagreements? Do they really think the candidate you voted for is the most interesting thing about you? That it’s your defining feature? Can men and women really permit political disagreements to cause permanent damage to friendships? To marriage?

Apparently. And it’s not a little disheartening, especially inasmuch as the disagreements boil down to a preference for diet Pepsi over diet Coke, or for Miller Lite over Coors Light—four repellent beverages that no one endowed with actual taste buds could possibly prefer to a draught of clear cold water.

But there is also a richness here that bears pointing out. The mind boggles, or it should, at people who, on the one hand, say it’s nobody’s business whom you jump into the sack with but who also, on the other hand, use voting—which is the last act of citizenship—as the standard for separating sheep from goats. How is one of these nobody’s business and the other everybody’s? I say again the mind should boggle. It should boggle especially inasmuch as the standard for separating genus ovis from genus capra has already been set—and by an authority slightly more trustworthy than your average cable news addict. (That standard is acts of corporal mercy.)

Perhaps you have a very old friend you don’t even want to sit down with, because you can see decades of friendship come crashing down on account of your not hating the right people, even though neither of you will ever meet or talk to any of those whom you’re required to abominate obsessively and vent your spleen on at all hours of the day.

I say nothing of those petulant children who have left the country “because of Trump” or who might have left “because of Kamala” (supposing there are any: right-of-aisle rage seems at the moment less brittle). I don’t like the Orange Clown or the Pantsuit in Search of a Complete Sentence either, but even Allen Ginsberg, during one of the nuttiest times in American history, and at a high-water mark of national paranoia, refused the ex-pat option and instead stayed put. “I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel,” he said, and he meant it.

Or to put all this another way: I’ll be damned and go to hell if I’m going to let national politics dominate my waking hours or be the reef that a friendship founders on. Whom anyone votes for, once the votes have been cast, should be a matter of supreme indifference—I would go so far as to say a matter of death-inducing boredom—to men and women entrusted with the offices of civility and good will. This includes votes for the last three major choices: the Pompous Power-Mad Ass, the Senile Warmongering Grifter, and the Cackling Village Idiot. (And these monikers highlight their good points.)

I’ll even turn the screw one more time here. So consumed are we with the distant and abstract that we meanwhile ignore our neighbors—those who, by definition, are “nearby.” Why this should be so, it seems to me, is that it’s a lot easier for us latter-day Samaritans to give our passions to those we will never have to do anything about than to give them to the flesh-and-blood people right before us, men and women whom we could actually lift out of the ditch if we weren’t staring at screens. For good or ill it has been my portion to be an academic my whole working life, and I’ve known plenty of academics, good liberal-minded people all, who are up in arms about female circumcision on the other side of the globe but who can’t be bothered to bring groceries to the widow down the block or to sit with her in her loneliness. This is another ripple effect: we want the distant and the abstract to “care” about so that we have no real day-to-day obligations except to scream at people we don’t like or, what is worse, destroy friendships with our poisoned barbs. Grown-ass people who do this should be ashamed of themselves. They are worse than two-year-olds in mid-temper tantrum.

My guess is that we’re headed to the place we’ve always been headed to: catastrophe. Real change of the improving kind usually comes about not because we are good intelligent people but because Reality has stepped in with demands no longer possible to ignore. Complacency has a way of ushering in crisis. The middle ground between complacency and crisis is vigilance—vigilance of a sort that isn’t all that difficult: tend to the things at hand. In my case these include my marriage, my kids, and my grandkids; my students, colleagues, neighbors, and friends; my hogs, my lambs, my hens, and especially during this interminable (!) Lenten season my darkened soul.

And if someone annoys you, that’s on you and your weak curiosity. Same goes for me.

Jason Peters joined Hillsdale’s faculty in the fall of 2021 after spending 25 years at Augustana College, where he was Dorothy J. Parkander Professor in Literature.