Curiosity had a bad press before the eighteenth century. Early christians such as Saint Augustine classified curiosity as one of the three major sins, alongside carnal pleasure and pride, since it revealed a lack of self restraint ( Eve should have never given into her curiosity and eaten that apple from the tree of knowledge). In the first century, the greek thinker Plutarch similarly labelled curiosity as a wise, equating it with being a gossiping busy body who pokes about in other peoples business. During the enlightenment, however, curiosity was transformed into a virtue. It was considered the driving force behind scientific advancements and technological progress. Scientific luminaries like Isaac Newton and Alexender Won Humbolt were possessed of a healthy curiosity, and inquisitiveness that enabled them to see beyond conventional ideas and make extra ordinary discoveries.
Curiosity remains valued in the arts and sciences today. But it is limited by our enlightenment inheritance, which assumes that curiosity should be applied to ideas and object, rather than people. One recent study, for instance defines curiosity as an exploratory inquisitiveness about ' what we don't know', omitting any reference to
Who we don't know we should move beyond this inheritance and elevate curiosity about others into supreme virtue, because it is a key to opening the door to empathy. We live surrounded by strangers - many of us hardly know our neighbours, we see the same shop assistants every day but understand little about their lives, we can work alongside people for years while their inner selves remain a mystery to us. Curiosity can help us discover who they are and how they see the world. As sociologists Richard Senate writes, we can think about empathy as ' the sentiment of curiosity about who other people are in themselves'.
Does curiosity about strangers come naturally to us? Not according to many anthropologists. Jared Diamond points out that in traditional societies, such as the tribes of new guinea, People have been generally considered to fall into one of three groups. ' Friends' are members of your own band or village, who you can trust.
Enemies are members of neighbouring bands or villages with which your band is on hostile terms. And then there are 'Strangers', unknown individuals from distant bands. ' If you do happen to encounter a stranger in your territory, ' says Diamond, ' YOu have to presume that person is dangerous', since they are likely to be scouting in order to rate your group of kidnap your women folk. In other words, any stranger is a potential enemy, and should be treated with extreme caution.
