Curiosity

Here's a post from hilzoy that quotes at length from Charles Brown's response to this statement by Sarah Palin:

I'm not one of those who maybe came from a background of, you know, kids who perhaps graduate from college. Their parents get them a passport and give them a backpack and say, "go off and travel the world." No, I've worked all my life. In fact I've had two jobs all my life until I had kids. I was not a part of, I guess, that culture.

There's a lot wrong with this statement, most of which Brown answers. Like him, my family wasn't well-off, and I went to Europe on my own. I was older -- my late twenties -- and I had saved up the money for the trip by -- well, by working. That's also a large part of the way I went to college, although my parents did foot tuition for the state university I attended. I paid for everything else myself. But I wanted to see Europe, even though I could only afford a trip to France and England.

I fell in love with Paris, but then, who doesn't?

But both hilzoy and Brown hit on one point that I think has a lot of resonance: curiosity. Curiosity is a natural state, as far as I'm concerned, and even more than ignorance, incuriosity is something that I simply don't understand: I can't figure out why anyone would want to be that way. (Ignorance can be remedied, and stupidity can't be helped, but incuriosity is beyond the Pale.)

Maybe that's why I don't have a great deal of comfort with authority -- I was one of those horrible children who started asking "Why?" and never stopped. "Because I said so" just never worked with me.

And it seems that too many of the conservative rank and file just don't wonder about things, when the universe is this totally magical place with so much to discover.

What they hell are they doing with their lives?