Curiosity

He said it. He actually said it. From Hannah Rosin at Slate:

This is the word that stood out for me in Obama's list of values yesterday: "hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism." The rest have echoes in traditional and more safe political dialogue. But curiosity has a different sort of resonance. Curiosity is what led his mother on the many of what must have seemed like reckless adventures, that eventually created the motley family he has today. For a post-PC age, curiosity is a much better word than tolerance with its implications of holding your nose. Curiosity always has two shades of meaning—great interest or careful attention to detail on one side and danger on the other. From the red flag of Eve to Curious George, Western culture has often stressed the latter definition. Now Obama reclaims it as a noble character trait, which is how I've always taught it to my kids.

For me, it's the sine qua non of humanity: most of our traditional "differences" from the apes and other "lower" animals have been shown to be differences of degree, not kind -- langauge, tool-using, the like. And I guess curiosity is the same, but we have much greater potential for exploiting it.

And lack of curiosity is, most like, the one quality above all others that I have no patience with. It's the seed of willful ignorance, which I detest -- how on earth can you not want to know things?

I simply don't want to deal with people like that, because we have nothing in common.

And coming off a world-view in which curiosity is not even on the radar -- OK, I feel better.