I’m a bit of a pessimist. Not in a depressing way, my views of the world are probably just more blunt than the standard. I think all emotion is simply biological imperatives that we attempt to fit into our cultural context in order to interact as a society. Love exists because mogonomy is beneficial to child rearing and survival. Hate serves as a protective agent. Happiness promotes repeated behavior. Etc etc. That’s not to undermine the importance of emotion or make it any less real (love, I believe, is life affirming), but emotion isn’t bound intrinsically to the human condition. The abstractions of emotions, as poets and screenplay writers love to abuse, are simply ways of dealing with two very different forces we have within us; our biology and our thinking conscious.
I’m writing this because my good friend, after many drinks and a good hour of hearing me rant about how there’s nothing uniquely human, said something which I think is pretty profound:
“Curiosity is the one redeeming factor of mankind.”
-Theresa
I give her credit for the quote even though I believe she said she heard it from someone else. Hell, I don’t even remember if those are the right words.
Besides the point.
The point is that curiosity doesn’t fit into my dreary outlook of the human species as a bastardized form of monkey. It’s the fact that we ask the questions: Who? What? Where? When? Why? and How? that makes us uniquely human. We question everything. What we see, what we hear, events that are occurring today and events that occurred hundreds of years ago. We obsess over information. People have spent their lives trying to find answers to things that are completely irrelevant to survival in any way. The quest for understanding, whatever it might be, is what nature has granted us as the next step in evolution.
I had forgotten all about Theresa’s quote until last week.
A classmate I have in Spanish is an aerospace engineer. One time before class, in an uncharacteristically serious conversation about future careers, she said she wanted to work on spacecrafts used for exploration.
“Exploring for what?” I asked. “Anything.”
It seems to me of all the undertakings humans have tried nothing epitomizes our curiosity more than deep space exploration. People throw their money, time, even lives at this quest for understanding of something that essentially has no relevance in our daily lives.
It’s done because we’re curious. We want to know, we want to understand.
This our gift; this is what justifies us as a species.
