The Rights and Wrongs of Curiosity (Plutarch to Augustine)

Extract

One of the more endearing of the seventy-eight treatises which make up the Moralia of Plutarch is one entitled ‘On not minding your own business'. The Greek title, Περ Πολυπραγμοσνης, reminds us momentarily of Plato's famous definition of justice in Republic 4, which is to do your own thing (μ πολυπραγμονεῖν). Plutarch was indeed an ardent Platonist, but here he is concerned not with political philosophy but with social habits. The treatise reminds me of nothing so much as of a famous Lancastrian comedian of my youth called Norman Evans, who in a sketch called Over the Garden Wall assumed the transvestite role of a nosy female neighbour, simultaneously pegging out clothes and retailing juicy items of gossip. For Plutarch, after defining this nosiness or πολυπραγμοσνη as ‘an unhealthy and harmful state of mind, a fondness for learning the misfortunes of others, a disease apparently free of neither envy nor malice’, condemns the common tendency to pry into the social origins of neighbours, their debts, and their private conversations. He likewise condemns people who read their friends' letters, and who watch sacred ceremonies which it is μ θμισ ρν (perhaps he had in mind Clodius' gate-crashing of the rite of Bona Dea). Such inquisitiveness, says Plutarch, is invariably accompanied by a wagging tongue, for what these people gladly hear, they gladly blab about: a ἃ γἔρ δως κοουσιν, δως λαλοσιν Pascal in his Pensees says much the same thing: ‘Curiosity is only vanity. Most often we only wish to know in order to talk about it.’