Curiosity Killed the Commonwealth

What we can learn from the assassination attempt--and our reactions to it

Jul 15, 2024

Saturday night’s assassination attempt on former President Trump was a national tragedy and a national disgrace, and a call—hopefully—to national repentance. With others, I praise God for his mercy in sparing the former president’s life, and sparing our nation the horrific drama that might have otherwise unfolded, and I lament the heroic death of Corey Comperatore and the other ordinary, patriotic citizens wounded in the crossfire.

I don’t want this Substack to be a place for hot-takes, but an event of this magnitude surely justifies an interruption in this week’s planned programming and a pause for reflection. I had been planning to share some reflections about last week’s National Conservatism Conference in Washington, DC, and indeed some of what I hoped to say dovetails all too well with the terrifying events of Saturday night. But I will postpone that till Thursday and offer instead something of a meta-hot take.

When news broke of a shooting at a Trump rally, and those jarring images popped up on our screens, of a bleeding Donald Trump holding his fist high, surrounded by Secret Service agents, what did we all do? If you were like 99.9% of Americans, I imagine that the first thing you did was to tune in to as many sources of information you could find, and the second thing you did was to start sharing whatever breathless tidbits you found with family, friends, or perhaps the world at large. At least, that’s what I did, and I like to think of myself as unusually unplugged. Never mind, of course, that the vast majority of information likely to emerge in those frantic first minutes was likely to be garbled or false. In such situations, it is not so much true information we are looking for, but new information: God forbid we should be out of the loop. If we can be ahead of the curve, so much the better. I found myself sharing with a couple of group chats the tidbit I got from a friend of a friend who was at the rally, that the shooter had killed himself. Of course, it didn’t take long for that to be proved false.

I felt a bit better about myself though after I spent a bit of time scrolling on X, and found numerous individuals—some with national or international reputations—sharing rumors and wild speculations: some alleged that the shooter was an antifa member named Mark Violets, which turned out to be false; others speculated that Trump hadn’t been shot at all but had just faked the whole thing as a publicity stunt to boost his candidacy, a narrative that got increasingly implausible as news emerged of the innocent bystanders shot. At least half of Saturday night’s hot-takes were discredited by Sunday morning, and probably half of Sunday’s will be discredited by the time you read this.

What do most of the narratives now swirling through cyberspace have in common? They all represent some attempt to bring order out of chaos, simplifying the cacophony of our present political moment into the crystal clarity of the final scene of a good murder mystery. Some conspiracy theorists will allege that Biden or other Democrat operatives ordered the shooting. Others will say the Secret Service conspired to let it happen, or to let it almost happen. The media did this, we are told, by painting Trump as a virtual Hitler (after all, wasn’t Bonhoeffer a hero?). This proves that it is the Left, not the Right, that is the real threat for political violence in this country!

In fact, it proves nothing, because one single data point in a nation of 330 million can never prove anything. Most presidential assassinations in the past have been the work of a random psycho, acting out of confused and idiosyncratic motives. Odds are the same will prove true of Matthew Crooks. But what happened Saturday night—both the action and the reactions—can still tell us something important about ourselves as a nation.

Why is it that we have such a compulsion to consume and share information, to frame and reframe narratives, knowing full well that we know almost nothing about what’s going on, or what to do about it? It is not, I would suggest, out of love for truth, but out of fear and hatred of the unknown. The more we distrust all information sources, the more feverishly we gulp down whatever information we can find, hoping that sheer information quantity can somehow compensate for lack of information quality. We feel increasingly insecure and out of control, and hope to feel in control by finding answers, however tenuous. The problem is that this is a hamster wheel, a vicious feedback loop. Tortured by uncertainty in a society gone sideways, we crave certainty, and so we demand facts, answers, patterns, solutions. But the sources that we go to for answers prove fallible, increasing our distrust and heightening our uncertainty. The facts that we cling to turn out to be slippery and malleable, and slide through our fingers, only increasing our desperation.

This vice is not new to our information age, even if it’s been put on steroids by digital media. The medievals and early moderns referred to it as the vice of curiositas, and we have much to learn from their treatment of it. Ironically, I was planning to spotlight in this week’s Substack the publication of a book chapter of mine on Richard Hooker’s critique of curiosity, an epistemic error that Hooker links directly to the emergence of political radicalism in his own time. Curiosity is bred from uncertainty, and responds by trying to know things that are not ours to know, or to know with more certainty than the nature of things will yield. This may provide momentary, illusory comfort, but soon we feel betrayed by the instability of the “knowledge” we have gained, and so we rush on in search of something new to make sense of the fragmenting world: new information, new answers, new narratives, and of course new heroes to save us. And gnawed deep down by the realization that we do not know as much as we pretend to, we compensate by clinging ever more passionately to our rival stories.

The result, of course, is that ordinary politics becomes impossible, because politics simply is uncertainty. Yuval Levin writes in his new book, American Covenant, that functional societies “assume that most political questions will not be fundamental questions of right and wrong but prudential questions of better or worse.” There will be exceptions—fundamental existential and moral questions—but those exceptions must not be allowed to become the norm, as they have today.

While we still know little about Matthew Crooks’s motives, what we can say is that there were any number of Americans Saturday who would have loved to see Trump dead—and any number who would have loved to see Biden dead for that matter. Amidst the fog of our political war there are some who yearn for the seeming moral clarity of a real shooting war. To which history tells us simply: be careful what you wish for.

None of us can undo what happened Saturday night, but we can decide how we respond. We can try to do our own small part to reverse the vortex of radicalization. What then is the antidote for the vice of curiosity? Two homely virtues (which I certainly don’t claim to possess!): humility and patience. Curiosity is born of the pride of thinking we know more than we can, thinking that we deserve to know more than we know, and seeking to advertise our knowledge through constant chatter. Humility knows to shut up and listen.

But what if you keep listening and the answers don’t seem to be coming? “Let patience have her perfect work, that you may be perfect and entire, lacking nothing.” Too often we think of patience simply as “waiting”—although waiting is hard enough in a culture of immediacy. The word patience, though, comes from the Latin root meaning “to suffer.” Patience means enduring suffering, and few things cause us such psychological anguish as uncertainty. We live in a culture that has no patience for pain: we pop a pill to dull the symptoms, and gripe loudly if it doesn’t work. No surprise then that we have no patience for the pain of uncertainty, but seek the quick fix of the digital feed or partisan narrative.

Thankfully, patience is always easier if you have something to distract you, something else to keep you busy. As Hooker wrote to the curious Puritan radicals of his day, “How much happier were the world if those eager Taskmasters whose eyes are so curious and sharp in discerning what should be done by many and what by few, were all changed into painful doers of that which every good Christian man ought either only or chiefly to do, and to be found therein doing when that great and glorious Judge of all men’s both deeds and words shall appear.” There is precious little that most of us can do either to unearth exactly what happened Saturday night or why, and indeed precious little we can do to make sure it is not repeated. But thankfully the Lord has given each of us more than enough to keep us busy in our own homes, and churches, and communities.

Of course, that’s not a call to turn a blind eye to national politics—heck, I just moved to near Washington DC to be more involved in it! But we might do well to better calibrate our action to our knowledge, putting most of our time and energy into the spheres where we really can understand what’s going on, rather than those we can’t.

Newly Published

Richard Hooker and the Christian Virtues: Even as I’ve broadened out into many areas of contemporary ethics and politics, my main academic scholarship continues to be on the great Anglican theologian/political theorist Richard Hooker. This volume, published this week after several years in process, collects essays from many eminent scholars on Hooker’s treatment of the virtues and vices. My essay, “‘Shall These Fruitless Jars and Janglings Never Cease?’: Richard Hooker’s Critique of Curiosity,” explores some of the themes touched on in today’s email in the context of the sixteenth century. Unfortunately, the volume is published by Brill, so I don’t expect any of you to shell out the $138.00 for it—but hey, ask your library to get a copy!
“Back to Governing”: My column on the need for conservatives to get back to the basics of governing amidst the paralysis of culture-war rhetoric apparently struck a chord. I was asked to record a radio version for WORLD which went up last week and I’ll be doing a longer radio interview for NC Family radio on it next week.
Richard Hooker on Theological Method: Sticking with the Richard Hooker theme, my book review of Philip Hobday’s Richard Hooker: Theological Method and Anglican Identity was published last week in Ad Fontes. Hobday’s book constitutes a wonderful advancement of new pathways in Reformation scholarship that have emphasized the essential catholicity of the Reformation. When it comes to the relation of Scripture, tradition, and reason, Hobday argues, much less separates Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin, and Richard Hooker than most have imagined. Well worth a read for those interested in these issues.

Coming down the Pipe

I still have a forthcoming column for WORLD Opinions, delayed now due to the assassination, that considers what lessons Christians should draw from Jonathan Haidt’s #1 bestseller on kids and smartphones, The Anxious Generation. Look for this column to appear in the next few days.
As noted above, I’m also planning on writing a piece on what I saw at the fourth National Conservatism Conference last week. This too should appear at WORLD Opinions in the coming days.
Last fall I gave a lecture at the Touchstone conference entitled “Rediscovering Political Authority in an Age of Expertise.” It was very well-received and the audio was recently released by Mars Hill (though it’s behind a paywall), and I’m happy to report that the full text will be published in the next issue of Mere Orthodoxy. Subscribe now to get it when it comes out!

On the Bookshelf

Yuval Levin, American Covenant (2024): I was privileged to go to the book launch for this in DC last month. Yuval is one of the greatest and wisest conservative minds of our time, and is always a pleasure to read. I’ll be reviewing this for FusionAIER.
Oliver O’Donovan, The Desire of the Nations (1996): I’m just wrapping up my first full read-through of this masterpiece in over a decade, and realizing (as always with O’Donovan) that I didn’t really understand it at all the first time or the second time. I’m taking voluminous notes, some of which I may share here over the next few weeks. But here’s one money quote for the moment: “We can see this from the characteristic dilemma which besets the favourite causes of liberal idealism: how to claim moral license for themselves without licensing their opposites. Each movement of social criticism draws in its train a counter-movement, and there is no ground in logic for paying more or less respect to the one than to the other. So Black consciousness, for example, requires (logically), invites (historically) and licenses (morally) a movement of White consciousness; feminism entails male chauvinism; homophilia entails homophobia, and so on. Our intuitions tell us that some of these movements are worth more than their shadows, but our intuitions are allowed no way of justifying themselves, and we are compelled, by the logic of historical dialectic, to give away whatever it is we think we may have gained.”
James Davison Hunter, Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America’s Political Crisis (2024): Just finishing this up as well, and my oh my does it have relevance for our current moment. Will probably review this somewhere in the coming months.

Get Involved

If you like this Substack, please spread the word with others. I’m just starting out, and steering clear of social media for now, and so would love to grow my subscribers through word of mouth! For now, this Substack will be totally free, but if you like the work I’m doing, please consider donating to it here by supporting EPPC and mentioning my name in the Comments.

If you have any questions or comments or pushback on anything you read here today (or recommendations for research leads I might want to chase down), please email me (w.b.littlejohn@gmail.com). I can’t promise I’ll have time to reply to every email, but even if you don’t hear back from me, I’m sure I’ll benefit from hearing your thoughts and disagreements.