Curiositas and the David Platt Documentary

Do we need to know everything? No.

Photo by Rex Pickar on Unsplash

This post was unlocked for a few days to allow some readers to see what paid posts are like, but now it is back to being locked. Please consider subscribing.

A couple days ago I noticed David Platt’s name trending on Twitter and I assumed it was because people were still complaining about Platt’s old book, Radical and how it ruined their lives. But apparently there’s a documentary going around exposing something about David Platt’s failings during his time as head of the International Mission Board, I guess. I don’t actually know because I didn’t watch it. And I don’t intend to. But I did feel pulled to watch it by the trending force of social media and the desire to be in the know and have an opinion. Which caused me to reflect how much the vice of curiositas has power over us. I understand that this is not an original reflection, but it strikes me as one worth repeating. Our social media algorithms, our sinful hearts, and our access to endless information all work together to develop inordinate desires to know titillating, scandalizing, shameful stories (whether true or false matters less than how scandalizing they appear to be). This is the vice of curiositas, a perverse, restless desire for knowledge that goes beyond what is respectable, reasonable, and appropriate, that goes beyond all limits. And the right response to curiositas is the virtue of temperance or self-control.