The Dangers and Delights of Questioning

Where would humanity be without curiosity? It's difficult to imagine, because curiosity seems like such a fundamentally human trait. Questioning is key for people to find ways of understanding themselves ("who am I?") and to pursue particular passions in their lives ("what do I want?" or "who do I want to become?"). These big questions have a ripple effect, spawning any number of smaller questions that help one take action ("how do I begin learning guitar?" "what is a capo?" and so on).

The need to question usually begins very early in life. (anyone who has spent time with newly verbal toddlers can attest that "why?" is often a favorite word). But children eventually learn that too much outward questioning can annoy others, and they learn that certain kinds of questions, under certain kinds of circumstances, are generally or explicitly disallowed. I've been wondering lately about these invisible, socio-culturally constructed boundaries beyond which, many of us are told, our curiosity ought not to penetrate.

What makes a question dangerous? Surely the answer varies from person to person, but I'm most interested in how this question operates in the context of communities. I wrote recently about my qualms with the idea of "normal," and I think it is probably norms, the age-old desire to preserve the status quo, that leads some groups to decide that certain questions should be forbidden. Consider that throughout human history (and, indeed, in many places across the world today), questioning one's sexuality and/or gender could be strictly punished, even by death. Book banning is making a comeback as American libraries face record numbers of challenges against books that describe real people's real experiences, because bigots believe they can prevent people (both kids and adults) from answering questions in ways they don't want by keeping everyone from knowing those questions exist in the first place.

The sad part is, they're right, at least in the short term. Yet in the long term this silencing does terrible damage. The queer kid growing up in the rural part of a red state without access to narratives by and about queer people may or may not turn out openly (or even knowingly) queer. But they will learn to hate queerness (in themself and in others), and to fit in they may fall into a bad habit of spreading that hatred in many ways. Some of these are more subtle, like the married gay man who shames non-monogamous gays for "giving us a bad name." And some end in the suicides of queer youth who are kicked out of their housing situations, abandoned by family and friends because they chose to be honest about who they were. This is the status quo bigots want to maintain, but in the end they cannot help but fail.

The bigots will fail because important questions demand truthful answers. Important questions don't go away if you answer them with a lie or even a half-hearted assertion that one feels compelled under duress to insist "must be true." And they definitely don't go away if you just try to ignore them. Truly important questions simply won't be ignored: the longer they go unanswered the larger they grow until they occupy nearly all of the brain's available bandwidth. To begin answering such questions, dangerous as others may deem them, may lead to a sense of relief so delightful I could only call it a sin to deny it.