I'm currently reading Reading Lolita in Tehran, a book about a group of Iranian women led by Azar Nafisi, a professor who now teaches at Johns Hopkins and ran the literary discussion group when she lived in Iran in the mid-90s. These young women met clandestinely, took off their veils, and studied Western literature, taking the works they read, which are primarily about people living in some way (emotional, physical, cultural) in a repressive situation, and using them as springboards for insights into and understanding of their own lives. They started with Nabokov who said, "Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form".
I had never considered the relationship of curiosity to insubordination before but it makes sense and explains why one often gets defensiveness or anger as a response rather than give and take on political threads. To ask questions may indicate a lack of trust, a failure to accept an authority, an opinion, a status quo, particularly if the question isn't couched respectfully or diplomatically. It is threatening to those who are so entrenched they can't handle opposing views simultaneously and consider them. So curiosity may just get you smacked on a partisan thread- or labelled as whatever the "other" party happens to be...
As you know. |
