Trains of Thought #13 - Wonder

Written April 30th, 2024 at 23:30. Published May 11th, 2024

Part of the “Train of Thought” series. See that link for more information

I was talking to someone today, and he said that the easy access to information we now have has destroyed wonder, and I thought that was really interesting.

Instead of wondering about something, we often just look it up since we all have phones on us now, but wonder is good. Sometimes we get too obsessed over just finding the answers, instead of spending time wondering.

It reminded me of something in the book Out of The Silent Planet by C.S Lewis, he describes the culture of Malacandra (Mars) and how they don’t write many books since it made life worse. It seems like they preferred wondering, and then said that Oyarsa would tell them if they needed to know something.

I wonder what we loose by not wondering. We loose a lot of curiosity, which is strange since you can always find an answer but actually you stop questioning since you know there’s an easy answer

You loose the fun of trying to think through something. You stop thinking about the world as much. You also get used to always knowing the answer.

It really bothers people if they don’t have a solid answer/opinion. The idea that some things aren’t as simple as facts doesn’t seem to be appreciated in our culture.

Even things as important as our political or economic structure is something that we should wonder about, could there be better options etc. but even so we probably will never know the ideal system.

A lot of theology is often like that. We can wonder and examine different ways of interpreting passages and different beliefs, but ultimately we have to pick one, and often that is done of faith. We might still wonder about it, and definitely should still be curious.

That’s not to say that theological topics don’t have a solid answer or that we should not have opinions or not care about changing anyone else’s beliefs, but we should be open to wondering about it.

This also applies to history, I just finished my history book today, and I really liked the last paragraph.

“The loss of familiar moorings makes fundamental questions about human behavior and political community difficult to answer, and the study of history offers no quick solutions. The untidy and contradictory evidence that historians find in the archives rarely yields unblemished heroes, unvarnished villains, or easy lessons that can be applied to the present. Good history reveals the complex processes and dynamics of change over time. It helps us understand the many layers of the past that have formed our present world. It shows again and again that the past does not preordain what happens next. Globalization, in this sense, is not the final destination of history. It is merely the constantly renewed reality of human existence, and the context for future struggles about the goals of political association, the meanings of liberty or equality, and the possibility of shared values.” (Western Civilizations Vol 2 by Joshua Cole and Carol Symes)

The more I study history, the more I realize that human populations are infinitely complex and anyone who offers simple solutions to complex problems is likely wrong (at least to some extent).

I’ve been starting to feel like a lot of stuff is almost impossible to truly understand. Our human minds can only comprehend so much, but that doesn’t stop me from trying. Ultimately, a lot of it has to be left up in the air, at least for now.

And honestly most of the time that is ok, I don’t need to know what the ideal political system is even though I love thinking about it. Actually, if I figured it out, then I wouldn’t get to enjoy thinking about it. If humanity knew everything, it would get boring fast.

Sometimes we do need to understand something or pick a side in order to determine how to act, and at that point you either have to pick whatever side feels stronger, or pick a side based on faith. There are theological issues that I’m still not sure about but that I believe one way or another more just based on faith/what I’ve been taught, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I want to work on having more evidence but sometimes I just don’t.

I do feel like a lot of people have lost a bit of wonder. We just look things up, and we often spend our time that we might’ve spent wondering about things on social media or video games.

As a side note, I had completely disabled the browser on my phone for a while before writing this except for a few of my own websites that I made, and it’s weird to not just be able to look something up whenever. At the same time, it’s pretty much never an issue, we don’t need to have instant access to all information to be able to live.

Overall I’m not sure how large of an issue this is, but it’s something interesting to think about. I would love to hear other people’s thoughts on it. I love wondering and thinking about things.