On the Discovery Channel Dr David Suzuki endlessly incants, “Question everything!”

 

Everything, of course, except Dr Suzuki’s pet orthodoxies. Dr Suzuki belongs to the High Sanhedrin of those who are in a perpetual state of incredulous outrage that anyone should question the club certainty of their Chicken Little Scientists’ Sodality that disastrous human-caused global warming is in progress. And while I’m passingly on that orthodoxy, let me put a query which has long lingered in my mind. Since we’re between ice ages; and since past ice ages have been far more harmful to humanity than past warm periods, if there is indeed global warming shouldn’t we be trying to intensify and protract it in order to stave off the next ice age? Shouldn’t enlightened governments be implementing programs to replace clean electricity generation with the most inefficient of soot-belching, coal-fired power stations, and to encourage people to drive smoky old bomb cars ? Wouldn’t that be responsible pre-emptive action to spare our descendants from icy misery and starvation?

 

However, that aside, I want to focus on that mantra, “Question everything”. Whenever I’ve heard this I’ve always remembered a saying imputed (inevitably) to Confucius on one of those flip-over desk-calendars in my father’s service station (i.e., gas station) – “The greatest fool can ask more questions than the wisest man can answer”.

 

There is the world of difference between enquiring and simply questioning; and questioning is only a virtue when it is an instrument of enquiring. The person who is genuinely of scientific mind, or a genuine intellectual – which is the same thing – is an enquirer, not a mere questioner; and as Chesterton so well realised, the true enquirer is actuated by a sense of the wonder of things, not by facile fad-scepticism.

 

What is more, the real intellectual, the person with a genuinely enquiring mind, need not be highly intelligent. Most intellectuals I have met are not exceptionally bright, and most exceptionally bright people I have met are not intellectuals. I say that not to deride the latter, but simply to make the point that being an intellectual, an insatiable enquirer and wonderer, is more a trait of character or of mentality than a facet of high IQ. A person’s IQ can tell whether he or she has exceptional comprehension skills and reasoning ability, but not whether he or she is exceptionally enquiring. There are intellectuals with high IQs, and intellectuals with middling IQs – perhaps even some with low IQs. There are genuinely intellectual butchers, bakers and candle-stick makers who never starred at school, but have the twinkling star of inquisitive wonder ever at the backs of their eyes – and are always a pleasure to meet. So here’s three cheers for genuine enquiring, and three jeers for pretentious questioning.