Have you ever gone onto YouTube and searched up videos of car crashes to binge watch? This can be a thing. It was a thing among a group of middle school boys in computer class when some of our kids were in middle school; this was a fun, and routine, activity for these students to do.

This begs the question: what do you say to your kids when you say it’s not a good idea to watch car crashes? After all, why not? Watching the crashes isn’t the same as willing people to crash, or making the crashes happen. And it’s just interesting. We all know the experience of rubber-necking, slowing down your car to stare at something unusual — and often dire — on a roadside. We all do it sometimes; it’s human nature.

Plato, of all people, has something to say about this. People in the 4^th century B.C. evidently enjoyed looking at gruesome or unpleasant things as much as we do in the 2020s. Here’s what he said:

Leontius, the son of Aglaion, was going up from the Piraeus under the outside of the North Wall when he noticed corpses lying by the public executioner. He desired to look, but at the same time he was disgusted and made himself turn away; and for a while he struggled and covered his face. But finally, overpowered by the desire, he opened his eyes wide, ran toward the corpses and said: "Look, you damned wretches, take your fill of the fair sight."

… Anger sometimes makes war against the desires as one thing against something else.”

What is Plato saying here?

He’s talking about this man’s struggle between the impulse to look at something gruesome, versus the effort to refrain from doing so.

You see according to Plato, there are two kinds of knowing. One kind of knowing is to learn and to enrich our desire for what’s wholesome, an ethical kind of knowing. This (a basic good) came to be known as “studiositas,” and it’s great!

The other kind of knowing is wayward, even perverse. It comes from a desire to be shocked and titillated. This depersonalized way of knowing, focusing on what’s obscene or explicit, came to be known as “curiositas.”

Plato says our passions and emotions condition how we see reality, and that if we feed unhealthy passions, our souls — and eventually our relationships — become unhealthy. So we educate our souls by being careful what inputs we expose them to. A habit, then, of looking at corpses is a path toward jading a soul and making it base.

If Plato is right (and I think he is), then curiosity is not always a good or helpful thing. It can actually be a bad thing. This is an unusual take for the modern person, trained as we are in our post-Enlightenment way of considering the world. We tend to see curiosity in glowing terms — an intellectual virtue, a source of innovation and growth. “Knowledge is power,” we learned from our scientific revolution forebears, and the more the better. Anything you find interesting, pursue it! Interact, engage, see where it takes you! The implicit message is to be curious about anything and everything; it can only help you.

I think the ancients had it right, though: curiosity can be a vice. In our day, I’d argue that it often is. Because of our curiosity, we may watch videos of people being injured in car crashes (or cutting, or doing drugs, or the like), read gossip sites for life drama on celebrities, or follow social media rabbit trails for hours to pursue topics with no bearing on our life.

Most pointedly, curiosity about sex and the body is often what leads moderns to check out porn … and that addictive trail is now proven to be one of the most damaging paths a person can take. The longer you do any of these things, the more normal and harmless it seems. But really, in each case, our own soul suffers, we increasingly depersonalize others, and piece of our social fabric weakens — while we continue crave more novelties, shock, and titillation. It’s no small thing.

What, then, is the solution?

Here again, Plato has the key.

We must recognize that there’s a struggle between reason (our intellect) and our appetites (the non-rational things that we desire to do). In trying to combat unhealthy appetites, we can engage a part of ourselves that Plato called “spiritedness"; by it our reason regulates our passion. When it’s properly trained, spiritedness helps us restrain wrong or excessive desires.

We see the struggle up close in the corpse-viewing incident: Leontius wanted to look at the dead bodies, knew he shouldn’t and tried not to, and failed. He looked — and then yelled at his eyes for doing so. He regretted it. His anger at himself was righteous because giving in to temptation was a moral failure. He knew it was.

This doesn’t mean Leontius was a bad guy. He was a human guy. The important thing in the story was that he saw the struggle and sought to combat temptation toward vice. He lost — that time. But the next time, so long as he kept on the path toward virtue, he might not have. Through his efforts, he was training his soul.

Leontius would have a far bigger problem if he didn’t struggle — or even know that he was supposed to. If he didn’t see the looking at corpses as a temptation and know the wise and healthy thing was to resist. If he had been taught that all forms of curiosity are benign or even helpful, and to just follow the path wherever his intrigue took him. If he believed the lie that “no one is getting hurt” when you pursue your base curiosities wherever they lead.

It’s a lie because Leontius himself is hurt by viewing the corpses; this is the point. He injures his soul. And if kept doing it, it would lead to his hurting others in small or big ways (because he’d have tendencies to dehumanize). And society as a whole would be hurt.

The moral of the story is: keep an eye on curiosity. Don’t assume it’s harmless. Realize that soul — your own and your children’s — needs continual training toward virtue. And that the virtuous soul is the flourishing soul; it’s the one reaping all the benefits of a life of goodness, truth and beauty.

The moral of the story is: lay off the YouTube car crash videos — yourself and your kid too.

Studiositas, not curiositas. We got this!