The Economist reviews the latest book from the prolific Canadian [via Argentina] author Alberto Manguel. In the pages of Curiosity, Manguel ruminates on a variety of issues, asking a number of questions about how it is we come to the conclusions that we do:

The topics to which his big questions lead him include exile, illness, climate change, pets, cultural barriers, social identities, Auschwitz, Hiroshima, financial greed and death. Some of those topics are too modern for the ancients to have anything direct to say. Others are timeless. But to say much that is striking, new or true about those would take aphoristic gifts or an astringency of mind that Mr Manguel does not claim to possess. To call him today’s Montaigne, as one of the jacket quotes has it, is pure puffery, as he would be the first to acknowledge.

We Americans continue to erase the gray areas between right and wrong — not just on moral grounds — that leave open the spaces for curiosity; Susan Jacoby’s Age of American Unreason comes to mind. Perhaps the time is ripe to fell a few unhelpful dogmas, and expanding the depth and width of our sense of curiosity can reduce our fears of the purest forms of inquiry:

Think about how more curiosity would change our dialogue and eventual conclusions about religion, politics, education systems, society. In the third sector, where grantmakers and nonprofits roam, curiosity has always been in the currents: research, test, tweak, recalibrate, etc. The sector is not unique in that regard, but it does have less to lose.

That famous Catholic Graham Greene might have said it best: “When we are not sure we are alive.”