Be curious, not judgmental.
Every once in a while, we run across something that immediately strikes a chord. On the surface, we get it and it appeals to us. What’s rarer is finding something that immediately strikes a chord and then continues to surprise us with layers of lessons.
“Be curious, not judgmental.”
This simple quote is attributed to Walt Whitman. No less a celebrity than Ted Lasso (the eponymous character in the Disney+ series) gave ol’ Walt credit in a much loved scene that has spurred sales of “Be curious, not judgmental” paraphernalia. Lovely quote. Lovely scene. Certainly, as Ted suggests (and demonstrates, we should all ask lots of questions before forming our opinions. After all, an uninformed opinion is not going to be a useful opinion and may get us in trouble.
And yet this quote has more significance than simply providing a clear and simple assertion of wise advice.
You would think that some “curious” people would ask a few appropriate questions:
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- Did Walt Whitman really say this?
- If so, when, where, in what poem or letter or speech?
- If not, who said it?
Sadly, not many people took ol’ Ted’s lesson to heart and asked these questions. It takes a bit of digging, but among publicly available resources, only Snopes seems to have taken up the challenge, and the answers seem to be.
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- Probably not.
- Nowhere that anyone can find.
- We don’t really know.
Normally, this would frustrate me. I want a quote properly attributed and it bugs me when memes appear on FB, Twitter, or other social media platforms that either misattribute famous quotes or completely make up quotes for famous people. For example, the internet is filled with memes that attribute the following quote to Thomas Jefferson: “The end of democracy and the defeat of the American Revolution will occur when government falls into the hands of lending institutions and moneyed incorporations.” However, according to the Thomas Jefferson Library at Monticello, Mr. Jefferson never said or wrote these words.
Generally, I succumb to suspicions of disinformation and deliberate manipulation of public opinion when I encounter such memes. If anyone objects, privately or publicly, to such memes, the person who posted the meme will likely dismiss the objections as pedantic – and the meme will stay posted to be shared and further spread the mis/disinformation.
Whether or not misquotes such as the Jefferson misquote “matter” is a subject for debate and I may come back to it in another post. (I think they do because people are more likely to base opinions on how they feel about a subject than what they know about it – in fact what they know is more likely to be determined by how they feel than they other way around – and attributing a fake political message to a hero figure will increase its appeal to a target audience.)
In the specific case of “Be curious, not judgmental,” however, I would conclude that the political and social consequences of misattribution are minor. No one is picking sides or challenging someone else based on this quote. No one will take the quote more or less seriously whether it is attributed to Walt Whitman, or for that matter Ben Franklin, Newt Gingrich, or Homer.
In which case, why not simply attribute it to Ted Lasso? He may not have been the first to say it, but he made it famous. And in so doing, he accidentally showed us how we may all become entranced by an idea without actually living it.
So if someone makes a t-shirt that says,
Be curious, not judgmental.
(not Walt Whitman) via Ted Lasso
I’ll buy it.
