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Question Authority?

©2005 David Boyne

Why do we ask questions?

If we didn't ask questions, could we still find answers?

Is it merely coincidence that "quest" is the root syllable of question? Doesn’t every journey we make start with asking a question? Do you mind if I leave my toothbrush at your place?” “When I just keep sailing in this direction, will I discover a New World?” “What if I combine Three Card Monty with corporate accounting, will I get even richer, even faster?”

Don’t we need to first ask ourselves what we want, before we can decide where we should go?Can it be that all human knowledge is discovered through the asking of questions? Who? What? When? Where? How? Curiously, isn’t the simple question Why? the true apple in the Garden of Eden—the very root of all knowledge? And curiouser, doesn’t that one-word question, Why?, contain both the thesis of all science and philosophy, and its anti-thesis: Why not?

Could it be that the ability to pose a question is our fundamental tool for survival, and, even more than our big brain or dexterous, opposable-thumbed hands, our supreme advantage over all animals, microbes, and other expressions of nature that would try to kill and consume us? After all, when little kids first discover the power of asking questions, aren’t they just like wolf cubs play-fighting, honing the social and hunting skills they will need to survive and prosper in their world? Have you ever played The Why Game with a kid? When a kid asks, "Why?" and you give her an answer, what does she do? Doesn’t she simply, elegantly, ask again, "Why?" Can it be that we are all genetically hard-wired to play The Why Game? Is our compulsion to ask "Why?" a built-in mechanism for human survival and evolution?

Yet isn’t there something profoundly perilous about asking a question? Why else would any trial attorney worth her fee follow the dictum that, to stay in control of a situation, you must never ask a question you don't already know the answer to? When we ask even the simplest of  questions, aren't we kind of sort of making a big belly-flop into an infinite pool of chaos—where the answer to our question may be anything imaginable or beyond imaginable? And really, is there ever just one answer to any question? Doesn’t every question have an infinite number of answers? How can we cope with the endless endlessness of this cosmic Why Game? Is our only way to make sense of the universe to ask a question, and seek its answers, and ask more questions, and seek their answers, until death finally shuts us up? Metaphorically, isn’t every question we ask like one more plank we lay down in a narrow bridge we build to travel across the deep cosmic abyss of self-awareness?

Know what I mean?