The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety

The opening chapter of The Wisdom of Insecurity makes the case that 1950s American society is antithetical to authentic understanding of the human existential situation.

Human lives are brief sparks of consciousness with a deep prehistory before birth and an endless darkness after death. Much of life involves pain and stress. People are having an increasingly difficult time making sense of their lives or understanding why they’re here. Modern people “live in a time of unusual insecurity” (14), clinging to our aspirations of a better future in the hopes that doing so will provide our lives with meaning. In our anxiety, we separate ourselves from attentiveness to the present moment and, instead, grapple for the security provided by the idea that our lives will have some justification if lived for a determinate purpose.

Partly this is a matter of the decline of faith: “It is simply self-evident that during the past century the authority of science has taken the place of the authority of religion in the popular imagination” (16). The myths of the afterlife peddled by traditional religions no longer hold the same sway over consciousness. For modern science, “the idea of God is logically unnecessary” (17), since scientific skepticism does not accept the truth of any proposition unless it can be empirically tested.