48 pages • 1 hour read
Alan W. WattsThe Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1951A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “The 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. Unfortunately, this is “deeply unsettling and depressing” (18) because most human beings seem to need myths and religious beliefs to escape their anxiety. Watts notes that political and economic ideologies can function as problematic replacement myths for the religiously disillusioned.
Once it becomes too hard for someone to believe any of the old religious myths or even new political myths (which reveal their own insecurity through their violence), people turn to work and entertainment to distract themselves: “Consequently our age is one of frustration, anxiety, agitation, and addiction to ‘dope.’ Somehow we must grab what we can while we can, and drown out the realization that the whole thing is futile and meaningless” (21). Since this is clearly also a moral and existential failure, something must be done. Many think the choice is between clinging to, or creating, a new myth, and/or facing the absurdity of life, but Watts argues that are not the only choices. Instead, there is an opportunity for a “complete revolution” (23) in typical human modes of thinking and feeling: awareness of the immediate present that all can see if they can only learn how to look.
Discovering reality through this revolutionary thinking is aided by faith, but hindered by belief. The key distinction between the two is that faith entails an openness to truth regardless of how insecure it might make us feel, whereas beliefs are used to support self-enclosed, preconceived ideas. The believer is not open to that which does not correspond to their beliefs. The faithful, though, are. Watts touts the virtues of “letting go” (24). In his estimation, the disappearance of the old religious myths is a good thing. It provides the opportunity to step into our insecure existential position head-on. Paradoxically, for Watts, finding the truth of God requires letting go of any fixed idea about, or belief in, God.
Chapter 1 Analysis
The theme of Insecurity as Opportunity is introduced in Chapter 1. Rather than retreat from the vulnerability inherent in the state of insecurity, we should allow ourselves to understand its revelation: “This disappearance of the old rocks and absolutes is no calamity, but rather a blessing. It almost compels us to face reality with open minds, and you can only know God through an open mind just as you can only see the sky through a clear window” (25). Rather than lament the downfall of the traditional religious structures that had given human beings a sense of place in the cosmic order for millennia, Watts welcomes the opportunity this collapse presents for the reinvigoration of consciousness. Watts claims that since every increase of joy comes with a corresponding increase in suffering, all the suffering in the modern age of anxiety may, conversely, also indicate a profound opportunity for the joyful salvation from the ‘I.’ In this sense, the pain of consciousness also indicates its nearness to a powerful increase in vision.
Watts’s diagnosis of the plight of modern man is not new. Many other thinkers writing in the immediately preceding generations, like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Camus, came to similar conclusions about anxiety, nihilism, and the meaningless absurdity of modern life. Watts’s originality—at least for a Western audience—lies in his solution. Earlier critics of modernity had two typical answers to its problems. The Romantics strove to discover or invent new myths, which Watts thinks is useless because these self-consciously derived myths will “never amount to a vital faith” (22). We understand from the outset that these myths are not transcendently true but mere fantasies. The Existentialist answer, especially as it is developed by Albert Camus, was to face the absurdity and stupidity of life head on, accepting the way of things and doing whatever one finds most suitable.
For Watts, neither of these solutions works. Instead, he prescribes “a complete revolution in our ordinary, habitual ways of thinking and feeling” (23) if we are to take advantage of the anxious situation in which we find ourselves. Though Watts’s references to Eastern spiritual traditions are sparse, they are a strong influence on Watts’s answer, which moves away from thinking and instead requires a more basic shift in awareness. Our current existential situation, according to Watts, requires an openness to reality—something he will develop more thoroughly in forthcoming chapters.
This chapter also explores the crucial thematic distinction between Symbol and Reality. Watts’s criticism is not of faith per se or of any religion in particular. Instead, he worries about religion’s tendency to misunderstand itself, to get unnecessarily caught up in the symbols of truth rather than the truth itself. “The common error of ordinary religious practice,” he writes, “is to mistake the symbol for the reality, to look at the finger pointing the way and then to suck it for comfort rather than follow it” (23). This distinction between the symbolic order and the real world applies to political ideology and science as well. The tendency to over-specialize in concepts and words, for Watts, obfuscates the view of reality crucial for transformative experience.
