An Age of Insecurity: Why our Culture is Increasingly Insecure and Prone to Offense
The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche well predicted our present situation when he published The Parable of The Madman in 1882. He wrote of a man who moved throughout his town declaring the death of God. But God had not died of age or sickness. Humanity had killed him. In church services and in the streets, the man interrupted, “We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun?”[i]
The man, whom the crowds thought to be mad, was trying to help them see the consequences of what they had done. It took a supposed madman to see it. But he proved not to be mad at all. He was prophetic. Nietzsche recognized that too often true words are quickly and easily dismissed. They were content in their new disbelief, even empowered by it, but Nietzsche realized that though they had disposed of God, the human heart still worshipped. They had not solved their deepest needs. And far from abandoning religion, humanity would have to reinvent religion for this new age. Humanity would have to find an answer to insecurity, and it would have to do it without reference to God.
The madman explained,
What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?[ii]
Nietzsche did not see the death of God as a cause to celebrate but recognized that such a supposed loss would require a new kind of religion.
Humanity, having never known a world without the divine, couldn’t simply walk away from what had previously given meaning to all of existence. We would have to find new means of atonement. We would have to invent new sacred games. We would have to find some new source of security. Nietzsche recognized that the only place humanity had left to turn was itself. We must become our own gods. He identified the new position of insecurity in which we have placed ourselves.
Nietzsche asked, “Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning?”[iii] The madman was describing a new and deeper insecurity. Gone were any fixed horizons of morality, and the consequences were disorientation and uncertainty.
The crowd stared at the madman in confusion. “I have come too early,” he confessed, smashing his lantern on the ground. “Deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard.”[iv] It would take time for humanity to fully understand what it had done. It would take time for us to understand we were once again naked and to go about reconstructing our fig-leaf clothes.
Commenting on Nietzsche’s parable of the madman, René Girard wrote,
It is a richer reading than the “death of God.” The text is speaking about the birth of religion as well as its death, because they amount to the same thing. The most revealing sentence is the one that says that God’s death forces the murderers to invent a new religious cult.[v]
The real question that emerged from Nietzsche’s parable is, what kind of new religion would we create? What would replace God? What would we do with our insecurities if we could no longer entrust them to God?
Nietzsche saw the coming of a new kind of religion in which we would look within for the divine, in which our idols would become images of ourselves. It would not be a world without worship. There is no escaping the impulse to worship. Something still catches our eye. Something still holds our attention. Some image still forms in our insecurity. As postmodern writer David Foster Wallace admitted,
Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.[vi]
The only question left is where we turn for security. Can we even find what we’re looking for?
Insecurity inevitably leads to the desire for some salvific object. Insecurity always leads us to worship. It awakens our imagination and sends our eyes looking for an image of security. Insecurity leads you to an idol. Recognize your insecurity and you’ll always find some fruit promising to solve it.
Excerpt used with permission from A Sharp Compassion: 7 Hard Words to Heal Our Insecurities and Free Us from Offense by Chase Replogle.
[i] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Publishing, 1974), 181–82.
[ii] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 181.
[iii] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 181.
[iv] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 182.
[v] René Girard, Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2008), 159.
[vi] David Foster Wallace, This Is Water: Some Thoughts Delivered in a Significant Occasion about Living a Compassionate Life (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2009), 101.