The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart (The CBC Massey Lectures)

by Astra Taylor

The words curiosity, security, and insecurity all share a root. They stem from the Latin word cura —meaning worry, care, attention, and study. There is no learning without insecurity, without opening oneself up to experiences new and unknown. When we talk about something being secure, we typically mean that it is fixed in place; when we talk about being secure ourselves, we mean having the assurance of knowing what comes next. To be insecure, then, means being unfixed and unsure, to be in a place of possibility. Depending on the context, this kind of insecurity can be unpleasant or even terrifying, and it is especially awful when it is foisted on us by those looking to take advantage of our disorientation. But under the right conditions—when it is buttressed by a more fundamental kind of material security and self-confidence—it can also be generative and liberating. You cannot have real curiosity, or creativity, if everything is locked down and you know what comes next. Being open to new ideas means being open to your own limitations; being willing to experiment means being willing to possibly fail, and also willing to learn something that might change you.

But the ancient Greeks had another concept, kairos, which refers to a propitious moment, the time for decision or action (and a term, coincidentally, that in modern Greek has come to mean weather).

Only an insecure creature, or perhaps an insecure culture, would need to puff itself up with such a pompous self-image, an act of defensive narcissism taken to a society-wide extreme. A secure creature, I like to imagine, could celebrate its own unique abilities while also respecting other forms of intelligence and perception; a secure creature could marvel at its own amazing thumbs without denigrating the paws, hooves, claws, webbed feet, and fins that other beings possess. If that were the case, we would perhaps also be more inclined to recognize the ways our grasping hands have gotten us in trouble. The idea of human supremacy has lent credence to the idea that nature is a storehouse for our kind to own and exploit, an attitude my sister, the disability studies scholar Sunaura Taylor, calls “suicidal anthropocentrism.”