Yet it is easy, too, to find evidence that people have always believed that they are living in times of unique insecurity. In 1951 – a relatively happy and prosperous moment, all things considered, after the deepest pain of the post-war recovery and before the worst of the Cold War – Alan Watts captured his era’s sense of insecurity well. There was, he wrote, ‘the feeling that we live in a time of unusual insecurity. In the past hundred years or so, many long-established traditions have broken down – traditions of family, and social life, of government, of the economic order, and of religious
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