Excerpts from The Waning of the Renaissance:
...I have come to believe that the underlying dynamic of cultural change is anxiety, which comes in two forms. Cultural systems, as I have learned from Mary Douglas and Clifford Geertz, are ultimately mechanisms for sorting out and thus giving form and meaning to the crude and variegated phenomena that impinge on human consciousness, but also on other levels of self as well. They do so by the creation of categories and boundaries, and by making distinctions between what is relevant and what is irrelevant to human existence, between the useful and the useless, the safe and the dangerous, and by doing so, make the universe more comfortable and less provocative of anxiety. [p.x]
Interestingly enough, much of technology over the past few decades serves to increase our anxiety. Cell phones, television, etc.
"In my opinion no one," Galileo wrote, "should close the road to free philosophizing about mundane and physical things, as if everything had already been discovered and revealed with certainty." [p.80]
Particularly disturbing was the loss, once the earth was no longer central, of the privileged situation of human beings in a universe increasingly seen as infinite. An infinite universe had no comforting boundaries or intelligible order. [p.83]
I think that this is true for the average person today. Paradoxically, most believers in an afterlife do not seem to have any preconceptions of heavenly characteristics -- boundaries, for example. My favorite question is what type of grass will there be on the golf courses?
