For the past hundred years or so, we have lived in a secular age. That does not mean that people aren\u2019t religious. It means there is no shared set of values we all absorb as preconscious assumptions. In our world, individuals have to find or create their own meaning.<\/p>\n
This, Dreyfus and Kelly argue, has led to a pervasive sadness. Individuals are usually not capable of creating their own lives from the ground up. So modern life is marked by frequent feelings of indecision and anxiety. People often lack the foundations upon which to make the most important choices.<\/p>\n
Dreyfus and Kelly suffer from the usual Cambridge\/Berkeley parochialism. They assume that nobody believes in eternal truth anymore. They write as if all of America\u2019s moral quandaries are best expressed by the novelist David Foster Wallace. But they are on to something important when they describe the way \u201d\u201d far more than in past ages \u201d\u201d sports has risen up to fill a spiritual void.<\/p>\n