These are ‘uncertain' times? Get a grip, this isn't 1940

Telegraph

24-04-2025

'The times, they are a-changing,' sang Bob Dylan in 1964. Now the times would be 'scary' or 'difficult' or 'uncertain'. Everyone says so. This week we had the controller of the Proms opining, 'The world's a scary place at the moment, and there's an awful lot of change going on around us.' Then the head of the Royal Horticultural Society went on Gardeners's World to say, 'We live in difficult times'. Sir Keir Starmer informed the various celebrities, pork pies and fish-and-chip paper assembled for St George's Day at Number 10 that 'We're living through a time of uncertainty'.
This is an increasingly inane and almost always meaningless sentiment. There is a reason nobody has ever said we live in 'certain times'. The notion that we inhabit an era uniquely different or scary says nothing about the times themselves and a great deal about us. It suggests our culture is increasingly individualistic and ignorant (though there's nothing unusual about that either). But we all want to feel special, right?
It's perfectly normal to be frightened of uncertainty. That's part of the human condition. It's another to assume that you are living in a Boschian nightmare specific to your existence, when you in fact live in a relatively peaceful, relatively stable, relatively prosperous nation. The word 'relatively' is having to work pretty hard, I admit, accepting that there are a great many things wrong with Britain and a great many reasons to be worried about the future. Plus ça change.
This navel gazing feels particularly silly and useless when even the merest historical context is applied to the notions of 'uncertain' or 'difficult'. As the Australian opener Keith Miller used to say when asked about facing hostile fast bowling: 'Pressure is a Messerschmitt up your a---, playing cricket is not.'
As we prepare to commemorate the 80th anniversary of VE day, it's tempting to think about ideas such as resilience in the face of suffering after six years of war or what genuine existential uncertainty meant back when we faced a global conflagration in 1939. I don't think it's helpful to use the bravery of the war generation to somehow expose the fecklessness of modernity, but I have always adhered to the idea that history should be a guide not just to how you feel about the world you live in, but about how you judge your own existence.
On its most basic level, if you think your life is tough, we have just seen the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen. It may seem absurd or grotesque to compare that hell to anything we see today, but even a superficial knowledge of that story is enough to recalibrate your sense of your own era or reconsider how fortunate you might be.
Covid, as a recent example of something unforeseen, was the closest most of us have come to societal breakdown in our lifetimes. It was deadly, frightening and unsettling. But in the grand scheme of things, it wasn't that unusual. Four generations ago, British people were being bombed in their own cities. Then they faced four decades of fear about nuclear annihilation, at times lurching into genuine terror. Britain endured a terrorist threat from Irish Republicans for 30 years long before Islamic jihadists ever blighted out streets.
Perhaps the people of Ukraine would have a different take on the idea of 'difficult times' that could help us understand our own anxieties more clearly. Three years into being attacked by Russia, they must feel on the brink of constant collapse. But for Ukraine, biblical levels of suffering are nothing novel. Between the early 1930s and the end of the Second World War, Ukraine is the heart of the 'bloodlands', as outlined with horrible clarity in the book of that name by historian Timothy Snyder. He takes the modern reader into an inferno of man-made famine, mass cannibalism, years of executions and deportation by the Soviet regime, followed by another wave of death and displacement at the hands of the Nazis, involving the planned starvation of its cities and prisoners of war as well as the waves of death squads piling Jews into mass graves. The deaths of many millions of Ukrainians, it should be noted, all came before the mechanised murder of the Holocaust. Ukraine is just one example among thousands from which we could draw in an attempt to get a firmer grip on what constitutes 'scary times.'
For those of a certain age there were the sunlit uplands of the late 1990s when the British economy grew, British culture became international again, Northern Ireland was getting close to peace and the Cold War was over. But waiting around the corner was 9/11, a whole series of new wars and then the banking crisis, from which we still have not recovered. The point is, even in 1997 there was Mad Cow Disease at home and conflicts still raged around the globe. It all depends where you are standing at any given moment.
Accepting uncertainty as inevitable can make a person more ready to react and evolve. Instead we are clinging to this narrative that 'now' is somehow different. That is a debilitating habit because it means surrendering our agency to cope. And it's why so many people now need emotional support peacocks, sleep under weighted blankets and wallow in comfort TV programmes with the words 'The Great British' in the title. It reminds me of when the boy playing a young Woody Allen in Annie Hall says, 'The universe is expanding and some day it will break apart and that will be the end of everything'. His mother tells the doctor he's stopped doing his homework, and the boy says, 'What's the point?'. Perhaps we all need to get up from under our duvets.
The loss of historical knowledge and perspective has made its mark in a culture of self-obsession and the fetishisation of anxiety. As ever these days, any discussion about fears about the future is always trumped by the threat of AI. If the computers take over, the idea of living in difficult and uncertain times will take on a whole other dimension. Sadly, Bob Dylan probably won't be around to write a song about it.