When Vladimir Putin ordered Russian nuclear forces onto high alert, days after he invaded Ukraine, people far from the warzone began to report bone-deep feelings of uncertainty. Media accounts suggested a sudden spike in insomnia, and an epidemic of compulsive social media ‘doomscrolling’. Meanwhile, anxious parents wondered how to discuss the unfolding crisis with their children, and the phrase “in these uncertain times” started cropping up in more than a handful of news stories and politicians’ speeches.
Search Google’s digitised archive of scholarly and historical literature, though, and you’d find that phrase recurring in hundreds of journals and books, in almost every decade, back to the 17th century. The belief that things are unprecedentedly uncertain right now, it turns out, is one that people almost always. “As the years go by, there seem to be fewer and fewer rocks to which we can hold, fewer things which we can regard as absolutely right and true, and fixed for all time.” Who today could disagree? But Watts was writing in 1951, a time generally remembered as one of peace and prosperity.
