# "In these uncertain times" -- Has it ever been any different? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [December 21, 2008, 5:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-these-uncertain-times-has-it-ever-been-any-different/478197 "2008-12-21T17:07:12Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 11\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![shallora](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/f9ae1b/32.png) [@shallora](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/shallora)\ **Post date:** [December 21, 2008, 5:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-these-uncertain-times-has-it-ever-been-any-different/478197/1 "2008-12-21T17:07:12Z")
**"In these uncertain times . . ."** This is an oft-used phrase one sees in: . . . Every newspaper editorial page . . . . . . Every church sermon . . . . . . Every political campaign . . . . . . Every financial presentation . . . . . . Every speech and book tour . . . . . . Every fireside chat . . . . . . Every talking head on tv or radio . . . They all use it: “In these uncertain times” You can find this phrase in so many political speeches, so many newspapers over the past 100 years. And I’m sure if you dig deeper you can find it going back 200 and even 300 years and more. My question is this: **Has there ever been “certain” times?** And what does “uncertain times” mean, anyway? Uncertain about what? Uncertain about the future? Sh\*t we’ve been uncertain about the future for a million years. Like today’s any different? I mean, using a phrase like “in these uncertain times” implies that there was recently “_certain_” times (only we’re no longer in them). But in my lifetime, I’ve _never_ heard nor seen any pastor nor newspaper editorial writer say: “In these _certain_ times.” I don’t ever remember my pastor saying something like “Well that was back then, when we were in uncertain times. Thank God we’re now in times of certainty, and that for the moment we have the power to exactly predict the future.” As if. So has there ever been “certain” times? Because according to those whom want to influence you, we’ve been in “uncertain” times for more than 500 years. Maybe a millenia or two. Seems to me “uncertain” times has been “certain” since the dawn of human history. It leads me to think that the prase “uncertain times” has been so overused as to be meaningless. ---
**Author:** ![DianaG](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/7ab992/32.png) [@DianaG](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DianaG)\ **Post date:** [December 21, 2008, 5:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-these-uncertain-times-has-it-ever-been-any-different/478197/2 "2008-12-21T17:46:15Z")
Sure, times have always been uncertain, but **now more than ever** , they’re, um… uncertainer than ever, I guess? ---
**Author:** ![shallora](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/f9ae1b/32.png) [@shallora](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/shallora)\ **Post date:** [December 21, 2008, 5:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-these-uncertain-times-has-it-ever-been-any-different/478197/3 "2008-12-21T17:57:58Z")
> [@DianaG](#): > > Sure, times have always been uncertain, but **now more than ever** , they’re, um… uncertainer than ever, I guess? “more than ever”?? Here we go again. Are you saying “these times” (whatever that means) are more “uncertain” (whatever _that_ means) than . . . . . . How they must have felt in 1933 at the height of the Great Depression? . . . How they must have felt in 1861 when states tried to actuall succeed from the Union? . . . How they must have felt on December 8, 1941? . . . How it must have felt after Kennedy or MLK were shot? . . . How they must have felt on September 12, 2001? I’m sure that Americans on December 8, 1941 probably said to themselves “these times are more uncertain than ever.” And they probably thought that they were at the pinnacle of uncertainty. Again, whatever that means. Again I suspect those whom use the term “era of uncertainty” or “times of uncertainty” are really using a throwaway phrase and the phrase itself really is quite meaningless. ---
**Author:** ![DianaG](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/7ab992/32.png) [@DianaG](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DianaG)\ **Post date:** [December 21, 2008, 6:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-these-uncertain-times-has-it-ever-been-any-different/478197/4 "2008-12-21T18:00:17Z")
It was a joke, dear. ---
**Author:** ![MandaJo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ac91a4/32.png) [@MandaJo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MandaJo)\ **Post date:** [December 21, 2008, 6:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-these-uncertain-times-has-it-ever-been-any-different/478197/5 "2008-12-21T18:10:16Z")
I dunno: from the fall of the Berlin Wall to September 11th, times felt pretty certain. Not perfect, but more or less predictable. I am not saying they really _were_, but they _felt_ much more certain than before or after. ---
**Author:** ![interface2x](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/c0e974/32.png) [@interface2x](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/interface2x)\ **Post date:** [December 22, 2008, 12:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-these-uncertain-times-has-it-ever-been-any-different/478197/6 "2008-12-22T00:58:48Z")
Of course there were certain times. The problem was that we weren’t certain about them at the time. We are now, though. Which makes now seem just that much more uncertain. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [December 22, 2008, 1:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-these-uncertain-times-has-it-ever-been-any-different/478197/7 "2008-12-22T01:16:05Z")
Of course there have been “certain times” – even in the very narrow sense of “good times which it seemed, at the time, were the natural order of things and would last forever.” E.g., 19th Century America in the decades before and after the Civil War. From George Orwell’s 1943 essay, [“Mark Twain: The Licensed Jester”:](http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300011h.html#part18) > [@](#): > > Although Mark Twain produced a surprising variety of books, ranging from a namby-pamby ‘life’ of Joan of Arc to a pamphlet so obscene that it has never been publicly printed, all that is best in his work centres about the Mississippi river and the wild mining towns of the West. Born in 1835 (he came of a Southern family, a family just rich enough to own one or perhaps two slaves), he had had his youth and early manhood in the golden age of America, the period when the great plains were opened up, when wealth and opportunity seemed limitless, and human beings felt free, indeed were free, as they had never been before and may not be again for centuries. LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI and the two other books that I have mentioned are a ragbag of anecdotes, scenic descriptions and social history both serious and burlesque, but they have a central theme which could perhaps be put into these words: ‘This is how human beings behave when they are not frightened of the sack.’ In writing these books Mark Twain is not consciously writing a hymn to liberty. Primarily he is interested in ‘character’, in the fantastic, almost lunatic variations which human nature is capable of when economic pressure and tradition are both removed from it. The raftsmen, Mississippi pilots, miners and bandits whom he describes are probably not much exaggerated, but they are as different from modern men, and from one another, as the gargoyles of a medieval cathedral. They could develop their strange and sometimes sinister individuality because of the lack of any outside pressure. The State hardly existed, the churches were weak and spoke with many voices, and land was to be had for the taking. If you disliked your job you simply hit the boss in the eye and moved further west; and moreover, money was so plentiful that the smallest coin in circulation was worth a shilling. The American pioneers were not supermen, and they were not especially courageous. Whole towns of hardy gold miners let themselves be terrorized by bandits whom they lacked the public spirit to put down. They were not even free from class distinctions. The desperado who stalked through the streets of the mining settlement, with a Derringer pistol in his waistcoat pocket and twenty corpses to his credit, was dressed in a frock coat and shiny top-hat, described himself firmly as a ‘gentleman’ and was meticulous about table manners. But at least it was NOT the case that a man’s destiny was settled from his birth. The ‘log cabin to White House’ myth was true while the free land lasted. In a way, it was for this that the Paris mob had stormed the Bastille, and when one reads Mark Twain, Bret Harte and Whitman it is hard to feel that their effort was wasted. And his 1946 essay [“Riding Down from Bangor”:](http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300011h.html#part44) > [@](#): > > What connects this song with books like HELEN’S BABIES is first of all a sort of sweet innocence—the climax, the thing you are supposed to be slightly shocked at, is an episode with which any modern piece of naughty-naughty would START—and, secondly, a faint vulgarity of language mixed up with a certain cultural pretentiousness. HELEN’S BABIES is intended as a humorous, even a farcical book, but it is haunted all the way through by words like “tasteful” and “ladylike”, and it is funny chiefly because its tiny disasters happen against a background of conscious gentility. “Handsome, intelligent, composed, tastefully dressed, without a suspicion of the flirt or the languid woman of fashion about her, she awakened to the utmost my every admiring sentiment”—thus is the heroine described, figuring elsewhere as “erect, fresh, neat, composed, bright-eyed, fairfaced, smiling and observant”. One gets beautiful glimpses of a now-vanished world in such remarks as: “I believe you arranged the floral decorations at St Zephaniah’s Fair last winter, Mr Burton? ‘Twas the most tasteful display of the season.” But in spite of the occasional use of “‘twas” and other archaisms—“parlour” for sitting-room, “chamber” for bedroom, “real” as an adverb, and so forth—the book does not “date” very markedly, and many of its admirers imagine it to have been written round about 1900. Actually it was written in 1875, a fact which one might infer from internal evidence, since the hero, aged twenty-eight, is a veteran of the civil war. > > The book is very short and the story is a simple one. A young bachelor is prevailed on by his sister to look after her house and her two sons, aged five and three, while she and her husband go on a fortnight’s holiday. The children drive him almost mad by an endless succession of such acts as falling into ponds, swallowing poison, throwing keys down wells, cutting themselves with razors, and the like, but also facilitate his engagement to “a charming girl, whom, for about a year, I had been adoring from afar”. These events take place in an outer suburb of New York, in a society which now seems astonishingly sedate, formal, domesticated and, according to current conceptions, un-American. Every action is governed by etiquette. To pass a carriage full of ladies when your hat is crooked is an ordeal; to recognise an acquaintance in church is ill-bred; to become engaged after a ten days’ courtship is a severe social lapse. We are accustomed to thinking of American society as more crude, adventurous and, in a cultural sense, democratic than our own, and from writers like Mark Twain, Whitman and Bret Harte, not to mention the cowboy and Red Indian stories of the weekly papers, one draws a picture of a wild anarchic world peopled by eccentrics and desperadoes who have no traditions and no attachment to one place. That aspect of nineteenth-century America did of course exist, but in the more populous eastern States a society similar to Jane Austen’s seems to have survived longer than it did in England. And it is hard not to feel that it was a better kind of society than that which arose from the sudden industrialisation of the later part of the century. The people in HELEN’S BABIES or LITTLE WOMEN may be mildly ridiculous, but they are uncorrupted. They have something that is perhaps best described as integrity, or good morale, founded partly on an unthinking piety. It is a matter of course that everyone attends church on Sunday morning and says grace before meals and prayers at bedtime: to amuse the children one tells them Bible stories, and if they ask for a song it is probably “Glory, glory Hallelujah”. Perhaps it is also a sign of spiritual health in the light literature of this period that death is mentioned freely. “Baby Phil”, the brother of Budge and Toddie, has died shortly before HELEN’S BABIES opens, and there are various tear-jerking references to his “tiny coffin”. A modern writer attempting a story of this kind would have kept coffins out of it > > English children are still americanised by way of the films, but it would no longer be generally claimed that American books are the best ones for children. Who, without misgivings, would bring up a child on the coloured “comics” in which sinister professors manufacture atomic bombs in underground laboratories while Superman whizzes through the clouds, the machine-gun bullets bouncing off his chest like peas, and platinum blondes are raped, or very nearly, by steel robots and fifty-foot dinosaurs? It is a far cry from Superman to the Bible and the woodpile. The earlier children’s books, or books readable by children, had not only innocence but a sort of native gaiety, a buoyant, carefree feeling, which was the product, presumably, of the unheard-of freedom and security which nineteenth-century America enjoyed. That is the connecting link between books so seemingly far apart as LITTLE WOMEN and LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI. The society described in the one is subdued, bookish and home-loving, while the other tells of a crazy world of bandits, gold mines, duels, drunkenness and gambling hells: but in both one can detect an underlying confidence in the future, a sense of freedom and opportunity. > > Nineteenth-century America was a rich, empty country which lay outside the main stream of world events, and in which the twin nightmares that beset nearly every modern man, the nightmare of unemployment and the nightmare of State interference, had hardly come into being. There were social distinctions, more marked than those of today, and there was poverty (in LITTLE WOMEN, it will be remembered, the family is at one time so hard up that one of the girls sells her hair to the barber), but there was not, as there is now, an all-prevailing sense of helplessness. There was room for everybody, and if you worked hard you could be certain of a living—could even be certain of growing rich: this was generally believed, and for the greater part of the population it was even broadly true. In other words, the civilisation of nineteenth-century America was capitalist civilisation at its best. Soon after the civil war the inevitable deterioration started. But for some decades, at least, life in America was much better fun than life in Europe—there was more happening, more colour, more variety, more opportunity—and the books and songs of that period had a sort of bloom, a childlike quality. Hence, I think, the popularity of HELEN’S BABIES and other “light” literature, which made it normal for the English child of thirty or forty years ago to grow up with a theoretical knowledge of racoons, woodchucks, chipmunks, gophers, hickory trees, water-melons and other unfamiliar fragments of the American scene. The 1950s in America were also characterized by a broadly shared (except by African-Americans) sense of certainty and security and optimism, a sense that “We’ve finally got it all worked out and that’s how it’s going to stay.” The only threats worth noticing were **alien** threats, like Communists and the Body-Snatchers (and, in the eyes of many, the Civil Rights movement). ---
**Author:** ![clairobscur](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/839c29/32.png) [@clairobscur](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/clairobscur)\ **Post date:** [December 22, 2008, 7:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-these-uncertain-times-has-it-ever-been-any-different/478197/8 "2008-12-22T19:28:55Z")
My mother is very worried about our current uncertain times. Remembering her that she lived through WWII (and the cold war, etc…) that, surely, was a more uncertain time doesn’t change her opinion the slightest bit. So, yes, I guess that for a number of people, the current times will always seem abnormally uncertain, regardless of their knowledge of the past. ---
**Author:** ![Quartz](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/quartz/32/267_2.png) [@Quartz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Quartz)\ **Post date:** [December 22, 2008, 7:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-these-uncertain-times-has-it-ever-been-any-different/478197/9 "2008-12-22T19:40:26Z")
1950s / 1960s U.K.: as Macmillan said, “You’ve never had it so good.” And, if you were monied or landed, the period from about 1750 to 1914 in the U.K. ---
**Author:** ![gotpasswords](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/c57346/32.png) [@gotpasswords](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gotpasswords)\ **Post date:** [December 22, 2008, 9:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-these-uncertain-times-has-it-ever-been-any-different/478197/10 "2008-12-22T21:37:21Z")
I was going to suggest the dot-com bubble period in the mid-to-late 90’s when the world was a virtual goldmine for anyone that hung a .com off anything they saw. Venture capitalists were king, and anyone that could spell “http” was writing their own job descriptions and getting whatever salary they asked for. People who had never heard the term until six months ago were calling themselves webmasters and e-commerce specialists. Landlords were on the receiving end of many a bribe and bidding war for apartments. People otherwise uninterested in websites were quitting their regular jobs to take up day-trading as a full-time occupation. People were being “paid” with stock options by the truckload. Then, somewhere in the late 90s, the public realized that perhaps buying groceries online and having them shipped to them maybe wasn’t the best thing in the world, then in early 2000, the whole thing went poof. People went from being multi-millionaires on paper to deeply under-water when the taxes on those stock options came due. ---
**Author:** ![Annie-Xmas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/ecc23a/32.png) [@Annie-Xmas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Annie-Xmas)\ **Post date:** [December 22, 2008, 9:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-these-uncertain-times-has-it-ever-been-any-different/478197/11 "2008-12-22T21:42:23Z")
From the end of WW2 to 1963 were probably the most certain times in the US of A. Then Kennedy was assassinated and Vietnam happened and the world figuratively exploded, reaching a height of insanity in 1968. If you went into a coma in 1962 and came out in 1969, you would not believe you were still on the same planet.