We are constantly told by politicians, journalists and business experts that we live in an era of unprecedented change — a dizzying period of technological and geopolitical revolutions, in which every year brings some new and astonishing upheaval for which our nervous, insecure societies are totally unprepared. What nonsense.

Never in human history has life been more predictable, safe and stable — at least for that large minority of the human race who live in the advanced capitalist countries of Western Europe, North America and East Asia.

This thought overwhelmed me last week as I prepared a tribute for my mother, who was born in Odessa in 1916 just before the Russian Revolution, and died peacefully in London on March 31. Who would have imagined, in the terrible and wonderful 20th century, almost all of which she lived through, that she would end her days peacefully in her own home in London — surrounded by the secure, comfortable family whose prosperity she had created literally from nothing — instead of being carried off by the wars, famines, revolutions, epidemics and state terrors that had dogged the first half of her life? And how could we compare the small changes in our lifestyles caused by the internet or Islamic terrorism or even the rise of China with the upheavals that my parents lived through during their first decades of life?

Despite all the claptrap about the accelerating pace of change and technological revolutions, most of our children’s lives are almost indistinguishable from our own. They may watch widescreen DVDs when we only had small black-and-white TV sets. They may chat via e-mails instead of phones. They may use Google when we used Encyclopaedia Britannica for our homework. They may play video games when we played pinball and go to comprehensive schools of variable quality instead of grammars and secondary moderns. But how can we compare these small steps of progress — or indeed the regressions to barbarism in parts of the Middle East and Africa — to the chasms of life experience between people who grew up in Europe in the first and second halves of the 20th century?

In the years before she died, my mother used to retell a story almost obsessively about her childhood. In the early 1920s post-revolutionary Russia was gripped by famine after the destruction of private farming by the Bolsheviks. My mother was walking with her father down the street in Odessa when she saw a beggar crouching at the roadside. She asked her father for a piece of bread, which they could ill afford to give away since money was worthless and could hardly buy any food. As she put the bread in the man’s outstretched hand, her childish curiosity could not resist the desire to touch him. His hand was as cold and hard as stone. The man had starved to death, his hand frozen in a dying gesture of supplication.

Almost everyone brought up in the early 20th century was haunted by some such story — and many formative experiences were, of course, incomparably more horrible than that. My mother herself had many narrow escapes. Her father was a self-made businessman who became a wealthy oil trader before the First World War. To escape the revolution he chartered a ship to take his whole family to Italy, but just as they were setting off for the port, a business associate phoned, promising to repay a large debt in gold. My grandfather decided to wait and an hour later the gold was duly delivered — but by that time the advancing Red Army had cut off the port, ending forever their hope of escaping the Communist regime.

From that fateful moment onward the wild swings of destiny continued, with postrevolutionary famines and epidemics, followed by returning prosperity under Lenin’s New Economic Policy and the horrors of Stalin’s purges. For several years my mother’s parents, as former bourgeois capitalists, had to go into self-imposed exile in Siberia, leaving their children to be brought up by their Italian nanny, Signora, the widow of a White general who had been executed by the Bolsheviks before her eyes.

In the Second World War, however, my mother’s family were incredibly lucky, having managed to squeeze themselves on to the second last train out of Leningrad before the Nazis completed their encirclement of that “hero city”. After that, as engineers and industrial managers, they all managed to avoid conscription and contributed to the war effort with their brains rather than their lives. Had they missed that train, they would almost certainly have died of starvation, like their many relatives and friends who stayed behind.

For my mother’s generation, brushes with fate like this were taken for granted. The life of her husband, my late father, was, if anything, even more dramatic. Born on the Polish-Russian border in 1908, he lived as a child through the First World War and managed to walk the 150 miles from Warsaw to Bialystock just before the Germans invaded in September 1939, only to find himself on the front line again when Hitler attacked Russia in 1941, cutting off Bialystock on the very first day. Luckily for my father, who was by then a successful pianist, he was on a concert tour in Uzbekistan when Hitler launched his surprise attack. Unluckily, he had left his mother behind. She would certainly have perished in the Holocaust, had my father not somehow managed to bribe an army officer to find her in Bialystock and smuggle her out across the German lines.

Such stories could go on and on — and in my family they often did, especially when my irrepressible father was still alive. But the point I am trying to make should be clear enough.

Compared with the upheavals of the early 20th century, the challenges we face today — whether as families and individuals or as societies and nations — are almost laughably trivial. Have psychologists who tell us that accident witnesses need grief counselling forgotten about Holocaust survivors and PoWs in Burma? Do environmentalists really believe that global warming is the greatest threat ever faced by Western civilisation? Do judges understand what they are doing when they extend doctrines of human rights to gay adoptions? Can politicians honestly speak of terrorism today in the same breath as the threat from Communists and Nazis to previous generations? Anyone who makes such comparisons is insulting our intelligence, as well as our courageous forebears.

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