One of the greatest trials of modern life, or so we are to led to believe, is that we live in an “age of uncertainty”. Our future is uncertain, our faith is uncertain, our identity is uncertain. Everything is shifting sands.

Worst of all, this uncertainty means that we are perpetually at risk and unprotected. 9/11 came out of a “clear blue sky”. Likewise, the current economic meltdown gave a whole generation of politicians and economists the shock of their lives when all their certainties crumbled to dust. And now nobody seems sure what to do next.

Such pervasive, large-scale unpredictability threatens our sense of security. We tend to fantasise about eliminating uncertainty, banishing it so that the world can be safe. We are on a mission — once again — to put in place immutable plans, designed by infallible experts, that will protect our future.

But to get rid of uncertainty is not only impossible — to do so would be to abolish the vitality of life.

The first thing to note about uncertainty — or insecurity, the uncomfortable feeling that it produces — is that it is intrinsic to a dynamic existence. Just as you can’t know heat without cold, you cannot experience security without insecurity — for the simple reason that you wouldn’t know what it felt like (just as someone blind from birth doesn’t know what darkness is).

The world is not one of opposites, it is one of polarities, and the swinging from one end of the spectrum to another is what makes us capable of experiencing our lives fully. It is what gives our consciousness resonance.

Whether or not you agree with this philosophy — and most Western liberals don’t, since they see themselves on a nonstop march of progress towards the liberation of mankind from all forms of misfortune and injustice, so we can all end up living like the Swedish — it is also undoubtedly the case that insecurity is inescapable.

As the philosopher Alan Watts pointed out, trying to “get” security is rather like jumping off a high cliff while clutching a rock in your arms for safety. You are born into a world you know nothing about, and in which larger forces incessantly buffet you like a cork in an ocean.

But what would a completely safe, certain and predictable world look like — since this seems to be what we think we aspire to? It would be a nightmare, a world without surprise or spontaneity. Many societies, among them the totalitarian states of the 1930s, have tried to create monolithic worlds where everything is “under control” — safe, certain, shackled by laws and imposed by force. The result has always been a deadening of the human soul.

This urge for certainty is not only dangerous at a large-scale political level. The psychologist Dorothy Rowe has noted that the desperation to maintain a sense of certainty can lead to mental-health problems.

According to Dr Rowe, what people fear more than anything else is not death, but uncertainty, and they will go to a massive — and massively destructive — extent in order to avoid it. People will kill themselves rather than change their world view (this is called depression), because they fear the mental chaos that letting go of their deeply held assumptions will bring.

Or they will kill others. On this analysis, suicide bombers are not so much killing themselves and their victims out of idealism, but out of a commitment to an absolutely rigid world view that can brook no rival or threat — lest it undermine that certainty and leave the individual existentially destroyed. Hence the hatred and fear from some extreme forms of Islam towards the scientifically minded, “rational” West, a culture that would destroy their God in an apocalypse of syllogism, science and empirical experiment.

In Britain we are often thought to have the opposite problem to fundamentalism — what you might call fudgamentalism. We dither and equivocate, never quite sure of anything. It is built into the structure of our language (On the whole, I think… on balance… probably… I dare say… I shouldn’t wonder… on the one hand).

However, it may also be why we are one of the very few countries in the world who haven’t experienced totalitarianism — because we are able to cope with doubt and its discomforts better than most.

If that is so, then three cheers for British woolliness, lack of conviction and all-round humming and hawing. For however feeble it may appear to other people — and even to ourselves — in fact it is the thoroughly admirable recognition of one of the fundamental realities of existence.

The British, somewhere in their psyches, know that we cannot know — and that, furthermore, if we did know everything, we would hate it. Or as our greatest Englishman, Winston Churchill, once memorably observed, “Without a measureless and perpetual uncertainty, the drama of human life would be destroyed.”

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