Seriously...

In an age of certainty, of assertions without facts, and sometimes assertions with facts, Mark O’Connell makes the case for a different virtue – ambivalence. Six years on from his thought-provoking, witty and charming Four Thought, he returns to make the case for ambivalence. In those six years almost every trend in public life has been away from ambivalence rather than towards it. Populist movements from the left and the right are about certainty, and even the idea of balance often ends up sharing single, entrenched views, just neatly arrayed on either side. Yet in real life few decisions are truly clear-cut, there is often a case on both sides, and a reasonable person could easily reach a different conclusion with the same evidence. Most of us, much of the time, have complex and mutually contradictory views on issues small and large. And that's also true in public life: the arts and business, politics and the military are all properly in the realm of ambivalence, with complicated, messy and marginal decis