The Courage of Ambivalence
Seriously...
BBC
4.1 • 885 Ratings
🗓️ 23 August 2019
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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 decisions.
Mark begins this programme in Dublin, speaking to a philosopher, a psychologist, an essayist and an art critic about what ambivalence is, how central it is to the human experience, and how we might embrace it. Then he travels to London, to examine areas of public life, and issues, where ambivalence feels less comfortable, more challenging. But as someone who is profoundly ambivalent about most things, much of the time, can he sustain the courage of his own ambivalence?
Producer: Giles Edwards
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This was an impregnable fortress. The only way you get out was in a wooden box. |
| 0:05.0 | The controversial maximum security prison impossible to escape from. |
| 0:09.0 | And one of the duties of a political prisoner is the escape. |
| 0:12.0 | The IRA inmates who found a way. of a political prisoner is the escape. |
| 0:12.5 | The IRA inmates who found a way. |
| 0:14.5 | I'm Carlo Gableer and I'll be navigating a path |
| 0:19.5 | through the disturbing inside story of the biggest jailbreak in British and Irish history. |
| 0:25.0 | The narrative that they want is that this is a big achievement by them. |
| 0:28.5 | Escape from the maze, listen first on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:35.0 | BBC Sounds. BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts. |
| 0:39.0 | Is the Daily Grind |
| 0:42.0 | Getting You Down. Fancy taking a break and going out into nature this |
| 0:46.9 | summer? Then look for Go Wild and BBC Sounds, a place for some of the best nature programs from Radio 4. |
| 0:55.0 | Get some inspiration for your next adventure, |
| 0:58.0 | no matter how big or small. |
| 1:02.0 | Just search for Go Wild and BBC Sounds and set out on your next adventure today. |
| 1:07.0 | Hi, I'm Riana Dylan, and this is seriously. |
| 1:17.0 | I live in Dublin and I'm a writer and I walk around the city a lot and so inevitably I often find myself getting reminded of James Joyce and his great Dublin novel Ulysses. |
| 1:30.0 | And when I do I think about the character of Leopold Bloom, who is constantly considering both sides of issues, |
| 1:36.5 | swinging back and forth between opposing views. I think about this because I'm wired the same way. I am a constitutionally |
| 1:44.8 | ambivalent person. There's one chapter in the book actually it's called |
| 1:48.9 | Cyclops where Bloom comes into a pub on this site right where I'm standing there, |
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