The Fence

Tim Minchin has a wonderful song called ‘The Fence’.  I recommend you all go listen and buy.  Without wanting to spoil too much, the chorus is a rallying cry to ambivalence.  Turns out that sometimes thing aren’t just wrong, and aren’t just right, and the world isn’t as binary as you thought and that really, sitting in the middle of things going ‘well yes but I can see both sides’ might actually be a noble calling.

Ah Tim Minchin; what words of truth you speak.

Complexity!  Ambivalence!  Whoopee!!!

There are very few things I absolutely believe in.  They probably boil down to this: don’t go around killing kids, (or adults too preferably, but there is a whole other conversation about war to be had there), don’t go around torturing or generally violating human rights, don’t burn books.

After that I guess the only other thing I’ve got any real faith in is the scientific method.  (Curious fact: the scientific method in one of its earliest expressions was quite possibly formulated by an Islamic scholar by the name of Ibn Al-Haytham.  This gent was trusted with building a dam across the Upper Nile by the Sultan of Egypt.  After saying ‘sure, I can do that!’ he realised that in fact, he couldn’t, and faked his own insanity rather than risk getting his head cut off, and spent the rest of his days under house arrest.  While under house arrest, he studied optics and formulated the hypothesis that, given that only God was perfect, and given therefore that mankind could never perceive truth perfectly, the only way to know the reality of the thing was by rigorous testing….)

Beyond that – history, politics, sociology, economics, the ‘goodness’ (well dodgy word here) of words on a page or things on a stage – it’s all hilariously, wonderfully ambivalent.

And that’s just fine for me.