a thought parked here for later use

A thought about the dislocation of modern conservatism; in particular about the unfashionability of pessimistic or tragic views of the human condition. These have fallen out of fashion partly because they seem to have no predictive value. Doom has been predicted ever since the Fifties, but things have continued to get better. Now, it seems to me that any prediction involves two things: you must identify both the relevant laws by which things change, and — presuming these laws are at all complicated and interesting — the state on which they are acting. It just seems possible that the reason that conservative thought has looked so silly for the last fifty years or more is not so much that it is wrong as an analysis of the ways in which societies change, but that it has been comprehensively wrong in diagnosing the character or state of the society whose changes it is trying to predict. Obviously this is not much use without specifics; unfortunately, I worked all this out while I was walking around the market this morning, and can’t remember the context in which it seemed so compelling. Did I mention my amnesia yet?