Books: The Uses of Pessimism: And the Danger of False Hope by Roger Scruton.

Pessimism Is Hope

by Molly Brigid Flynn

A moderate pessimism is our best hope. Unscrupulous optimists are hopeless. Futurists are the real reactionaries. Conservatism is needed to defend rather modern conceptions of law, community, individual, and the good life. 

In the excitement (and disappointment) of the politics of hope and change, surely a conservative’s responsibility must be to remind us that change is not the substance of things hoped for, and that reasonable

hopes for those concrete goods really within human grasp are best fulfilled by preservation or repair—and by the small-scale, face-to-face work of everyday life. 

In other words, the role of conservatives is to be the wet-blanket. 

To those whom Roger Scruton calls “unscrupulous optimists,” this attitude appears unhappy. It is with some surprise, then, that we find a certain cheerfulness throughout Scruton’s newest book, The Uses of Pessimism: And the Danger of False Hope. 

The book is about knowing ourselves as other than what we might want to be, coming to terms with the human condition, and living within our limits with equanimity.

There is a truism that a pessimist sees the glass half empty when the optimist sees it half full. The only problem here is that this truism isn’t true. 

Knowing that an empty glass is possible, and inevitable if we drink without refilling our reserves, the pessimist can be grateful for whatever the glass does hold. 

Having a memory that appreciates the past and not just an imagination that dreams up a future, he can also point the way back to the cow.

....

Read more: www.imaginativeconservative.org