“The need to hope…will always reassert itself, even when there are no grounds for hope. I’m a child of the ’60s and saw all this happening…in which people seized upon the most unreal speculations as to how a new society could be born out of this abundance of the baby boomers and, in pursuit of this, set about destroying everthing that would make it possible to live. That was a very good example of hope springing out of nothing,” says Roger Scruton, author of The Uses of Pessimism.