Cohen on Conservativism
Cohen, says, here (pdf, p2), that:
"Do not suppose that, because lamentation is perennial, it's misplaced. Anti-conservatives say, 'Oh, well, people have always said that things are getting worse', and anti-conservatives mean thereby to convey that the conservative lamentation expresses an illusion. But it is entirely possible that at any rate certain kinds of things have always been worse than they were before".
I'm going to address this sentence in its own right. It might well be the case that by "certain kinds of things" Cohen means things other than those I'll explore. In short, Cohen is possibly not guilty of the criticism I raise here.
So it's quite true that some people like to point out that people always think that things are getting worse; society is going to the dogs now in a way it never did when member-of-generation was young. If people have always said this, it's tempting to claim that it's said for content-independent reasons. People grumble because they like grumbling or because humans are hardwired to dislike change more as they get older.
If it's content independent, then it's not worth worrying about. Things can get worse - we should not ignore that possibility! But a low level of moaning from some corners of society is perfectly normal, and nothing to get worried about.
Cohen objects to this, because it's possible that things have always been getting worse. But this is very clearly not the claim that conservatives make. Modern "conservatives" might want to hark back to the 50's, perhaps the Victorian period. At most, let's imagine they hark back to the middle-ages, when the Church had power. Let's be honest: I bet people at all of those times also moaned that things weren't what they used to be. Perhaps conservatives should hark back to the earliest point in human history when no-one moaned? This is very unlikely to be reasonable.
Conservatives usually want to resurrect a relatively recent period in history. But there's no real reason to think that their current moaning about the glory we had fifty years ago is any more valid than the moaning that happened fifty years ago about the glory we had one-hundred years ago.
