Predictions

A peek at the horoscope, puzzling the meaning of dreams, wearing lucky socks, having a method for choosing lottery numbers – many otherwise rational people retain a vestigial interest in prediction to ensure favourable outcomes. I’ll happily admit to a fascination with Tarot cards – and I do seem to be an archetypal bossy Aries. Christopher Dell’s Prophecies demonstrates just how widespread a belief in divination has always been across cultures, however peculiar or unsavoury the methods. In ordering his vast material, Dell sets out some ‘categories of convenience which allow us to impose some structure on a naturally amorphous topic’.

Half of the British political world thinks we are insufficiently scared about the present; the other half thinks we are insufficiently excited about the future. The latter is a non-partisan movement, or at least a cross-partisan one. From fully-automated luxury communism, through centrist Abundance, to the more right-coded Looking for Growth, all the way to Anglo-futurism (somehow paradoxically simultaneously futurist and reactionary), policy thinkers are rejecting incrementalism and learned helplessness and articulating provocative future visions that could – with a tweaked planning system and Natural England ritually immolated – lie just a couple of parliaments away. All these movements could usefully learn from Could Should Might Don’t. It is less clear that anyone else will.