Yesterday, I reviewed John McCain’s speech in Columbus and explained my skepticism with various foolish schemes to save the environment. Afterwards, a few friends emailed me telling me that I shouldn’t be so gloomy and I replied to them explaining that I’m nothing of the sort, and that even though I’m not a McCainiac, I remain hopeful for the future of conservatism.

On Pajamas Media, Rodger Kimball has aa brilliant post about why conservatives, with the exception of a few outliers, generally aren’t gloomy. Here is an excerpt:

From time immemorial conservatives have delighted in writing works with titles like Leviathan, The Decline of the West, The Waste Land. Nevertheless, by habit and disposition conservatives tend, as a species, to be less gloomy than–than what? What shall we call those who occupy a position opposite that of conservatives? Not liberals, surely, since they are so often conspicuously illiberal, i.e., opposed to freedom and all its works. Indeed, when it comes to the word “liberal,” Russell Kirk came close to the truth when he observed that he was conservative because he was a liberal. In any event, whatever the opposite of conservatives should be called–perhaps John Fonte’s marvelous coinage “transnational progressives” is best–they tend to be gloomy, partly, I suspect, because of disappointed utopian ambitions.

Conservatives also tend to enjoy a more active and enabling sense of humor. The English essayist Walter Bagehot once observed that “the essence of Toryism is enjoyment.” What he meant, I think, was summed up by the author of Genesis when that sage observed that “God made the world and saw that it was good.” Conservatives differ from progressives in many ways, but one important way is in the quota of cheerfulness and humor they deploy. Not that their assessment of their fellows is more sanguine. On the contrary. Conservatives tend to be cheerful because they do not regard imperfection as a personal moral affront. Being realistic about mankind’s susceptibility to improvement, they are as suspicious of utopian schemes as they are appreciative of present blessings. This is why the miasmic gloominess emanating from many conservative circles today is so dispiriting. It goes against the grain of what it means to be conservative. It is dampening, and I for one hope it will prove to be a quickly passing phenomenon. Among other things, this recent access of personal gloominess makes the practice of professional gloominess–the robust deployment of satire, ridicule, and so on–much more difficult and less satisfying.

That is absolutely true- Conservatives understand the flaws of man, realize how truly insignificant man is in the overall scope of God’s creation, and can only make the best of our short lives while laughing, in good humor, at the left’s utopian schemes. And this also explains why the left- including their visible members in the national and Ohio blogosphere, are constantly gloomy, angry, and humorless: It’s because their efforts to immanentize the eschaton still haven’t worked.