>The present (especially as caught up in a snapshot of opinion) offers a
>very uncertain prophecy of the future.
That's wrong, most of the time. Most of the time, the future isn't all that unlike the present and recent past. Sometimes there are real breaks, but those are rare. It's like Keynes's distinction between risk, which is statistically quantifable within predictable parameters, and uncertainty, which isn't. Risk is a lot more prevalent than radical uncertainty.
Doug