Behind such shifts are the cultural relativists who have been a force in anthropology for over a century — they tend to follow something called “the Benedictine-Herskovitz formulation” which says that what is right or good for one individual or society is not right or good for another, even in similar situations. This means “not merely that what is thought right or good by one is not thought right or good by another, but that what is really right or good in one case is not so in another” (Frankena, 1973). Some would go still further, such as Alison Dundes Renteln in the US, who believes that “there can be no value judgments that are true, that is, objectively justifiable, independent of specific cultures”. This approach is a decisive attack on the old objective-subjective hypothesis as propounded by the Cambridge academic I.A. Richards — that (very roughly speaking) it can be conclusively demonstrated that a certain text is actually better than another. His theorem has turned out to be harder to prove, in the end, than Fermat’s last one. Such relativism is corrosive of critical standards. Perhaps we have not tried hard enough to prove it. Perhaps it might help if someone were to offer a million dollars. Maybe somebody very rich, cultured and liberal, in the true sense, like an American billionaire . . . ?

Otherwise, we must rely on talented individuals: writers such as the critic and scholar James Wood, born in 1965, now working in the US. Everything he writes is highly interesting and engaging, and if he were able to broaden his scope, and (preferably) return home, he might do much. Such writers need readers; and a group of brilliant and younger rivals. We can live in hope.

The battle between high culture — that of the real artists, their patrons, critics and audiences (which could be all of us) — and the anarchists and populists, is as vital as ever. This is what cries out for harder reading and thinking. There are other forces which are not on the side of the angels: increasing democratisation, the economic forces of globalisation, producing a rootless technocratic class and offering so many tempting routes to materialist excitements; there are the infinite tentacles of the internet. It is not so much the withdrawing roar of the waves down the naked shingles that depresses, as the ceaseless clamour of their electromagnetic counterparts, so difficult to avoid, so impossible to control, and (on balance, despite all the brilliant stuff) so massively, heedlessly Philistine.