Far more likely to perish, unfortunately, is the “open society”. As the philosopher Leszek Kolakowski wrote: “the extension and consistent application of liberal principles transforms them into their antithesis . . . [A]mong the dangers threatening the pluralist society from within . . . what seems to bode most ill is the weakening of the psychological preparedness to defend it.” Perhaps he had in mind Bertrand Russell’s boast “I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong”, which is today echoed by Ricky Gervais: “We have nothing to die for. We have everything to live for.” Will history be kind enough to let us get by on that alone?

If we are to equip ourselves for the challenges ahead, we urgently need to tackle this nihilism. For as long as we see ourselves as the spiritless inhabitants of a meaningless world, we will teeter precariously above a precipice of our own making.

We must also reverse our deep-set suspicion of history. Our universities have, for some time now, been expunging reams of “dead white males” from their reading lists. To a generation with fingers in their ears, such thinkers have nothing to say. Unable to sense the subtle threads that bind us all to a shared past, we latch on instead to whichever tags are dangled in front of us — feminism, transgenderism, post-colonialism. These labels are much easier to grasp, for they require no real knowledge of the past, only of present suffering.

We need some way to engage with each other as members of a common group once again. And though so much of our culture splintered over the last century, there is one strand that might provide us with a starting point: popular culture.

Anchored by the conservatism of public taste, most popular forms — film and music in particular — stayed the course of the 20th century much more successfully than their “higher” cousins. Many can trace an unbroken line back to the very traditions the modernists tried to sever us from. If a contemporary classical composer writes in a tonal style, it sounds peculiar to us: too self-conscious, too kitsch. But in popular music, the continued use of a harmonic system developed centuries ago sounds perfectly natural — precisely because it never tried fully to break away.

Indeed, far more of the West’s teleological code might have been smuggled in popular forms than their highbrow critics ever realised. Just as the eye seems to appear on whichever evolutionary branch one looks at, so the same trends that preoccupied Western musicians a hundred years ago are unfurling in pop music today. Melody strains against its rhythmic and harmonic leashes once again, threatening to snap free altogether. But while Schoenberg — motivated by political ideology — thrust this melodic “autonomy” onto his works, today it grows out of humanity’s simple desire to explore. The prognosis for today’s music is therefore, I believe, much better.

Popular culture crystallised archetypically Western tropes that, if nurtured, may still blossom again. It is probably the closest thing we have today to a myth about ourselves — we do not question, perhaps cannot question, the pre-rational sway it has over us. So ingrained in the public’s mind are the perfect cadence and the love story that not even the Enlightenment’s cynical ticks can burrow deep enough to suck them out. Today, like the lounge suit, their ubiquity conceals a quintessentially Western inheritance.

Which suggests that capitalism — for all Adorno and Horkheimer’s misgivings — might protect, rather than corrupt, culture. Kolakowski notes how totalitarian regimes reach a point of economic stagnation and collapse, taking their culture with them. Capitalism, by reflecting more accurately the intricate web of human relations, does a better — though not, of course, perfect — job of preserving our tastes and traditions.

But it cannot look after us alone. It is but one part of an urgently needed review of who we are and where we’re going. And to face the future with any confidence, we must begin with the memory of where we once came from.