The best thing we can do for Homer, for opera, for the French New Wave, for the Four Classical Novels, for Jay-Z and The Simpsons and Star Wars is to take the promises held out to the culture by the older sort of educational middlebrow, look carefully at them, and keep them. We would keep them by guaranteeing every person a decent school, free time, and a good nearby library, one they could walk through without immediately attracting the hostile attentions of staff. We could decide that there are such things as beauty, goodness, excellence, and self-cultivation and that we’re willing to pay for them; we could stop indulging the adolescent boy’s fantasy that the world of culture is a scrim drawn over an unremittingly Darwinian landscape. We could, having done all this, settle down to the task of talking with each other about the art we love in a way that attends to the specificity of that art. We could do that now.