Sometimes it seems nothing will ever happen again that cannot pay its way. Never again will impecunious nobles publish vellum tracts of strange, subversive poetry that just might change the world. Never again will students commandeer the streets for causes not their own. Never again will universities and banks endow their ordinary, workaday buildings with the quoins and clocktowers, the flutings and friezes that give human existence a dignity and depth it may otherwise lack.

This single bottom-line mentality could be the slow-burn result of whichever Parisian longhair picked up the first stone to storm the Bastille. Democracy, capitalism, secularism; the holy trinity has slowly desiccated higher principle till nothing remains but universal self-gratification. That's arguable. But there's another possibility too.

Next time you find yourself wistfully comparing a fine-honed terracotta surface with some chipped and mouldering piece of pre-cast, and wondering why human nature - which generally seems to change so little - has shifted so profoundly in this alone, consider the following. It's not about nature, human or otherwise. It's a question of medication. We're on the wrong drugs.