What a difference half a decade makes. This summer’s prevailing ethos, zeitgeist, vibe—call it any fancy name you want—was sharply different from the summer, just five years ago, of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter.

Such sudden changes in the moral atmosphere seem to occur every so often. The year 1776, the 250th anniversary of which we are scheduled to commemorate next year, was perhaps one such occasion, when the English-speaking world saw the publication of the Declaration of Independence, Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations” and the first volume of Edward Gibbon’s “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.”

Another break in general consciousness, from Victorian stricture to Bloomsbury Group fluidity, was announced 101 years ago by the novelist Virginia Woolf. “On or about December 1910,” she wrote, “human nature changed. All human relations shifted, and when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics and literature.”

And it has happened again in the great contrast between the notoriety most conventional media outlets gave to the eight-minute tape showing the

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