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I went last week to a production of Rigoletto, the revival of a production first staged in 2001. A criticism that I read in advance informed me that the initial orgy scene had been toned down somewhat by comparison with what had gone seventeen years before. Was this progress or regression? The critic did not venture an opinion on this vital question; he merely recorded the change as a fact.

It seems that all opera productions these days need an orgy scene, just as doctoral theses in the Soviet Union used to need at least one quotation from Lenin. There was a time when an orgy would have been censored, but now it is obligatory—no opera without one. There was a brief orgy scene in the last Flying Dutchman that I saw, and it was a bit of a relief when they got it over with because I knew that it must be coming and tension mounted until it did. It was a bit like childhood diseases in the old days: The sooner you had them, the quicker you got over them.

The problem with orgies is that once you’ve see one, you’ve seen them all, and these days they are staged literally rather than suggestively, as if the aging audience has to be reminded of what sex actually is. Moreover, they are staged like a tableau of Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, the fin de siècle compendium of what used to be called, in those far-off judgmental days, perversions. The implicit, however, is more powerful than the explicit, or it used to be. The explicit, in fact, is the enemy of the voluptuous.

Ours is not an age of subtlety, however technically sophisticated it may be. Insults and even ordinary criticisms seem to me crude by comparison with those of my youth. We seem to prefer the elephantine to the feline. My favorite insult is that offered by the political philosopher to his more famous rival, Sir Isaiah Berlin. Oakeshott called Berlin the Paganini of ideas, which is wonderful because it can be received also as a compliment, for Paganini was the greatest violin virtuoso of his time, universally acknowledged as such. He was also regarded as flashy and superficial, a judgment borne out by his own musical compositions. How one would take such an insulting compliment, or complimentary insult, would rather depend on one’s self-estimate and the state of one’s vanity. Berlin knew perfectly that Oakeshott’s remark was more insult than compliment, and may even have suspected that it contained within it a grain of truth. His own phenomenal fluency was not a guarantor but perhaps a symptom of his superficiality—relative, that is, to a genuinely profound or original philosopher, not to the average barfly.

These days, by contrast, insults tend to be crude and vulgar. When Mr. Trump reputedly called certain countries by an epithet that I shall not repeat, he was only employing the type of language that, to my regret, is now in very common use even among intellectuals. We seem either to go in for the false delicacy of political correctness, speaking as if some words were as injurious law-hammers brought down on the skull, or employ the language of stevedores (if any such still exist) or of building workers to express our political ideas. One might have hoped for a happy medium, the possibility of frankness without crudity.

I have to admit that Mr. Trump’s characterization of other countries at least had the merit of exposing a certain contradiction in the minds of his opponents. Those who objected to his language were inclined also to object to his proposal to return migrants from those countries to their countries of origin on the grounds that—well, that those countries were as Mr. Trump said they were, and that it would therefore be cruel and inhumane to return them there.