1. England has failed to produce much in the way of beauty for about 100 years because the upper middle classes and middle classes took over. In the 19th century the rising middling sorts looked up to the aristocracy. This produced some beauty in housing & art.
Beauty requires leisure. The most beauty-orientated societies were in Ancient Greece where it was a morality. The Greek aristocracy despised labor. The middle class and Protestants make a religion of labor. Consequently, they hate beauty & are iconoclasts. That’s why US is ugly.
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Hmm, very interesting. A hidden corollary to Weber? Yes, it does strike me that despite their ever-increasing incomes and wealth, the Anglo-American middle classes appear more over-stressed and overworked than ever. Among all ‘cures’ suggested to them, you never see ‘work less’.
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The Anglo-American middle classes are being eaten, relatively speaking. They’re sinking. But, yes, you “work” on your relationship, “workout”, “work” with your children etc. Not working is a sin. It’s literally considered immoral. Unemployment worse than adultery.
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So if this hypothesis holds, Protestantism should vary inversely with æsthetics... which it seems to, for the most part! At the risk of sounding somewhat Moldbuggian, it is sad to observe in the liberalisation of the Mediterranean & elsewhere a kind of hidden Protestantisation.
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Iconoclastic & joyless. Protestantism has occasionally been stabilised & made to work productively, but it is generally an entropic force. Who cares what it sounds like, if it sounds like Marx or Moldbug or Genghis Khan—I’m only interested if it’s true. Is the Med liberalising?
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By liberalising, I mean accepting modern liberal ideology, with all of its nostrums and shibboleths—which tends to be an elite phenomenon at this point, but not quite as ubiquitous in Anglo-America. Ditto for the Balkans & E Europe, where it’s aggressively pushed by a small elite
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I think Catholicism (Orthodoxy/Islam in Balkans) runs deep in these countries, and there’s a language barrier. I also think that it’s in the blood and national temperament to an extent, not to mention climate—siestas are anti-Protestant. If the US Empire goes pop it’ll recede.
End of conversation
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