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.
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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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