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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   27227 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 16, 2026

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I think we're highly biased by our novelty-focused culture, but I would wager that America is producing excellent cultural and entertainment products at least as consistently as Ancient Greece or Rome did.

To be fair, Rome was also known for entertaining the masses with blood sports and the like, but Hollywood went from intelligent, well-written movies to Superhero-slop. Now that the audience has grown tired of it, they have apparently become incapable of producing new epics, and are mostly recycling old movies or existing IPs, usually poorly.

If you want to enjoy human artistic excellence in the United States, you can find it in virtually every large American city. You like opera? We've got opera. Ballet? Classical music?

All stagnating, mostly simply replaying the same old classics to dwindling audiences.

and performances that are probably at least as good as the average of what you could have experienced 500 years ago, or 1000 years ago, or 2000 years ago.

Yes, the US is very technically proficient. But that is not culture.

And let's be honest, most of the servants of Ancient Greece and Rome probably weren't deeply immersing themselves in the art and literature of the era (even if there are notable exceptions like Epictetus and Cleanthes.)

Traditional cultures are known for roaming troupes of artists, entertaining the masses, so I actually would expect people of that time (including farmers, not sure why you chose servants, unless you see the past through the lens of the rich, and have a blindness to the lives of commoners), to have access to art as well, but obviously more in line with the wealth levels and population density of the time.

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