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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 27, 2025

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As far as I can tell, the dearth of innovation across contemporary music, architecture, literature, etc. is symptomatic of a deeper cultural malaise and applying palliative care to any one area, whether through documentaries or executive orders, is unlikely to do much to slow the decay until something more fundamental changes. There can be plenty of disagreement over what exactly has gone wrong or when (if you quizzed a group of online reactionaries, you'd get answers ranging from 1965 to 0 AD), but reaching a consensus is neither sufficient nor likely even necessary to build something new and beautiful for its own sake.

Of course when we look back on history, we see a punctuated equilibrium where short periods of years or decades can outshine the centuries surrounding them in terms of art, architecture, music, poetry, and other measures of cultural achievement, leaving a long trail of decaying imitations in their wake. Is this an artifact of chance historical preservation and the biases of those who recorded the works of their contemporaries, or do whole societies really just suddenly stop producing anything interesting or worthy of remembrance? Our own example seems like evidence for the latter, but I remain unsure.

Getting back to buildings, I recall once looking for any example of a contemporary style of architecture whose designs I liked, and all I found was the Neo-Andean of Bolivia. Some mixture of that, Art Deco, and whatever you call the supertrees in Singapore (solarpunk, I suppose), is what I'd like to see more of if I had a say in such things, though I would value having regional or climatic differentiation above all else. When I read Albion's Seed years ago, one of the things that struck me was the extent to which people's homes in colonial America (and basically every society ever except the one we live in now) were designed to either take advantage of or mitigate local factors such as snowfall, wind direction, humidity, and so on, rather than simply copying and pasting the same suburban floorplan, adding air conditioning or heating as needed, and calling it a day. There is something profoundly wrong with the fact that apartment buildings in Chicago look the same as ones in Miami.