I saw the first two seasons of the Crown: one thing I realized was how much European royalty changed in one generation. They stopped caring about titles, promiscuity, virginity, lineage & even divorce. Elizabeth & Phillip seem to’ve been last generation that were traditionalists.
There’s this scene in S2 where Phillip laments about this change and says he was a royal prince from a royal house and people still didn’t want him to marry the Queen he had grown up with. But here no one cared that Margaret was marrying a commoner with deviant sexual behavior.
William and Kate or Edward and Sophie seem to be the most traditional of the lot and even they had multiple relationships out of marriage. This is simply unthinkable of in the Europe of Victoria or modern day India / Saudi Arabia too.
Whatever progress Europeans have made in the sciences & technology to be accompanied with a ravishing autophagy that it eats up their own tradition & culture like a locust till there’s nothing left. Very interesting to observe.
It really seems like their civilization has made the ultimate Faustian bargain where they built the most powerful most successful and most advanced societies in material terms but it cannibalized all their tradition, religion, family and culture. Hard to pinpoint a single cause.
Not true. Moral taboos exist to be broken, that’s human nature. What matters is they exist in the first place to rein in the masses & hold them to a higher standard. When society publicly starts celebrating breaking all taboos, the system collapses as a whole.
Tbh I’m just a bit surprised. I thought the Netflix show was making things up, how was English royalty ok with marrying bisexual commoners in the 60s? Turns out it was all true.
Now I’m not condemning European civilization in toto, not even close. Their achievements in modern science are invaluable & we must use them. However, think of it as Western civilization being the ‘control experiment’ - they were in unchartered waters & didn’t know what’d happen.
On the other hand, we have seen what can happen and can use this knowledge to take the best of both worlds to build a materially prosperous & culturally resilient religious society.
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