Shut Up About Rome and Cathedrals Already

Times were never that good and you definitely don't want to pay for a cathedral.

Have we lost our way?

Have we forgotten what made us great?

Have our lives become meaningless when compared to ancestors millennia ago?

The answer might surprise you. Because the answer is, “No, shut the fuck up about Rome and Cathedrals already.”

While it’s not exactly a new trend, it is one that seems to be growing in volume. You’ve definitely seen it. An account that posts something about Roman baths and says, “If the Roman Empire never fell, we’d be colonizing Mars.” Pictures of Cathedrals with a caption, like, “Why doesn’t society make buildings like this anymore?” 

The thought is that, in the past, WESTERN CIVILIZATION was a powerhouse of intelligence, ingenuity, and purpose. The Romans were hyper intelligent masters of the universe who were only felled by wokeness. Or something. It wasn’t a combination of mismanagement, infighting, overexpansion, and a whole lot of people who wanted to kill them. It was that humanity lost its way and it’s certainly not ancient Rome’s fault. And by “lost its way,” those people usually mean “different-looking people from different socities mixed together as they have done since the literal beginning of time, you fucking morons.” It always comes back to Western Civilization for a reason. 

Meanwhile, the whole Cathedral thing is predicated on the idea that when we were all religious, we could do GREAT THINGS like build giant gothic churches that last for centuries. If we only turned to God, we could again achieve this level of beauty. Usually these posts also include a picture of a garish modern glass-and-metal building as a counter example of how our artisans have become lost in the fog of modern society. Because, again, reasons.

Oh, if we could only go back!

Oh, if we could only achieve what those great people did!

Again, I beg you to shut the fuck up.

First of all, the Roman Empire was pretty fucking far from perfect. Yes, some places had indoor plumbing. Which is a great achievement and all. But it was still gross as fuck. As many have pointed out, communal bathrooms were plagued by rats that would literally bite you on the dick. And to wipe yourself, you used a communal sponge. And those were the conveniences of society. Let alone the massive amount of enslaved people which a lot of the people who have a hard-on for Rome would be.

Also, sorry, fuck-os, the Romans hated the barbarians from the white-majority areas you now fetishize too. They thought people in other parts of your precious Western Europe were frightening, giant idiots. So, unless you were born to an aristocratic family that wasn’t focused on murder, no, you wouldn’t love living back then. 

And while we can all appreciate Roman statues as great works of art, by all accounts they were painted to look like a fucking mannequin you’d see in a Burdines in 1985. The image we have of everyone wearing identical, comfortable togas and walking amongst bleached white marble statues is a fiction. It’s hilarious how different they look with their original colors.

And as respectable as right wing influencers want to make it, Rome was a country with a lot of people who did a lot of different things that weren’t always signs of PURITY and GREATNESS. Let me quote some translated Roman graffiti for you:

“Watch it, you that shits in this place! May you have Jove's anger if you ignore this.”

“Weep, you girls. My penis has given you up. Now it penetrates men's behinds. Goodbye, wondrous femininity!”

“Theophilus, don't perform oral sex on girls against the city wall like a dog.”

First of all, Theophilus, go for it, man. Don’t let them bully you. Second, that’s literally worse than graffiti you see today. People wrote on the fucking walls. People shit and pissed and fucked everywhere. Not to mention that many apartments for poor people (e.g., most people) were often tall death traps in cities that were plagued by fires. Also, fire brigades did exist (yay) but were pretty irregular and could be downright evil (boo), so good luck. 

Then there’s motherfucking cathedrals. Why can’t we make them anymore? Where did those plans go? Who’s responsible? I want names on my desk! One popular response was something like, “My daddy said we don’t even know how to make them anymore!” Which is not true. We do. We’re not confused by these buildings. We didn’t forget how architecture works. It’s just impractical as fuck for the Catholic church, let alone any branch of Christianity, to make these building the way these doofuses think they should be.

Because here’s the big thing: Cathedrals, especially the kind that confused white boys pine over, take a lot of time and are really, really expensive. Back in the a long time ago, a cathedral might take anywhere from a few years to fucking generations to complete. It’s cool that the community was that focused on a fun project, but do you really think modern right wing people who demand quarterly profits and instant growth are going to pour all their money into a project they won’t live to see? Fuck, they’re too busy wasting their billions so they can look the exact same age they already are. 

Also, we still fucking build and repair cathedrals. Even the GREAT WORKS OF WESTERN ARCHITECTURE have fires and collapses and rain damage. The reason new buildings don’t always look the same is because even the Catholic Church prefers its buildings to be completed within a few years on a reasonable budget rather than a few fucking lifetimes including years-long work stoppages due to money running out. That kind of happened a lot. But since we construct things now differently while using different materials, they’re not REAL CATHEDRALS. Which isn’t how that shit works, dummies.

Right wing influencers freak out about the idea of the state paying for poor people to have food. Who do you think paid for cathedrals? “The Catholic Church.” Yeah, well, back in the day, the church and the state weren’t always mutually exclusive entities. The two influenced each other in the geographical area that racist dorks jizz over. And as much as conservatives very, very much want to eliminate the divide between church and state, do you really think they’re going to want their tithes and taxes to go up to spend on a building without their say-so? Are they going to leave their life savings to the church for the project? Of course fucking not.

Then again, maybe some people will. But the idea that a community can come together and work on a generations-long project with funding from mandatory tithes and taxes is antithetical to the modern right wing view of economics and social policy. I can guarantee almost none of these people posting memes about “why can’t we build this anymore waaa” are going to spend decades apprenticing to become skilled stonemasons. And literally zero would want authorities out of their control to spend their money on a project for the common good.

It’s all bullshit that insists WE USED TO BE BETTER. Before everyone got into ballroom waltzes and reading novels and television and integration, we were a real society. Why do they think that? Because they have a fantasy version of the past they’ve seen in movies and on television. They want to live in both Julius Caesar’s Rome and the one hundreds of years later when Theodosius I made Christianity the state religion of Rome. Which were pretty different empires. Side note, Constantine converted to Christianity and made it more accepted in Rome. He wasn’t the one who made it the state religion.

But real fun fact about Theodosius I: He was the last Roman emperor to rule the empire before it split up. So, yeah, he made an early Catholic flavor of Christianity the state religion, but it’s not like that was the thing that SAVED WESTERN CIVILIZATION. It didn’t cause the collapse of Rome, but it sure as fuck didn’t stop it. I guess by the time they got their shit together and loved God, the wokeness level was already too high.

It’s all “I’m the smartest boy in this middle school” bullshit meant to make (white) people feel like they’ve lost something by accepting others in society. History is something that happens to them, not something they have any hand in. If things are bad, it’s someone else’s fault and someone else should fix it. Some of the people who love this shit are very, very rich. They could fund a hundred cathedrals if they wanted. The thing is, they don’t want to use their money or their time. It’s EVERYONE ELSE WHO MUST CHANGE!

They can’t admit that empires rise and fall for a dozen reasons; not because two men were allowed to kiss in public. It’s far easier to look at a bucolic, absolutely boring view of the past that ironically sucks out the humanity from everyday people who were fucking, shitting, and writing graffiti.