Has western civilization peaked during late 19 early 20 century?

Well I'm talking about that video of a chinese guy using a flamethrower on a live cow and the various videos of dogs being cooked alive. Bloodsports wasn't ethical but I find it a bit less unethical than those things

You are right
Better yet, tgey had wives and prostitutes. The best of both worlds

I mean by technique the material advancement. New ways of manipulating matter, this kind of technical scientific advancement. I mean by spirit the zeitgeist of elevated philosophy and high culture that makes real advancement in understanding the world possible. Examples: Athens as the birth of modern thought, 19 century europe and early 20 century europe/america where all the last math subfields were born, subfields which made possible our current age high in technique but low in spirit - no new subfields of math were created after the mid 20 century, all we have since then is inertial motion from these epochs. Culture is whatever is thought by a people

Civilization was always shit.

curious because "elevated" philosophy seems split on the idea that "real advancement" is possible, especially when it is thought to "understand the world". Not to mention the categories of "high" culture were only reified in this exact period you're describing (late 18th century depending on context/geography). Seems like you're relying on romanticist myth and presentist bias to understand history in general, much less the sloppy and facile comparisons to any contemporary context.

"Culture is whatever is thought by a people" so is math culture?

War in Europe fucked things up pretty bad... I would say the period from 1950 until around 2000 was the golden age. Of course, there was the looming threat of the cold war but evidently nothing came of it.

There was great cultural innovation during this 50 year period and it exists as the cosy period in which there was neither war close to home like in the first half of the 20th century nor was there as much widespread institutional corruption or global psy-op campaigns attacking individuals as there from 2000 onwards.

Boomers sure did have it pretty fucking good.

>"nothing came of it"
might want to check into that a bit more deeply

why do people think that this is a question worth asking or that it is even possible to answer?

let me reframe the question. Which time period do you think you would have enjoyed living in most?

>Is math culture?
big yep
Ok lets go by bits
Yeah there is controversy of how much of the world we can understand. But you see this argument being made precisely by the culture that has Athens as its intellectual ground. You dont see some random tribe questioning epistemology. And no one in their right mind would say greek philosophers didnt have a more elevated thought than some random tribe today
Yeah high culture was reified actually around the 1600, but still, that is just evidence of a fuller development -the valuing of beauty
And we I have my biases as I take a Spenglerian approach to this stuff. But what would be an objective measure? If we look objectively, the common person from the 1950s was better articulate and can think in a clearer way than the common person today for example - just read a non fiction book for the lay people from that time, or see some interview with people from then. Would you accpet this as an objective measure of decline, if you compared it and found it to be true?
Anyway what is your view on this stuff then? And why China?

watchdominion.org if you really think you give a single shit about "ethics"

>talking to people on the streets
>brothels cheap and plentiful
>legal OTC opium, cocaine, morphine
>literally just fried potatos, extremely easy to cook if not a faggot
nah, it would be better

I'm tempted to say yes because that's when they stopped expanding and instead started all these apology movements and started handing out money to others etc, even Britain gave away all their stuff.
But it's tricky to say because I wasn't alive in the early 1900s so I don't know what I felt like during that time. Maybe back then they thought the peak was in the 1850s and maybe people in the 1850s lamented how they had peaked in the 1790s, and so on. I just don't know.

But yeah, without expansion and vigor a civilization nears the end of its cycle, if you take the EU for example I don't even know what their strategy is. It's all domestic affairs. Women's issues, fringe group issues, keep billionaires and mediafags happy, bend over for corpo lobbyists and so on and so on and so on.
No plans in sight for meaningful new technologies, scientific leaps or building a starfleet or a cyborg army or just, you know, SOMETHING.
As a Eurofag I'm concerned about the US as well, they better last longer than 300 years.