Our incurably romantic outlook

“Our civilization is much more artificial than that of Greece or Rome; and the main cause of this is the Christian ethic. Where Romance enters the sphere of morals is at the gate of sex; nearly all the diabolism (helping itself to the traditional Sadic and invert machinery), springing up so eagerly in Puritan soil can be traced to a sex-root. It is even extremely easy in the modern West to sexify everything, in a way that would have been impossible in the Greek world, for instance.” - Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, Book I, ch. III, p. 15.