ANDREW FERGUSON RECORDS THE END OF ‘CIVILISATION:’
In the closing moments of the final episode of Civilisation, Clark intended to strike a note of optimism. “When I look at the world about me in the light of these programs, I don’t at all feel as though we are entering on a new period of barbarism,” he said. He shows us the campus of the then-new University of East Anglia. Apple-cheeked college students pop in and out of classrooms, labor over books—the baby boomers as Clark hoped they were in 1969. “These inheritors of all our catastrophes look cheerful enough. . . . In fact, I should doubt if so many people have ever been as well-fed, as well-read, as bright-minded, as curious, and as critical as the young are today.”
Watching at home, we can assume, was the 14-year-old Mary Beard, all a-tingle and raring to go to college herself, where she could use her curiosity and reading and bright-mindedness to prove the great man and his theory wrong.
Read the whole thing. Back in 2013, I described watching Kenneth Clark’s seminal program as akin to reading “Notes from Atlantis” – the postwar British culture that made it simply no longer exists. As Ferguson writes, from the title onward, the BBC’s new sequel, Civilisations (note the title is of course, now plural), “pokes us in the ribs” repeatedly with its successor intellectual culture – a queasy mélange of postmodernism and multiculturalism. Exit quote from Beard, one of the hosts of the new series:
‘We’ know that ‘we’ are civilised by contrasting ourselves with those we deem to be uncivilised. . . . The inconvenient truth, of course, is that so-called ‘barbarians’ may be no more than those with a different view from ourselves of what it is to be civilised, and of what matters in human culture. In the end, one person’s barbarity is another person’s civilisation.
No. (Nice paraphrase of the motto at Reuters that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter,” though.) As Saul Bellow famously said in the early 1990s, eternally angering the left, “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans? I’d be glad to read him.”