![Sir Kenneth Clark at the Old Royal Observatory, Greenwich, with an Astrolabe](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/news/2024/04/25/TELEMMGLPICT000004115768_17140634655480_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqGnvE-VNXSbhg1qqFSd7ePxWaismuX_J-2KovjnuQF3M.jpeg?imwidth=680)
![Sir Kenneth Clark at the Old Royal Observatory, Greenwich, with an Astrolabe](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/news/2024/04/25/TELEMMGLPICT000004115768_17140634655480_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqGnvE-VNXSbhg1qqFSd7ePxWaismuX_J-2KovjnuQF3M.jpeg?imwidth=680)
There are many things that are remarkable about our civilisation. One of the more curious is that we have become the first civilisation in history that is taught to despise everything that is ours and venerate anything that is not. But there was a time, not very long ago, when a different approach was possible. Kenneth Clark’s magnificent 1969 series Civilisation is one example.
The subtitle of the series – note – was “a personal view”. And Clark, despite his extraordinary learning and erudition, was careful throughout to emphasise this point. It was not just a Western view or a European view, but his view. If that was meant to forestall the malevolent critics who have come along since, it has failed.
A few years ago, the BBC did a new version of Civilisation, using a number of historians trying to tell multiple stories. The whole thing was a mess. Any attempt to sum up something so vast is not going to please everyone or be capable of taking everything in. Clark knew that fact and bowed to it. His successors seemed to be dimly aware of it and then sploshed around in the resulting mess.
And while the makers of the latest series left their audiences little the wiser, the audience who watch Clark’s original will at least come away with a fairly good idea of our history, from the barbarians to the present day. They will know which came first – the Renaissance or the Enlightenment. They may even get to know something about the Dark Ages.
But today all such learning is regarded as “pedagogical” (in a bad sense), “patriarchal” (in the worst sense), and of course “Eurocentric” (enough said). There is nothing worse, today, than to be “Eurocentric” – that is to be accused of looking at the world from a European vantage point. But of course how are Europeans meant to look at the rest of the world?
The boringly obvious observations of Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978 swept through academia and then spilt out from there. And it is one reason why the right not just to celebrate but to even be curious about our past is now regarded as a suspicious activity. Anyone who doubts that fact should remember that the Government’s own counter-extremism advisers a few years ago came up with a list of books and television series the very ownership of which could be a sign of “radicalisation”. The list included not just books by C S Lewis and me but – naturally – Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation.
Now the series has been re-released by the BBC with a warning note alerting fragile viewers to the fact that it reflects “standards and attitudes” of its time, which is one of the most banal statements it is possible to make. Who does not reflect their time? But really what this is of course is a trigger warning. A warning that this series was made in a less enlightened time than ours.
Anyone who believes that guff should wonder whether there is anyone today in the public sphere as enlightened, courteous, knowledgeable and humble about their knowledge as Clark was with his. I doubt it.
But the BBC had another trick up its sleeve, which is to wheel out the ubiquitous Cambridge don, Mary Beard.
For all her learning as a classicist, Beard has in recent decades spread far outside her realms of knowledge to become a sort of all-round Left-wing gatekeeper. When she is not railing against America, Beard can be found – as here – chipping away at the civilisation whose roots she has spent her life studying.
In her attempt to provide a longer trigger warning, or “contextualisation”, for the re-release of Civilisation, she makes the obvious point. Clark’s series, she says, is a “principally European” story. Beard seems to say this as though it is obviously, evidently a bad thing. A fact that says much about her and nothing about European civilisation.
If people like Beard are so genuinely flummoxed as to why people would focus on Europe while talking about civilisation, perhaps she could look further afield. Perhaps she can find the Japanese scholars looking at the world through a non-Japanese perspective.
There are so many things to celebrate in our culture. But one thing I will not miss is this trend for turning admirable Western self-criticism into Western self-laceration and ultimately self-destruction.
If people think our civilisation has flaws, wow do I have a world to show them.
The BBC has gone to war on our civilisation
A new trigger warning on Kenneth Clark’s 1969 series reflects dangerous Western self-laceration