Lord Clark on Civilization

This is a long excerpt from the book Civilization by Kenneth Clark, later Lord Clark, writing in 1969. I was living in Florida in the early 1970s and I watched the ten-part PBS series “Civilization” (the transcripts of which comprise this book) and I remember how moving it was. The test of any work of art — including the art of accumulating and disseminating wisdom — is the test of time. Forty years one, I find little to criticize here. These were his concluding words, pp. 346-7

And yet when I look at the world about me in the light of this series, I don’t at all feel that we are entering a new period of barbarism. The things that made the Dark Ages so dark — the isolation, the lack of mobility, the lack of curiosity, the hopelessness – don’t obtain at all. When I … visit one of our new universities, it seems to me that the inheritors of all our catastrophes looked 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.

Of course, there has been a little flattening at the top. But one mustn’t overrate the culture of what used to be called “top people” before the wars. They had charming manners, but they were ignorant as swans…. The members of a music group or an art group at a provincial university would be five times better informed and more alert. Naturally these bright-minded young people think poorly of existing institutions and want to abolish them. Well, one doesn’t need to be young to dislike institutions. But the dreary fact remains that, even in the darkest ages, it was institutions that made society work, and if civilization is to survive society must somehow be made to work.

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