Civilisation and its discontents

Christopher Booker

It tnay seem cheating to conclude this series 'books of the Seventies' with the script of 4television series that was both broadcast published in 1969. But for reasons I r,44411 enlarge on, I believe that Kenneth `-lark's Civilisation series was not only one !I the clearest of all symptoms of that 1,lound shift of mood which took place "etWeen the Sixties and the Seventies it sed in itself one of the most fascinating l'lemmas to have confronted our culture in 'e Past decade.

,s I have observed in these columns 01e, a powerful ingredient in the colossal Allact of Civilisation, particularly in iLtnerica, was the contrast it struck with the tiil'es when it was first shown. At the end of we Sixties there were already many signs of a l'heariness at that decade's obsession with essant change and the passing moment. teltirlenly oh blessed relief there on iiilevision screens which had been purveyr r,8 nightly images of Vietnam, race riots, rtit st demonstrations, pop festivals and th".tne rude disorder of the late Sixties, was s'h!s tirbane figure, in his beautifully-cut ;1,4, taking us back into a different world ta‘te,alni of exquisite paintings, tapestries, v-uedrals, palaces, the rich, ordered harttirest of a thousand years of European cult:. Amid the chaotic nightmare of the nsent, Clark seemed a symbol of all that Itht",,se of permanence and stability we ght we had lost, and were beginning Till to yearn for. vehilideed as he magisterially surveyed the thLIe sweep of Western civilisation since thihw'iddle Ages, not the least appealing (lid! for many viewers was the way Clark 40, conceal his distaste for the way the dit? had ended up. Apart from stray asides itrelieited through the series at modern ttects, playwrights, psychiatrists, 'hellIhre,4,4ffie' and 'all those forces which tarlks'Len to impair our humanity nieeks' tear gas, ideologies, opinion polls, Clar",,anisation, planners, computers', ised'I:s fear that we were no longer civil suspicion that we were sinking into hissew barbarism, recurrently intruded on leasttirv, eY of past glories like a spectre at the 'lei,' In Chartres Cathedral, he could not littrarelnarking that 'even the tourists have Iii 6;estroyed its atmosphere, as they have Prom Many temples of the human spirit'. Obs; the octagon at the top of Greenwich inrv,atorY, surrounded by all the noble ente-ZIrlenta of seventeenth century sciand ;huis gaze strayed out across the trees Ilus,,":e elegant buildings of Wren's Royal iNrtal below to a distant skyline of smokdis aett)ries and high-rise flats, 'the squalid Qtclerf • Now in all this horror of the present and desire to escape into the more ordered, harmonious, 'human' world of the past, Clark struck a note which has remained typical of the Seventies. Rarely has there been a time so dominated by lois of confidence in its own cultural capacities, by such amazing nostalgia for the buildings and imagery of past ages, as we see in everything from the conservation craze in architecture to the endless TV serials in 'period dress', from the booming antique shops and salerooms to the yoghourt ads showing actors dressed up as smocked rustics and rosy-checked milkmaids. But the question inevitably arises how have we come to such a pass? Certainly in a project cast on so grand a scale as Civilisation, this question should have been a major underlying theme.

Indeed, up to a point, Lord Clark seemed to be giving his answer. The trouble with our present civilisation, he implied, was that we have lost touch with our spiritual roots, our sense of human scale, our sense of man's proper place in the frame of nature. We have become materialists on a heroic scale, defying the universe, but at the same time losing that sense of proportion in all things which has been the secret of all those societies along the way which we may hold to have been truly civilised.

Where did it all start to go wrong? If we are to see the past thousand years of our civilisation as a evolutionary development, and not just as a series of disconnected episodes, there must have been certain points along the way where those disruptive tendencies now bearing such unwelcome fruit began to show themselves. But here Lord Clark showed himself strangely reluctant to face the full implications of his own evidence.

He began his story with a somewhat melodramatic account of how civilisation was brought through the Dark Ages following the fall of Rome, 'by the skin of its teeth'. He made no bones about what constituted this holy relic, being carted about on the extreme Western shores of Europe by a handful of barbarian monks. It certainly was nothing to do with Christianity, the latest of those 'mystery religions', full of 'meaningless rituals' that had 'destroyed the self-confidence' of the antique world. It was the humanist tradition of Graeco-Roman culture.

Around 1000 AD this frail flame was fanned back into life. 'Civilisation' was re-born and the moment Clark chose to illustrate this was particularly significant in the re-emergence in Christian art of a recognisably human figure. From then on, despite his previous lukewarm sympathy for Christianity, the Church passed into favour as the chief pillar of Western civilisation, and over the next two episodes, describing the Middle Ages, it could do little wrong. But even here, despite his passing insistence on the 'civilising' importance of the Christian view that the spiritual world was ultimately more real than the material, it was again revealing what incidents and people Lord Clark chose to illustrate this. He homed in with particular delight, for instance, on the figure of Abbe Suger of St Denis, the man who had consciously revived the Greek belief that men's minds could only come to appreciate the spiritual world through material beauty. Even the sculptors of Chartres must have drawn their inspiration from Greek models.

In short, for all his apparent sympathy for the world-view of mediaeval Christendom, Clark's real admiration for the Middle Ages was centred on the way they marked the beginning of a revival of the humanistic values of the classical world. All of which might lead one to suppose that, as the Middle .Ages drew towards their close, and as civilisation reached that mighty turning point where men reached out to find still greater significance in the material world (and in themselves), without necessarily retaining the all-embracing framework of religion, Lord Clark would have found himself increasingly at home; indeed that, in the Renaissance, that time when the old Graeco-Roman culture was revived more fervently and consciously than ever before, and when (as he borrowed from Protagoras for the title of one of his programmes), man might again become 'the measure of all things', Clark would find his true 'centre of gravity'.

Yet here was a curious thing. Of the Middle Ages themselves, Clark had spoken with almost unreserved enthusiasm. They had almost everything he regarded as a necessary condition of civilisation —a 'sense of permanence', of man's place in nature, of 'eternity' and so forth. But in each of the three programmes in which he represented man bursting forth from the 'constrictions' of the mediaeval frame, covering the Renaissance and the Reformation, he so chose to arrange his evidence that, after an initial wave of optimism, liberation and creativity, they ended in blackest pessimism. From the order and light of Urbino and Alberti's Florence to the romantic, almost nihilistic gloom of Giorgione's Tempesta, from the glories of the High Renaissance to Leonardo's world-destroying deluges, from the sunlit humanism of Erasmus to what Clark rather curiously took to be Shakespeare's conviction that life is ultimately meaningless, each time the great leap forward and upward of these two centuries was represented as ending in doubt, if not in total despair.

Is this not rather strange? Is it even possible that, in that very moment which saw the triumphant re-emergence of his own highest values, that Renaissance leap into a new man-centred world-view, Lord Clark was already unconsciously sensing the birth of that restlessness, that insatiable curiosity about the external, material world, that refusal to accept the restraints of a universal order, which had finally led to his nightmarish vision of the present?

Certainly in the next episode, on the Counter-Reformation, Clark took obvious delight in running counter to the grain, as he extolled the partial re-establishment of authority and religious certainty in the Tridentine Church. But even here, as he surveyed the attempts of Bernini and Co. to give their spiritual visions material expression, he was driven to end his story unhappily on the dissipation of the ceilings and frescoes of the late Baroque into swirling clouds of illusion.

From there on, as the modern world grew closer, Clark found it ever harder to keep a secure foothold. He rejoiced briefly in the re-ordered universe of Newton and Descartes, of Vermeer's prosperous Holland — but even this was an order based ultimately (except for Rembrandt) on the materialism of emergent capitalism and scientific observation and, as he gazed out from Greenwich, he was only too gloomily reminded of what tliat love of wealth and science was eventually to lead to. He found universal truth in the masters of eighteenth century music, Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, but saw them leading inexorably to Don Giovanni: 'the pursuit of happiness and the pursuit of love, which had once seemed so simple and life-giving, had become complex and destructive, and his [Don Giovanni's] refusal to repent, which makes him heroic, belongs to another phase of civilisation'.

Loth to plunge on such a perfect cue into the whirlpool of nineteenth century Romanticism, Clark returned to the 'Age of Reason' — but again the smile of Voltaire faded into the self-destructive make-believe and irrationality of the French Revolution.

Increasingly, in his final episodes, Clark was forced to clutch at straws for anything he could really call 'civilisation' Balzac's defiance of 'fashionable opinion' (really? — was that why Balzac so liked living in a large house and being invited to the best dinner parties?), the technological romanticism of Brunel, the 'heroic materialism' of the Manhattan skyline, the 'love of nature' which he traced through Rousseau and Wordsworth to the cloud studies of Constable, the gaseous canvases of Turner and Monet's lily pools, where the figurative image finally hovers delicately on the edge of complete abstractionism. All this was pretty thin stuff when measured against the confident universality which Clark had found in the past, above all in the Middle Ages; only by shutting the best part of both eyes was it possible to see in those closing episodes anything more than the faintest vestiges of those ideals of 'harmony', 'proportion', 'a sense of permanence' and 'eternity', which in earlier programmes he had claimed were essential to any definition of 'civilisation'. And so, with this increasing sense of dissipation, of a reluctance to lift his head, we reached Lord Clark's melancholy peroration on the whole series, his quotation from Yeats: 'things fall apart, the centre cannot hold, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world . . . and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned'. As if finally reluctant to end his story on quite so bleak and despairing a note, he showed some 'idealistic' looking students at Essex University (vintage 1968), and then, as he later put it in his autobiography, 'walked into my library, patted a wooden figure by Henry Moore, as if to imply that there was still hope, and it was all over'.

Now in commenting on this superbly polished performance, which was greeted ten years ago with near-universal rapture (but noticeably by almost no attempt to analyse what Clark was actually saying), it is tempting to quote from the dialogue of Plato named after that self-same Protagoras who had once pronounced that 'man is the measure of all: "Do you think it is a beauti ful and well-written poem?" "Yes, both beautiful and well-written". "And do you think a poem beautifully written if the poet contradicts". "No". "Then look at it more closely". '

Almost everyone ten years ago took the view that Civilisation was a 'beautiful and well-written poem' — indeed it has become that paradigm which all good little TV chiefs are constantly hoping to repeat. But at the heart of the series was a contradiction so glaring that it might be thought astonishing it was not picked up more widely at the time. On the one hand, Lord Clark was arguing that the rise of Western civilisation in the Middle Ages rested on the revival of the humanist ideals of Greece and Rome. On the other, he could not hide his intuition that somehow the 'drowning of our innocence' may have begun at precisely that moment when those values again became uppermost; when to the heroes of the Renaissance it seemed possible that man and his works, to a degree which not even the ancient world could have imagined, might become truly 'the measure of all things'.

And of course one reason why Lord Clark's contradiction was not discovered is that his position is one which is almost universally shared. As we look around at the contemporary plight of mankind, most of us opine that the modern world appears to be going to hell in a handcart. We think that civilisation is in decay, the state of our arts shows that we have culturally lost confidence on a scale which is quite unprecedented in the experience of mankind (imagine a world in which were condemned only to listen to the music, read the novels, look at the pictures and live in the buildings of the past twenty years — a definition of hell?). And yet we are not prepared ultimately to accept that such an outcome might have been implicit in the whole course Western civilisation has taken over the past five hundred years. We treat the past as an agreeable escapist refuge, a source of reassuring images to shore us up against our present ruin. We admire Chartres Cathedral more than Centre Point, a humble thatched cottage more than the Aylesbury Estate. And yet we refuse to put the whole picture together with a proper sense of intellectual consistency, to admit that the ugliness, noise, pollution, totalitarian horrors and threatened catastrophes of our world may spring just as surely and inevitably from our view of man and his relations with the universe as did the Gothic cathedrals from the mediaeval view of these things.

What is required today, for the sake of our intellectual and spiritual self-respect if nothing else, is a gigantic shift of viewpoint, so that we can see the history of what our civilisation has really been about in the past five hundred years in its true perspective. But that, to say the least, is the theme for another article.