CHRONOLOGICAL SNOBBERY STRIKES AGAIN AT THE BBC: Acclaimed BBC series Civilisation is given a warning over outdated attitudes.
Lord [Kenneth] Clark’s 1969 television series Civilisation has been given a warning note by the BBC for reflecting the “standards and attitudes” of its time.
The art historian’s groundbreaking series is being broadcast by the BBC for the first time in more than a decade.
The broadcaster has said that it may be forced to edit such programmes to align with its current editorial standards but it has not done so for Civilisation.
However, as well as adding the note, the corporation has released a video in which Dame Mary Beard critiques the principally “European story” told in Civilisation. The historian has previously criticised the series in print for its omission of female historical figures.
Beard really seems to have it in for Clark’s landmark series, which was created in 1969 to highlight the BBC then-recent switch to color broadcasts. In 2018, Andrew Ferguson recorded “The End of ‘Civilisation’” for the late, lamented Weekly Standard. Note this passage:
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.
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. Its successor culture continually demonstrates what C.S. Lewis called “chronological snobbery,” which is particularly alive and well at the Beeb:
It is defined as the belief that ‘the thinking, art, or science of an earlier time is inherently inferior to that of the present, simply by virtue of its temporal priority or the belief that since civilization has advanced in certain areas, people of earlier time periods were less intelligent.’ If we add, ‘and therefore wrong and also racist’ to this definition, we would have a perfect definition of today’s SJWs. Historian Larry Taunton defines it as ‘imposing the mores of our own time on those who lived in another.’
As Ferguson wrote, from the title onward, the BBC’s sequel, Civilisations (note the title was of course, switched to 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 who attempted a would-be successor 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.”