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Word Gems
exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity
Kenneth Clark's Civilisation
Chapter 13
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Imagine an immensely speeded up movie of Manhattan Island during the last hundred years. It would look less like a work of man than like some tremendous natural upheaval.
It's godless, it's brutal, it's violent -- but one can't laugh it off, because in the energy, strength of will and mental grasp that have gone to make New York, materialism has transcended itself...
It took almost the same time [for New York] to reach its present condition as it did to complete the Gothic cathedrals ... [which] were built to the glory of God, [but] New York was built to the glory of mammon...
... at a distance it does look like a celestial city. At a distance...
I have heard it said by people who want to seem clever that civilisation can exist only on a basis of slavery... they point to [ancient] Greece. If one defines civilisation in terms of leisure and superfluity, there is a grain of truth in this repulsive doctrine.
I have tried throughout this series to define civilisation in terms of creative power and the enlargement of human faculties; and from that point of view slavery is abominable. So, for that matter, is abject poverty. Throughout the ages of human achievement which I have been discussing, the mass of voiceless people have had a hard time. Poverty, hunger, plagues, disease: these were the background of history right up to the end of the nineteenth century, and most people regarded them as inevitable -- like bad weather...
So the anti-slavery movement became the first communal expression of the awakened conscience. It took a long time to succeed. There were huge vested interests involved...
Engels' book is presented as documentation, but is in fact the passionate cry of a young social worker, and as such it provided, and has continued to provide, the emotional dynamo of Marxism. Marx read Engles -- I don't know who else did: that was enough. Everybody read Dickens. No living author has ever been more hysterically beloved by a larger cross-section of the community.
His novels produced reform in the law, in magistrates' courts, in the prevention of public hanging -- in a dozen directions. But his terrible descriptions of poverty had very little practical effect: partly because the problem was too big...
Ask any decent person in England or America what he thinks matters most in human conduct: five to one his answer will be "kindness." It's not a word that would have crossed the lips of the earlier heroes of this series.
If you had asked St. Francis what mattered most in life, he would, we know, have answered "chastity, obedience and poverty";
if you had asked Dante or Michelangelo they might have answered "disdain of baseness and injustice";
if you had asked Goethe, he would have said "to live in the whole and the beautiful."
But kindness, never...
At this point I reveal myself in my true colours... I hold a number of beliefs that have been repudiated by the liveliest intellects of our time.
I believe that order is better than chaos, creation better than destruction. I prefer gentleness to violence, forgiveness to vendetta...
I believe that in spite of the recent triumphs of science, men haven't changed much in the last two thousand years; and in consequence we must still try to learn from history.
I said at the beginning that it is a lack of confidence, more than anything else, that kills civilisation. We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs.
Fifty years ago W. B. Yeats wrote...
"... the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity."
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... The moral and intellectual failure of Marxism has left us with no alternative to heroic materialism, and that isn't enough. One may be optimistic, but one can't exactly be joyful at the prospect before us.
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