Arkady
President
I recently re-watched a documentary series called "Civilisation," by Kenneth Clark. It's a BBC series from 1969, mostly about European art history from the early middle ages through the early 20th century. It also spawned a companion book that had been one of my favorites in high school.
When I was young I was politically conservative and really grooved on Clark's vision of civilization, which was focused on the value of the western cultural tradition. I recalled one section from the book that had compared an ancient Greek statue (the Apollo of the Belvedere) to an African mask -- vastly different works of art which each represented messengers from another world. Clark had said there was no doubt to him that the Apollo embodied a higher state of civilization than the mask. That "to the negro imagination" the world was a place of fear and darkness, where the spirits were enforcers of harsh taboos, whereas to the Hellenistic imagination it was a place of light and confidence, in which the gods were merely more beautiful and harmonious versions of ourselves.
At the time, that vision resonated with my conservatism, but in retrospect it sounds chauvinistic if not downright racist. So, I wondered what I'd think of the series now, three decades wiser, with dramatically different politics. To my surprise, the series held up very well. Sure, some of the language and prejudices of Clark were already outmoded by 1969, when the man was in his sixties and representing a fading pre-war British mindset. Viewed from 2017, a little of the series was painfully embarrassing. But only a little. Most of the time, his evangelism for western culture comes across as appropriately nuanced and open-minded. His chauvinism was cultural, not racial -- to him, Northern Europe in the viking age represented essentially the same mental landscape as tribal Africa: artistically vibrant, but formed around a core of fear and ignorance that made it differ fundamentally from the heights of civilization.
By the end of the series, I found myself quite liking Clark, all over again, despite him being a self-described stick-in-the-mud. It reminded me of what had drawn me to a certain brand of conservatism in the first place. His was not a nakedly capitalist conservatism -- a worship of the brutal forces of the market. Quite the opposite. He was deeply suspicious of those forces. It certainly wasn't the bible-thumping bigotry of the American Deep South, either. He celebrated the "smile of reason" of men like Voltaire who stood up to the Bible-thumpers of their time. Rather, his was a conservatism that valued deep learning, expansive thinking, tradition, manners, and self-discipline. It was the same conservative impulse that motivated a young William F. Buckley, who didn't just defend the ramparts of old-school Brahman values against liberal onslaughts, but even more forcefully against the likes of Ayn Rand's nihilism and the small-minded hatreds of the John Birchers.
The last episode of Civilisation is very much in that vein. The episode deals with the modern era (modern to 1969 Clark). And the fascinating thing to me now, with a much better sense of history than I had when I first encountered the series in high school, is that Clark's sympathies lie more with the young students of his era than with the "heroic materialists" of the economic elite. He was living through some revolutionary times, but he was hopeful about those revolutionary youngsters. His was a conservatism that would have fit well with someone like Tolkien or CS Lewis -- stuffy Oxford dons who might sniff at the fashions of the day and at people calling their parents by their first names, but who are more deeply troubled by the march of industrialization, and the stripping away of all value systems other than crass commercialism. That's a brand of conservatism that still resonates with me. I like a certain "pipe tobacco" conservatism -- fusty old academics quoting long-dead white dudes, but, at the end of the day, taking very seriously new insights, as well. It's tweedy, thoughtful conservatism, that yields to liberalism, perhaps a bit reluctantly, when liberalism is right. It is the polar opposite of the anti-intellectual conservatism that has come to dominate in the US in the last few decades.
That's what I find so frustrating about the modern American conservative movement. It rejects what was decent about that older form of conservatism, while keeping its colonialism, sexism, and racism, and combining that with nasty bits of other earlier ideologies -- the xenophobia and contempt for learning of the Know Nothings, the mindless doctrines of religious zealots, and the nihilistic materialism of the objectivists. It has become a doctrine for shallow-minded and hateful people.
When I was young I was politically conservative and really grooved on Clark's vision of civilization, which was focused on the value of the western cultural tradition. I recalled one section from the book that had compared an ancient Greek statue (the Apollo of the Belvedere) to an African mask -- vastly different works of art which each represented messengers from another world. Clark had said there was no doubt to him that the Apollo embodied a higher state of civilization than the mask. That "to the negro imagination" the world was a place of fear and darkness, where the spirits were enforcers of harsh taboos, whereas to the Hellenistic imagination it was a place of light and confidence, in which the gods were merely more beautiful and harmonious versions of ourselves.
At the time, that vision resonated with my conservatism, but in retrospect it sounds chauvinistic if not downright racist. So, I wondered what I'd think of the series now, three decades wiser, with dramatically different politics. To my surprise, the series held up very well. Sure, some of the language and prejudices of Clark were already outmoded by 1969, when the man was in his sixties and representing a fading pre-war British mindset. Viewed from 2017, a little of the series was painfully embarrassing. But only a little. Most of the time, his evangelism for western culture comes across as appropriately nuanced and open-minded. His chauvinism was cultural, not racial -- to him, Northern Europe in the viking age represented essentially the same mental landscape as tribal Africa: artistically vibrant, but formed around a core of fear and ignorance that made it differ fundamentally from the heights of civilization.
By the end of the series, I found myself quite liking Clark, all over again, despite him being a self-described stick-in-the-mud. It reminded me of what had drawn me to a certain brand of conservatism in the first place. His was not a nakedly capitalist conservatism -- a worship of the brutal forces of the market. Quite the opposite. He was deeply suspicious of those forces. It certainly wasn't the bible-thumping bigotry of the American Deep South, either. He celebrated the "smile of reason" of men like Voltaire who stood up to the Bible-thumpers of their time. Rather, his was a conservatism that valued deep learning, expansive thinking, tradition, manners, and self-discipline. It was the same conservative impulse that motivated a young William F. Buckley, who didn't just defend the ramparts of old-school Brahman values against liberal onslaughts, but even more forcefully against the likes of Ayn Rand's nihilism and the small-minded hatreds of the John Birchers.
The last episode of Civilisation is very much in that vein. The episode deals with the modern era (modern to 1969 Clark). And the fascinating thing to me now, with a much better sense of history than I had when I first encountered the series in high school, is that Clark's sympathies lie more with the young students of his era than with the "heroic materialists" of the economic elite. He was living through some revolutionary times, but he was hopeful about those revolutionary youngsters. His was a conservatism that would have fit well with someone like Tolkien or CS Lewis -- stuffy Oxford dons who might sniff at the fashions of the day and at people calling their parents by their first names, but who are more deeply troubled by the march of industrialization, and the stripping away of all value systems other than crass commercialism. That's a brand of conservatism that still resonates with me. I like a certain "pipe tobacco" conservatism -- fusty old academics quoting long-dead white dudes, but, at the end of the day, taking very seriously new insights, as well. It's tweedy, thoughtful conservatism, that yields to liberalism, perhaps a bit reluctantly, when liberalism is right. It is the polar opposite of the anti-intellectual conservatism that has come to dominate in the US in the last few decades.
That's what I find so frustrating about the modern American conservative movement. It rejects what was decent about that older form of conservatism, while keeping its colonialism, sexism, and racism, and combining that with nasty bits of other earlier ideologies -- the xenophobia and contempt for learning of the Know Nothings, the mindless doctrines of religious zealots, and the nihilistic materialism of the objectivists. It has become a doctrine for shallow-minded and hateful people.
