I'm Sorry, Sir Kenneth

Or is it Lord Clark, or Baron Clark? I gather to most people you were simply K.

10 years ago I wrote a post in this blog denouncing Kenneth Clark and his book and TV series which are both called "Civilisation." I denounced Clark as a quite horrible snob.

The problem is that I had not seen his TV series, and had only read the first half-page or so of his book and then very hastily paged through the rest. And in what I wrote I got Clark all wrong. I assumed that he was an upper-class, royalist Torie elitist, which made me wrong three out of four times: Clark's family did come from the upper part of the upper crust, but he was a lifelong supporter of Labour. And although he worked for the royal family and knew them well, he annoyed them quite a bit in a television series he made shortly before "Civilisation," which let television cameras into parts of the royal palaces where they had never been before, and in which Clark was altogether too frank and cheeky about what he saw as the foibles and failings of past rulers of Britain. As for elitism: when he was appointed director of the National Gallery in 1933 at age 30, he set about to make the museum more accessible and friendly to the general public. Later in his life he made his now-famous television shows about art because he wanted art to belong to everyone. Although he's most often associated with pre-Modern art, he was quite enthusiastic about some Moderns, such as the sculptor Henry Moore, perhaps his best friend. He opposed other members of the avant-garde of his time because he found them to be too elitist.

It's true, as he says in the beginning of the book which angered me so 10 years ago, that he largely equates civilisation with Western civilisation. I wish I had been the director of the TV series, and had been able to convince Clark to change the name of the series to "Western Civilisation," and to drop his comparisons of Western civilisation to other civilisations. I wish he hadn't said that one of the works of Western art he was showing in the series -- I don't remember which work it was, and I don't think it matters -- was "better than anything Islam had ever produced." What does such a statement accomplish, other than to lend aide and comfort to bigots, which Clark was not, and to give to more thoughtful viewers the strong suspicion that Clark's knowledge of Islamic art was far from comprehensive?

Clark was not bigoted, he was old-fashioned. He was born in 1903, and in 1969, when "Civilisation" first aired on the BBC, he had not acquired the outlook of cultural relativism which had begun to spread through the Left, and which by now is deeply ingrained in Leftists such as myself, and which caused me too so over-hastily mis-judge a fellow Leftist like Clark.

Another objection which has been made to Clark is his championing of geniuses. I do not share this objection, because I can't imagine any more than Clark could how we would get great art without geniuses.

I would urge you to see the television series, and to try to overlook Clark's occasional attempts to make art about one civilisation vs another. Although he does this right at the very start of the first show, he doesn't repeat such unpleasantness very often. Instead, the show is all about the love of a connoisseur for things of great beauty, things which happen to have been made in the Western world between the 9th century and the 20th, a connoisseur who wants to share his joy in such things with the whole world. And there's nothing at all wrong with that. On the contrary, the series is beautiful.

And K -- as everyone called him, it seems -- is quite simply loveable.

Civilisation My Arse, Sir Kenneth! [PLEASE READ THE PS!]

Kenneth Clark, 1903-1983, the art critic and historian, OM, CH, KCB, FBA -- in other words: about as upper-crusty British as one could be without actually belonging to the royal family -- probably best known, like Carl Sagan and J Bronowski, for a public-television series, in Clark's case entitled "Civilisation," and the book associated with the series, Ah say Ah say Kenneth Clark seems to have been a very nice, very charming man. I probably would've liked him if I'd ever known him, it seems that most people did. But then, would a common "unwashed" American "ethnic" person such as myself ever actually have met Clark? He may have had staff members charged primarily with the duty to see to it that such meetings never took place. He may well have spent most of his time in the company of royals, and very little time with anyone who was not titled.

Such insulation would help to explain the nature of his work. I do not like Clark's work. I do not like it in a tree, I do not like it with a bee, I do not like it with a crutch, I do not like it very much, I do not like it here or there, I do not like it anywhere, I do not like it with grape jam, I do not like it, Sam I Am! Bertrand Russell boldly asserts that the ancient Greeks invented philosophy. Whatever the Egyptians and Chinese and Indians and other were doing before Thales & Co,. it wasn't philosophy, according to Russell. I think Russell is wrong about that. Way wrong. Well, Clark goes Russell one better and asserts that the ancient Greeks invented civilisation. What is often referred to as Western civilisation is the only truly civilized state of things, according to Clark. Clark also repeats the traditional Western mistake of missing how tenuous is the connection between ancient Greek and the modern West, and not only tenuous, but very much dependent upon the links of Moslem and Byzantine culture, which kept the legacy of Greek philosophy and science and literature and art alive while the West sank into very deep and dark barbarism indeed. Islam is cited only 3 times in the index of Civilisation, China and Japan not at all, Africa only that one time at the beginning, where Clark politely puts down the civilisation represented by that African mask about which he apparently knows nothing, about which he clearly wishes to know nothing.

At this point people may want to defend Clark by saying that "Civilisation"/Civilisation is only about Western civilisation. Yes, clearly it is. But Clark could've called it Western Civilisation. He didn't. He also doesn't mention all the long list of things that the West has taken from other cultures and then claimed as its own. No, he's one of the ones ignorantly claiming them.

At the beginning of Civilization, the book and television series, Clark is in Paris, the center of his idea of civilization. He talks about how in the 9th century, Vikings -- not civilized, according to Clark -- almost captured Paris, and oh what a calamity that would've been! Then he shows a picture of an ancient Greek sculpture of Apollo, and asserts that it represents a much higher state of civilisation than an African mask. (If Clark had any idea what part of Africa the mask came from, or what it represented, or anything else about it, he kept all that info to himself.) (That is my sarcastic way of pointing out that Clark was pretty ignorant of the African culture he was disparaging in his pleasant and polite way.)

Clark asserts that civilsation is something you can feel. In, I think, a very similar way, Oswald Spengler asserts in the Untergang des Abendlandes that race is something you can feel. I don't feel what Clark or Spengler is feeling, but in both cases I feel the presence of bigotry.

Let's get back to Paris and the Vikings -- would it have been such a calamity if the Vikings had taken Paris? Would that act have threatened to extinguish civilisation, as Clark implies?

What the fuck was so civilised about Paris in the ninth century? The Carolingians were busily waging war against each other and destroying the Empire Charlemagne had established. The kings and nobles were not caring well for their peasants. The economy was still mostly barter. A lot of people starved to death. Civilisation my ass. Having the Vikings take over could've actually improved things in lots of ways. They didn't want to plunder and destroy like the Huns or the Conquistadors -- or like the Carolingians were still for the most part attempting to do, except that Charlemagne's descendants weren't nearly as good at waging war as he was, and were primarily waging futile war against each other, whereas Charlemagne at least had pacified the very large area under his control -- the Vikings wanted to rule, and they ruled pretty well, from England to Russia and lots of places in between.

In the ninth century the Vikings were still un-Christian and illiterate. I don't think the non-Christianity was a bad thing. I would agree with Clark that literacy is a good thing. However, I think it was a bad thing that the Christian Church had such a thorough monopoly on literacy in Western Europe at the time. For one thing, the contemporary accounts of encounters between Christians, such as those in and around Paris in the ninth century, and illiterate non-Christians such as the invading Vikings, were all written by Christians. Lately it has occurred to historians how one-sided such depictions were, how distorted at the expense of the non-Christians. Clark was not part of the re-assessment and correction of the traditional Western view of the world. He was a staunch traditionalist. Where the West encountered literate peoples, whether Byzantine or Arab or Copt or Syriac or Chinese or Mayan or what have you, Clark does not avail himself of the non-Western records -- well, it's very hard for anyone to avail themselves of the Mayan records, since the Conquistadors burnt almost all the Mayan books and killed all the Mayans who could read them. Oops! -- and does not seem to be the slightest bit interested in the possibility that his traditional, pro-Western view of the world could be wrong.

It is wrong. Way, way wrong. It wouldn't have been cutting-edge in the 18th century, let alone the 20th.

PS, 26 October, 2019: This post is completely wrong. Clark was the opposite of a snob. I should have read past the first half-page before shooting my mouth off. I'm sorry.