From Civilisation,
the illustrated companion book to Lord Kenneth Clark's 1969 BBC documentary of the same name:
What is civilization? I don’t know. I can’t define it in abstract
terms—yet. But I think I can recognize it when I see it, and I am looking at it
now [Paris].
… At certain epochs
man has felt conscious of something about himself—body and spirit—which was
outside the day-to-day struggle for existence and the night-to-night struggle
with fear; and he has felt the need to develop these qualities of thought and
feeling so that they might approach as nearly as possible to an ideal of
perfection—reason, justice, physical beauty, all of them in equilibrium. He has
managed to satisfy this need in various ways—through myths, through dance and
song, through systems of philosophy and through the order that he has imposed
on the visible world. … However complex and solid [civilization] seems, it is
actually quite fragile. It can be destroyed. What are its enemies? Well, first
of all fear—far of war, fear of invasion, fear of plague and famine, that makes
it simply not worthwhile constructing things, or planting trees or even
planting next year’s crops. And fear of the supernatural, which means that you
daren’t question anything or change anything. The late antique world was full
of meaningless rituals, mystery religions, that destroyed self-confidence. And
then exhaustion, the feeling of hopelessness which can overtake people even
with a high degree of prosperity. There is a poem by the modern Greek poet,
Cavafy, in which he imagines the people of an antique town like Alexandria waiting every
day for the barbarians to come and sack the city. Finally the barbarians move
off somewhere else and the city is saved; but the people are disappointed; it
would have been better than nothing. Of course, civilization requires a modicum
of material prosperity—enough to provide a little leisure. But, far more, it
requires confidence—confidence in the society in which one lives, belief in its
philosophy, belief in its laws, and confidence in one’s own mental powers. …
People sometimes think that civilization consists in fine sensibilities and
good conversation and all that. These can be among the agreeable results of civilization, but they are
not what make a civilization, and a society can have these amenities and yet be
dead and rigid. So if one asks why the civilization of Greece and Rome
collapsed, the real answer is that it was exhausted. And the first invaders of
the Roman empire became exhausted too. As so
often happens, they seem to have succumbed to the same weakness as the people
they conquered. … These early invaders have been aptly compared to the English
in India in the eighteenth century—there for what they could get out of it,
taking part in the administration if it paid them, contemptuous of the
traditional culture, except insofar as it provided precious metals…
Civilization means something more than energy and will and creative power:
something the early Norsemen hadn’t got, but which, even in their time, was
beginning to reappear in Western Europe. How
can I define it? Well, very shortly, a sense of permanence. (Civilisation;
pp.1-14)
From The Master
, Volume 5 of Leon Edel's towering biography, Henry James: A Life:
New York
had created not a social order but an extemporized utility-life that
substituted the glamour of technology for the deep-rooted foundations of
existence. … Man could create so blindly and so crudely the foundations of
inevitable ‘blight.’ … Civilization meant order, composition, restraint, moderation,
beauty, duration. It meant creation of a way of life that ministered to man’s
finest qualities and potential. Using this standard of measurement, James found
America
terribly wanting. It was founded on violence, plunder, loot, commerce; its
monuments were built neither for beauty nor for glory, but for obsolescence. It
put science and technology to the service of the profit motive, and this would
lead to the decay of human forms and human values. Older nations had known how
to rise above shopkeeping; they had not made a cult of ‘business’ and of
‘success.’ And then James hated the continental ‘bigness’ of America.
Homogeneity, rootedness, manners—modes of life—these were his materials, and
everywhere James looked he found there had been an erosion of the standards and
forms necessary to a novelist, necessary also to civilization. The
self-indulgence and self-advertisement of the plunderers was carried over to
the indulging of their young. Americans had interpreted freedom as a license to
plunder.
(The
Master: Henry James, Vol.5, pp.291-317)
