One of the hallmarks of Civilization is its absence of chatter. Clark is a gracious historical guide, but he does not go in for small talk. He is genial but also serious. An abundance of glorious music often commandeers the audio. Clark says his piece and then lets the camera pan slowly over the art, architecture, and landscapes he has assembled for our enjoyment and edification. “Throughout,” as one reviewer noted, the show “maintains a majestically slow pace. Luxuriously long moments where the visuals are completely unencumbered by any commentary whatsoever.”
Prominent in his first episode is Skellig Michael, the craggy, windswept island off the southwestern coast of Ireland. Named for St. Michael the Archangel, it was there, between the sixth and eighth centuries, that Gaelic monks took up residence and helped preserve the guttering embers of Western culture against the rising tide of barbarian invasion. The fragility of that culture is a leitmotif of Civilization. The first episode is titled “The Skin of Our Teeth.” It was by such a slender margin that those monks and a few other scattered groups managed to preserve the intellectual deposit of the West.
All the artists Clark names in his wide-ranging tour are male. Most if not all are white. Are these things deficiencies? Today’s BBC clearly thinks so. When they broadcast its successor in 2018, they were studiously multicultural and accommodating to feminist sensibilities. One of the three presenters is female. Another hails from Nigeria. When the current King Charles was still Prince of Wales, he said that he looked forward to being “Defender of the Faiths,” plural, unlike those fuddy-duddies of yore who styled themselves Defender of the Faith, singular. By the same token, the successor to Clark’s program was called Civilizations, plural, to show that no special claims were being made for the West.
The original Civilization was pitched at a high level. It was also meticulously accessible. The treasures Clark toured were allowed to speak for themselves, and so speak they did. The elites didn’t much like Civilization, partly because they found it insufficiently multicultural, partly because they objected to Clark’s unstudied air of competence and cultural mastery.
But Civilization is a good example of what it might look like to restore culture in an age that has abandoned common sense. If it seems old-fashioned and out-of-date to a generation weaned on social media, special effects, and incessant lectures about the evils of capitalism and the West, that tells us more about the quality of our times than it does about Clark’s achievement in this series.
Something similar can be said about Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts. Bernstein began the concerts in 1958, just two weeks after he took the helm of the New York Philharmonic. These marvelous concerts—with commentary by Bernstein—aired on television, first in black and white and then in color, until 1972. Bernstein organized each concert around a theme—the meaning of music, musical modes, orchestration—drawing on the orchestra’s current programming for suitable illustrations. In 2005, a new nine-disc selection of the concerts was released, some 25 hours of music and commentary.
As with Clark’s Civilization, there was no small talk. The music was central. Bernstein not only introduced a new audience to classical music. He also introduced a number of fledgling musicians to their future audiences. The pianist André Watts was just 16 when he made his debut in 1963 at one of the concerts.
Unexpectedly, the Young People’s Concerts were a huge popular success, in Europe and Asia as well as in the U.S. For three years, CBS broadcast the concerts during prime time on Saturdays and the series eventually garnered more than 20 million viewers. Parents scrambled to sign up their newborns for concert tickets a few years down the road. Despite Bernstein’s success as a conductor and composer, some commentators judge this long-running concert series to be his greatest musical achievement. He might have agreed. Looking back on the concerts years later, he said they were “among my favorite, most highly prized activities of my life.”
One can point to other triumphs of cultural common sense from the recent annals of American history. The Book of the Month Club, brainchild of the ad man Harry Scherman, debuted in 1926. Beginning with 4,000 subscribers, the operation grew to nearly 900,000 by 1946. But the club was as much an educational success as a commercial one. As described by Scherman, the club “establishe[d] itself as a sound selector of good books and [sold them] by means of its own prestige.” This was true. Subscribers were introduced to novels by Ernest Hemingway, Margaret Mitchell, J. D. Salinger, and John Steinbeck, and histories by Barbara Tuchman and William Shirer. Bertrand Russell’s History of Philosophy was a Book of the Month Club Selection, as were two big books by the philosopher George Santayana.
The point is that all these initiatives bore witness to a culture at one with itself. It was a culture innocent of the self-loathing that has been such a disfiguring feature of elite American culture since the 1960s. From our perspective in early 2025, it is a culture of common sense—affirmative, forward-looking, and normal.
Throughout Civilization, Kenneth Clark hailed “energy” and “confidence” as hallmarks of a vibrant civilization. In his last episode, he identified “lack of confidence, more than anything else,” as that which “kills a civilization.”
The spectacle of Donald Trump’s boundless energy, and the energy he calls forth from others, is heartening. Among other things, it makes us appreciate how his “revolution of common sense” might not only spark a political restoration, but also a new cultural golden age.
And that, my friends, is the latest elephant in the room.
Roger Kimball is Editor of The New Criterion as well as President and Publisher of Encounter Books.
