Some readers may remember Sir Kenneth Clark who hosted a groundbreaking 1969 TV series called Civilization. The series was so well-received that Clark was made a baron, so he's more accurately known as Lord Clark.
I adored those Kenneth Clark videos and still have them on DVD as part of my archives. Meanwhile, Michael Wood soon became one of my favs around the time I graduated with my PhD. Before moving back to Toronto, I mined the Ottawa Public Library for two years, watching every travel and educational VHS tape I could get my hands on.
Michael Wood was someone with class who saw a bigger picture and wasn't dreadfully uninspiring like some religion, philosophy and culture professors I had the displeasure of knowing.
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| Michael Wood circa 1992 |
Things have changed a lot since then (the close of the 20th century). Nowadays I've turned into a soundbite pinhead like everyone else and tend to like history videos that get to the point—fast. Or I learn through drama like The Sopranos or The White Lotus those things I never really considered as a naive and innocent grad student.
All that aside, Michael Wood, seen here just before the first Iraq war, spoke to me the other day. Occasionally I've questioned our current assumptions about democracy, socialism, and yes, even oligarchy (before you freak out on me, recall that Plato did too). I think it's healthy to question. It makes us more flexible and ready to face whatever comes... even if something wicked this way comes.
Here's the opening transcript of the video. Again, this was filmed back in the early 1990s when practically nobody questioned the 'virtues' of the West and our supposedly spotless democracy. Yet now we're seeing not just America's but all of humanity's true colors... basically, I care if it hurts me. Otherwise, I'll turn a blind eye and survive.
Will the future come out a rainbow or a murky mess? Are things going down the drain or are these just humanity's growing pains?
I'm not sure. What do you think?
Transcript
(00:00) We humans have been on the earth for more than a million years but civilization - life in cities - has come about only in the last 5,000. Through history, civilizations rose and fell, carved out of nature, dependent on nature---in the end nature took them back. But in the past few hundred years, one form of civilization, that of the
(00:30) West has changed the balance with nature forever. And now it is civilization itself which has become the central problem of our planet. To understand why we must look afresh at how we see history. In our time at the end of the 20th century, many people in the west speak as if the future course of history has been
(01:11) settled. People talk of the Triumph of the West, of the victory of liberal democracy and the free market and even of the end of History. The questions which have concerned humanity for so long: What is society for? How should it be organized? What are human rights and freedoms and how do they relate to Nature and to the spiritual? These
(01:32) questions about the goals of life it is said have now been settled in favor of the values of the West. But there have been and there still are civilizations which have seen the world very differently. Civilization arose independently in a handful of places on the face of the Earth---in Iraq, Egypt, India, China and here in the jungles of
(01:58) the Americas. And the oldest and greatest of those, India and China, are still alive in the land of their birth and each of those civilizations created a unique and distinctive vision of Life which forms a vital counterpoint to that of the West.
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