All language subtitles for Civilisation.13of13.Heroic.Materialism.720p.BluRay.YIFY

(MUSIC) WILLIAM WALTON:
Symphony In B Flat Minor

Dorothy Wordsworth said about the view
of London from Westminster Bridge,

that "It was like one of Nature's
own grand spectacles."

Well, nature is violent and brutal

and there's nothing we can do about it.

But New York?
After all, New York was made by men.

It took almost the same time
to reach its present condition

as it did to complete the Gothic cathedrals.

At which point, a very obvious, reflection
crosses one's mind

that the cathedrals were built to the glory of God,
New York was built to the glory of mammon,

money, gain,

the new god of the 19th century.

So many of the same human ingredients
have gone into its construction

that, at a distance
it does look rather like a celestial city.

At a distance.

Come closer and it's not so good.

(MUSIC) WILLIAM WALTON:
Symphony In B Flat Minor

Behind this grim uniformity
lurks an even grimmer poverty

and problems that seem almost insoluble.

One sees why heroic materialism
is still linked with an uneasy conscience.

It has been from the start.

I mean, that, historically,

the first discovery and exploitation of those
technical means which made New York possible

coincided exactly with the first
organised attempt to improve the human lot.

The first large iron foundries in England,

like the Carron Works or Coalbrookdale

date from round about 1780.

Howard's book on penal reform
was published in 1777

and Clarkson's Essay On Slavery in 1786.

Clarkson laid the foundations
of the antislavery movement

and painstakingly discovered
all the horrifying evidence.

The political side was the life, work
of William Wilberforce

in whose house in Hull I'm now standing.

I've often heard it said
by people who want to seem clever,

that "Civilisation can exist only
on a basis of slavery"

and, in support of their thesis,

they point to the examples of 5th-century
Greece, or of the antique world in general.

If one defines civilisation
in terms of leisure and superfluity,

there is a grain of truth in this repulsive doctrine,

but I have tried throughout this series

to define civilisation in terms of creative power
and the enlargement of human faculties,

and from that point of view,
slavery is abominable.

Well, so, for that matter, is abject poverty.

Poverty, hunger, plagues, disease,

they were the background of history
right up to the end of the 19th century,

and most people regarded them as inevitable,
like bad weather.

Nobody thought they could be cured.

All that was required
was an occasional act of charity.

This pretty scene is entitled Rustic Charity

and under it are written the lines

"Here, poor boy without a coat,
take this ha'penny."

Not an indication of very serious concern.

But slaves and the trade in slaves
that was something different.

It was esoteric.

It wasn't something that surrounded one
like the air, as homemade poverty did,

and the horrors it involved
were far more horrible.

Even the unsqueamish stomachs
of the 18th century

were turned by accounts
of "the middle passage".

(Creaking timbers)

This is one of the irons
used for branding the slaves

on chest and back with the proprietor's initials.

This is the actual model of a slave ship,

which Wilberforce produced
in the House of Commons

to show how the slaves were crammed together.

It's reckoned that over nine million slaves

died from heat and suffocation
in those holds on the way to America.

A remarkable figure, even by modern standards.

The antislavery movement

became the first communal expression
of the awakened conscience

but it took a long time to succeed.

The trade was prohibited in 1807

and, as Wilberforce lay dying in 1835,

slavery itself was abolished.

Well, one must regard this
as a step forward for the human race,

and be proud, I think,
that it happened in England.

But not too proud.

The Victorians were very smug about it

and they chose to avert their eyes

from something almost equally horrible
that was happening to their own countrymen.

England had entered the war against Napoleon

in the first triumphant consciousness
of its new industrial powers.

After 20 years, England was victorious,

but, by failing to control
her industrial development,

she'd suffered a defeat, in terms of human life

far more costly than any military disaster.

I needn't remind you of how cruelly

the Industrial Revolution degraded and exploited
a mass of people for 60 or70 years.

After about 1790

there appeared the large foundries and mills,

which dehumanised life.

Arkwright's spinning frame,
invented in about 1770

is always quoted as the beginning
of mass production. On the whole, rightly.

There he is, faithfully recorded for us
by Wright of Derby,

typical of the new man who was to dominate
industry until the present day.

He and his like gave England a flying start
in the economy of the 19th century,

but the result of their inventions
was a dehumanisation

that obsessed almost every great
imaginative writer of the time.

From the start, poets had recognised
the nature of the "satanic" mills.

Robert Burns
passing the Carron Iron Works in 1787,

scratched these lines on a windowpane.

"We cam na here to view your works,

In hopes to be mair wise,

But only, lest we gang to hell,

It may be nae surprise."

This new religion of gain
had behind it a body of doctrine,

without which it could never have maintained
its authority over the serious-minded Victorians.

Its sacred books

the works of Malthus on population

and Ricardo on economics

were taken as gospels by pious men,

who used them to justify actions

they would never have thought of defending
on human grounds.

Hypocrisy?

Well, hypocrisy has always existed.

Where would the great comic writers have been
without it, from Moliere downwards?

But in the 19th century,

with its insecure middle class
dependent on an inhuman economic system,

there was mass hypocrisy
on an unprecedented scale.

For the last 40 years or so,

the word "hypocrisy" has been a sort of label
attached to the 19th century,

just as "frivolity" was attached to the 18th century
and with about as much reason.

The reaction against it continues.

Although it is a good thing
to have cleared the air

I think that the reaction has done harm

by bringing into discredit all professions of virtue.

The very words "pious", "respectable", "worthy"
have become joke words, used only ironically.

Much as one hates the inhuman way
in which the doctrines of Malthus were accepted,

the terrible truth is

that the rise of population did nearly ruin us.

It struck a blow at civilisation more ominous
than anything since the barbarian invasions.

First, it produced the horrors of urban poverty

and then the dismal countermeasures
of bureaucracy and regimentation.

It must have seemed, may still seem, insoluble.

Yet this doesn't excuse the callousness

with which prosperous people
ignored the conditions of life among the poor

on which, to a large extent,
their prosperity depended.

And this in spite of the most detailed
and eloquent descriptions

that were available to them.

I need mention only two:

Engels's Conditions Of The Working Class,
written in 1844

and the novels written by Dickens

between 1838 and 1854

between Nicholas Nickleby and Hard Times.

Engels's book is presented as documentation,

but it is, in fact
the passionate cry of a young' social worker

and, as such, it provided
and has continued to provide,

the emotional dynamo of Marxism.

Marx read Engels.

I don't know who else did. That was enough.

But everybody read Dickens.

The pictures you're looking at
are by the French artist Gustave Dor�,

whose illustrated books on London
appeared in 1872.

You see, things hadn't changed much
since the '40s.

Perhaps it took an outsider
to see London as it really was,

and it needed someone
of Dor�'s marvellous graphic skill

to make this great slice
of human misery credible.

I think that Dickens did more than anyone
to diffuse an awakened conscience

but one mustn't forget the practical reformers
who preceded him.

At the beginning of the period,
the Quaker, Elizabeth Fry,

who, in an earlier age,
would certainly have been canonised,

because her spiritual influence on the prisoners
of Newgate was really a miracle.

And in the middle of the century,
Lord Shaftesbury,

whose long struggle to prevent the exploitation
of children in factories

puts him next to Wilberforce,
in the history of humanitarianism.

It's an almost incredible fact

that, in the middle of the 19th century,
there was no children's hospital in London

and children weren't taken into ordinary
hospitals for fear that they might be infectious.

Shaftesbury was one of the founders
of the Hospital For Sick Children.

Dickens helped to raise the money for it.

There is its first ward in Great Ormond Street.

Here is its successor today.

And, as I look at it

I'm more than ever convinced
that humanitarianism

was the great achievement of the 19th century.

We're so much accustomed
to the humanitarian outlook

that we forget how little it counted
in earlier ages of civilisation.

Ask any decent person
in England or America today

what he think matters most in human conduct

five to one, his answer will be "kindness".

It's not a word that would have crossed the lips
of any of the earlier heroes of this series.

If you'd asked St Francis what mattered in life,
he would, we know, have answered

"Chastity, obedience and poverty."

If you'd asked Dante or Michelangelo,
they might have answered,

"Disdain of baseness and injustice."

But kindness? Never.

Nowadays, I think we underestimate the
humanitarian achievement of the 19th century.

We forget the horrors that were taken
for granted in early Victorian England.

The hundreds of lashes

inflicted daily on perfectly harmless men
in the Army and Navy.

The women chained together in threes,

rumbling through the streets in open carts,
on their way to transportation.

These and other
even more unspeakable cruelties

were carried out by agents of the establishment,
usually in defence of property.

Some philosophers tell us that humanitarianism

is "a weak, sloppy,

self-indulgent condition,

spiritually much inferior to cruelty and violence".

This point has been eagerly accepted
by novelists,

dramatists and theatrical producers.

Of course, it's true that kindness is
to some extent, the offspring of materialism

and this has made antimaterialists
look at it with contempt,

at the product of what the German philosopher
Nietzsche called "a slave morality".

He would certainly have preferred
the other aspect of my subject,

the heroic self-confidence of the men
for whom nothing was impossible,

the men who forced
the first railways over England.

(Whistle)

(MUSIC) JOHANN STRAUSS:
Tales From The Vienna Woods, "Bahn Frei"

The railway engine created a situation
that was really new,

a new basis of unity,
a new concept of space,

a situation that is still developing.

The 20 years after Stephenson's Rocket
had made its momentous journey

along the Manchester-Liverpool railway

were like a great military campaign.

The will, the courage, the ruthlessness,

the unexpected defeats,

the unforeseen victories.

The Irish navvies who had built the railway
were like a "grande arm�e",

ruffians, who yet had a kind of pride
in their achievement.

(MUSIC) Tales From The Vienna Woods

Their marshals were the engineers.

The strongest creative impulse of the time
didn't go into architecture, but into engineering,

partly because, at this date,

it was only in engineering
that men could make full use of the new material

that was going to transform
the art of building - iron.

The first iron bridge in the world was built
at Coalbrookdale in Shropshire in 1779.

Almost archaic.

By 1820, Telford could build the Menai Bridge,
the first great suspension bridge,

an idea that combines beauty
and function so perfectly

that it's hardly been varied, only expanded,
down to the present day.

Here's the Clifton Bridge, begun in 1836,
although not completed till long after,

still one of the most beautiful
suspension bridges in the world.

It was designed by a man who deserves to, rank
with the earlier heroes in this series

Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

He was a born romantic.

Although the son of a distinguished engineer,

brought up in a business
that depended on sound calculations,

he remained, all his life
in love with the impossible.

In fact, as a boy, he fell heir to a project
which he himself believed to be impossible,

his father's plan for the construction
of a tunnel under the Thames.

At 20, his father put him in charge of the work

and thus began the sequence of triumphs and
disasters that were to mark his whole career.

Here's one of the triumphs.

A grand dinner held in the tunnel
when it was halfway across.

On the left, Father Brunel congratulating his son.

Behind them, a table full of notables.

It's typical of Brunel
that, in the next bay of the tunnel,

there was an equally grand dinner
for 150 of his miners.

Two months later, the shield collapsed
and the water poured in for the third time.

In the end, the tunnel was completed.

That was the way with Brunel's designs.

They were so bold that shareholders
were frightened and withdrew,

sometimes, I'm bound to say, with reason.

But one thing he did push through and complete
and that was the Great Western Railway.

Every bridge, every tunnel was a drama,

demanding incredible feats of imagination,
energy and persuasion

and producing works of great splendour.

The greatest drama of all was the Box Tunnel,

two miles long, on a gradient,
half of it through rock,

which Brunel, against all advice,
left unprotected.

How on earth did they do it?

By men with pickaxes, working by torch light,

and horses to pull away the debris.

There were floods, collapses.

It cost the lives of over 100 men.

But, in 1841

a train steamed through

and from that day forward, for over a century,

every small boy dreamt of becoming
an engine driver.

Brunel, by his dreams,

no less than by his practical application
of engineering techniques,

is the ancestor of New York.

And, I must say, he looks it.

There he is, complete with cigar,

the first hero in this series
of whom we have a photograph.

He's standing in front of the chains
used in launching,

or rather in failing to launch,

his vast steamship, the Great Eastern.

This was his most grandiose dream.

The first steamship to cross the Atlantic in 1838
had been only 700 tons.

Brunel's Great Eastern was to be 24,000 tons

a floating palace.

The amazing thing is that he got it built at all,

but, no doubt
he had taken too big a leap forward.

Although the Great Eastern ultimately floated
and crossed the Atlantic

the delays and disasters it had involved
killed its designer.

But the transatlantic liner was one more way

in which the 19th century
created its new world of shape,

its architecture.

"The shapes arise",

said Walt Whitman, writing in the 1860s,

"Shapes of factories, arsenals,
foundries, markets;

Shapes of the two-threaded tracks of railroads;

Shapes of the sleepers of bridges,

vast frameworks, girders, arches."

This is our own style,
which expresses our own age,

as the baroque expressed the 17th century,

and it's the result of 100 years of engineering.

It's a new creation, but it's related to the past

by one of the chief continuous traditions
of the Western mind

the tradition of mathematics.

In the middle of the 19th century, it might well
have looked as if art that set out to be artistic

had much better all be scrapped.

Think of the Great Exhibition of 1851.

It was contained in a building,
the so-called Crystal Palace,

but was a piece of pure engineering
on Brunel's principles,

and, in fact, greatly admired by him.

Dateless and impressive,
in a somewhat joyless style,

but inside this piece of engineering was art.

Well, funny things happen in the history of taste,

but I doubt very much if many of these objects
will ever come back into favour

the reason being that they are a giant spoof,

not responding to anything new

or controlled by any stylistic impulse.

But in France

at exactly the same time,

there emerged two painters

whose social realism
was in the centre of the European tradition,

Jean Fran�ois Millet and Gustave Courbet.

They were both revolutionaries.

In 1848, Millet was probably a Communist,

although when his work became fashionable,

the evidence for this was rather hushed up.

Courbet remained a rebel

and was put in prison for his part
in the Commune, very nearly executed.

In 1849, he painted a picture
of a stone-breaker

Alas, destroyed in Dresden during the last war.

He intended it as a straightforward record
of an old neighbour,

but it was seen by a Communist friend,

who told him that it was the first great monument
to the workers, et cetera, et cetera.

Courbet was delighted by this idea

and said that the people of Ornans wanted
to hang it over the altar in the local church.

This, if it were true, which I very much doubt,

would have been the beginning
of its status as an "objet de culte",

which it has retained to the present day.

It's the indispensable picture
to all Marxist art historians.

The following year, Courbet painted
an even more impressive example

of his sympathy with ordinary people,

his enormous picture of a funeral
in his native town of Ornans.

By abandoning all pictorial artifice,

which must inevitably involve
a certain amount of hierarchy and subordination

and standing his figures in a row,

Courbet achieves a feeling of equality
in the presence of death.

How seriously he's accepted
the truth of each head.

But I mustn't leave you with the notion

that the relationship between art and society
is as simple and predictable as this.

A pseudo-Marxist approach works fairly well
for the decorative arts

and for mediocrities.

But artists of real talent
always seem to slip through the net

and swim away in the opposite direction.

I'm standing in front of
one of the greatest pictures of the 19th century,

Seurat's Baignade in the National Gallery.

Although it contains factory chimneys

and a bowler hat and proletarian boot tabs,

it would be absurd to speak of it
as a piece of social realism.

The point of the picture is not its subject,

but the way in which it unites the monumental
stillness of a Renaissance fresco

with the vibrating light of the Impressionists.

It's the creation of an artist

independent of social pressures.

All the greatest pictures of the late-19th century

are quite different in subject and mood
from what one might expect.

And, before one makes gloomy generalisations
about the period,

the miseries of the workers
the oppressive luxury of the rich and' so forth,

it's as well to remember that
among its most beautiful productions

are these paintings by Renoir.

No awakened conscience.
No heroic materialism.

No Nietzsche. No Marx. No Freud.

Just a group of ordinary human beings
enjoying themselves.

(MUSIC) OFFENBACH: La Belle H�lene

The Impressionists didn't set out to be popular.

The only great painter of the 19th century

who longed for popularity
in the widest possible sense

was, ironically enough,

the only one who achieved
absolutely no success in his lifetime,

Vincent Van Gogh.

In its earlier phase, the awakened conscience
had taken a practical, material form,

even Elizabeth Fry, with her powerful
religious gifts, had lots of common sense,

but in the later part of the 19th century,

the feelings of shame
at the state of society became more intense.

Instead of benevolent action
there arose a need for atonement.

No-one expressed this more completely
than Van Gogh

in his pictures, his drawings,

his letters and his life.

For the first part of his working life, he was torn
between two vocations, painter and preacher,

and for some years
the preacher was in the ascendant.

Preaching wasn't enough. Like St Francis,
he had to share the poverty of the poorest

and most miserable of his fellow men.

It wasn't the hardships
that made him give up this way of life,

it was his unconquerable need to paint.

Van Gogh's hero, the hero of almost all
generous-minded men in the late-19th century,

was Tolstoy.

There he is, sawing wood,

expressing the feeling that one must share
the life of working people,

partly as a sort of atonement
for years of oppression,

partly because that life was nearer
to the realities of human existence.

Tolstoy towered above his age,

as Dante and Michelangelo
and Beethoven had done.

His novels are marvels
of sustained imagination.

His doctrines are full of contradictions.

He wanted to be one with the peasants,
yet he continued to live like an aristocrat.

He preached universal love,

but he quarrelled so painfully
with his poor demented wife

that, at the age of 82, he ran away from her.

After a nightmare journey,
he collapsed at a country railway station.

He was laid out on a bed
in the stationmaster's house.

Almost his last words were

"How do peasants die?"

There he died

with all the horrors of modern publicity
stewing outside the station.

After his death
when the peasants were singing a lament,

soldiers were sent in with drawn swords

to stop them from mourning
the subversive infidel.

However, there was no way
of preventing the funeral.

That scene took place in 1910.

Within two years, Rutherford and Einstein
had made their first discoveries

so a new era had begun

even before the 1914 war.

It's the era in which we're still living.

The radio telescope at Jodrell Bank.

Of course, science had achieved
great triumphs in the 19th century,

but nearly all of them had been related
to practical or technological advance.

For example, Edison, whose inventions did as
much as any to add to our material convenience,

wasn't what we should call a scientist at all

but a supreme do-it-yourself man.

But from the time of Einstein, Niels Bohr
the Cavendish Laboratory,

science no longer existed to serve
human needs, but in its own right.

When scientists could use a mathematical idea
to transform matter

they'd achieved the same quasi-magical
relationship with the material world as artists.

In this series, I've followed the ups and downs
of civilisation historically,

trying to discover results as well as causes.

Well, obviously, I can't do that any longer.

We have no idea where we are going

and sweeping, confident articles on the future

seem to me the most intellectually disreputable
of all forms of public utterance.

Scientists who are really qualified to talk
have kept their mouths shut.

JBS Haldane summed up the situation
when he said

"My own suspicion is that the universe
is not only queerer than we suppose,

but queerer than we can suppose."

TANNOY: Three, two, one,

Zero,

(MUSIC) BENJAMIN BRITTEN: Shine Out, Fair Sun
From The Spring Symphony

(MUSIC) Shine out

(MUSIC) Shine out

(MUSIC) Fair Sun

(MUSIC) The stars in icicles arise

(MUSIC) Shine out

(MUSIC) Shine out

(MUSIC) Fair sun

(MUSIC) And make this winter...

However, in the world of action
a few things are obvious,

so obvious that I hesitate to repeat them.

One of them is our increasing reliance
on machines.

They have really ceased to be tools

and have begun to give us directions.

Unfortunately, machines
from the Maxim gun to the computer

are, for the most part,

means by which an authoritarian regime
can keep man in subjection.

(Computers whir)

(MUSIC) The grey wolf howls

(MUSIC) He does so bite

(MUSIC) The grey wolf howls...

(Engines roar)

Our other speciality is the urge to destruction.

With the help of machines, we did our best
to destroy ourselves in two wars

and, in doing so, we released a flood of evil.

(Explosions)

(Air-raid siren)

Add to this, the memory of that shadowy
companion who is always with us,

like an inverted guardian angel,

silent, invisible

almost incredible

and yet unquestionably there...

..and one must concede that the future
of civilisation doesn't look very bright.

(Soundless)

(MUSIC) Shine Out, Fair Sun

And yet, when I look at the world about me
in the light of these programmes,

I don't at all feel that we're entering on
a new period of barbarism.

The things that made the Dark Ages so dark,

the isolation, the lack of mobility,

the lack of curiosity, the hopelessness,

don't obtain at all.

I'm at one of our new universities
the University Of East Anglia.

Well, these inheritors of all our catastrophes
look cheerful enough

and not at all like the melancholy late Romans
or pathetic Gauls,

whose likenesses have come down to us.

In fact, I should doubt if so many people
have ever been as well fed, as well read

as bright-minded, as curious and as critical,
as the young are today.

Of course, there's been a little flattening
at the top,

but, you know, one mustn't overrate the culture

of what used to be called "the top people"
before the wars.

They had charming manners,
but they were as ignorant as swans.

They knew a little about literature,
less about music

nothing about art
and less than nothing about philosophy.

The members of a music group or an art group
at a provincial university

would be ten times better informed
and more alert.

(MUSIC) BENJAMIN BRITTEN: The Driving Boy

(MUSIC) And chop-cherry, chop-cherry ripe within

(MUSIC) Strawberries swimming in the cream

(MUSIC) And schoolboys playing in the stream

(MUSIC) Strawberries swimming in the cream

(MUSIC) And schoolboys playing in the stream

(MUSIC) Then, O then, O then, O my true love said

(MUSIC) Till that time come again

(MUSIC) She could not live a maid

(MUSIC) When as the rye reach to the chin

(MUSIC) And chop-cherry, chop-cherry ripe within...

Well, naturally,
these bright-minded, young people

think poorly of existing institutions

and want to abolish them.

One doesn't need to be young
to dislike institutions.

But the dreary fact remains

that, even in the darkest ages,

it was institutions which made society work.

And if civilisation is to survive

society must, somehow, be made to work.

At this point, I reveal myself in my true colours,

as a stick-in-the-mud.

I hold a number of beliefs that have been
repudiated by the liveliest intellects of our time.

I believe that order is better than chaos...

..creation better than destruction.

I prefer gentleness to violence,

forgiveness to vendetta.

On the whole, I think that knowledge
is preferable to ignorance,

and I am sure

that human sympathy
is more valuable than ideology.

I believe that, in spite of
recent triumphs of science,

men haven't changed much
in the last 2,000 years.

And, in consequence,
we must still try to learn from history.

History is ourselves.

I also hold one or two beliefs
that are more difficult to put shortly.

For example, I believe in courtesy,

the ritual by which we avoid hurting other
people's feelings by satisfying our own egos.

I think we should remember
that we are part of a great whole,

which, for convenience, we call Nature.

All living things are our brothers and sisters.

Above all, I believe in the God-given genius
of certain individuals

and I value a society
that makes their existence possible.

(MUSIC) TOMAS LUIS DE VICTORIA:
Responsories For Tenebrae

These programmes have been filled
with great works of genius.

In architecture, sculpture and painting.

In philosophy, poetry and music.

In science and engineering.

There they are. You can't dismiss them.

And they're only a fraction of what Western Man
has achieved in the last 1,000 years,

often after setbacks and deviations

at least as destructive as those of our own time.

Western civilisation has been
a series of rebirths.

Surely, this should give us
confidence in ourselves.

I said, at the beginning of the series,

that it's lack of confidence
more than anything else, that kills a civilisation.

We can destroy ourselves
by cynicism and disillusion,

just as effectively as by bombs.

50 years ago, WB Yeats, who was more like
a man of genius that anyone I've ever known,

wrote a prophetic poem and in it he said...

"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed
and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned.

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity."

Well, that was certainly true between the wars
and it damn nearly destroyed us.

ls it true today?

Not quite, because good people
have convictions, rather too many of them.

The trouble is that there is still no centre.

The moral and intellectual failure of Marxism

has left us with no alternative
to heroic materialism

and that isn't enough.

One may be optimistic,

but one can't exactly be joyful
at the prospect before us.

(MUSIC) IGOR STRAVINSKY: Apollon Musagete