Civilisation
I'm watching the 1969 BBC series Civilisation: A Personal View by Kenneth Clark.
On Diderot and the Encyclopédie, Clark says: "And in the Encyclopédie he wrote articles on everything from Aristotle to artifical flowers. The aims of the Encyclopédie seem harmless enough to us but, you know, authoritarian governments don't like dictionaries. They live by lies and by bamboozling abstractions; they can't afford to have words accurately defined."
This observation seems completely true to me. I think about Orwell and the language of 1984 and Animal Farm; I remember all the times Chomsky has talked about defining the word 'terrorism.'
Clark also says: "The remoteness of Versailles had this good result: that Parisian society was free from the stultifying rituals of court procedure and the trivial day-to-day preoccupations of politics. The other thing that made Eighteenth Century salons a source of enlightment was that the French upper classes were not destructively rich. They lost most of their money in a financial crash brought about by a Scottish wizard named David Law. As I've said several times, a margin of wealth is helpful to civilisation, but, for some mysterious reason, great wealth is destructive."
I don't know enough about this topic to comment, but I was struck by the recent trend, well documented, of the wealthy becoming simply grotesquely rich and how the whole country has seemed to go down the crapper in the same time frame, i.e., the last thirty years.
On Diderot and the Encyclopédie, Clark says: "And in the Encyclopédie he wrote articles on everything from Aristotle to artifical flowers. The aims of the Encyclopédie seem harmless enough to us but, you know, authoritarian governments don't like dictionaries. They live by lies and by bamboozling abstractions; they can't afford to have words accurately defined."
This observation seems completely true to me. I think about Orwell and the language of 1984 and Animal Farm; I remember all the times Chomsky has talked about defining the word 'terrorism.'
Clark also says: "The remoteness of Versailles had this good result: that Parisian society was free from the stultifying rituals of court procedure and the trivial day-to-day preoccupations of politics. The other thing that made Eighteenth Century salons a source of enlightment was that the French upper classes were not destructively rich. They lost most of their money in a financial crash brought about by a Scottish wizard named David Law. As I've said several times, a margin of wealth is helpful to civilisation, but, for some mysterious reason, great wealth is destructive."
I don't know enough about this topic to comment, but I was struck by the recent trend, well documented, of the wealthy becoming simply grotesquely rich and how the whole country has seemed to go down the crapper in the same time frame, i.e., the last thirty years.
posted by a librarian at 11:13 AM
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