“It is 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.” - Lord Kenneth Clark 

I’m in the middle of watching the BBC documentary series “Civilisation: A Personal View” by Lord Clark. 

He made a point in the first show so devastatingly true that it struck me with almost physical force. 

He was doing a piece to camera, while standing in front of, and underneath, a Roman aqueduct, and talking about what makes up a civilisation. 

Now Lord Clark was raised in the British academic tradition, and would have been incapable of beginning any work without first defining his terms, and so this was in a sense his coda for the whole series. 

He said that one of the most important features of a civilisation, if not the most, was confidence. 

Confidence that it would still be around next year, that it was worthwhile planting crops now, so they could be harvested next season. 

Confidence that soldiers wouldn’t suddenly appear on the horizon and destroy your farm. 

Confidence that an apple seed planted in your backyard will provide fruit for your grandchildren. 

Confidence that if you paint a fresco, the wall it is on will still be standing in a century. 

Confidence that if you write a book, the language you use will still be understood half a millennia in the future. 

And confidence that if you hauled stone for the great cathedral which had been building since before your father was born, and which your baby son might live to see completed if, the good Lord willing, he lived to be an old man; your efforts would be valued by subsequent generations stretching forward toward some unimaginably distant futurity. 

And above all, the self-confidence that you are part of something grander than yourself, something with roots in the past, and a glorious future of achievement ahead of it.