When the BBC announced a few years ago that it planned to update “Civilisation,” the British art historian Kenneth Clark’s landmark TV series of 1969, it seemed as if it had set itself an impossible task. The word has since become politically charged, implying as it does hierarchies of achievement and value judgments, not to mention its opposite: barbarism. Then there was the fact that Clark’s focus was exclusively on Western civilization, a perspective considered unacceptably parochial in today’s globalized environment. How could any production ever navigate the political minefield associated with this subject?
...