"WHAT IS CIVILISATION?" asked Kenneth Clark 50 years ago in the seminal bbc series on the subject. "i don't know, and I can't define it in abstract terms, yet. But I think I can recognise it when I see it, and I'm looking at it now." And he turned to gesture behind him, at the soaring Gothic towers and flying buttresses of Notre Dame. It seems inhuman to care more about a building than about people. That the sight of Notre Dame going up in flames (see Europe section) has attracted so much more attention than floods in southern Africa which killed over 1,000 arouses understandable feelings of guilt. Yet the widespread, intense grief at the sight of the cathedral's collapsing steeple is in fact profoundly human-and in a particularly 21st-century way.
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