Livre d'Or

I developed my super twitchy around the words "civilized", "progress" and of course "savage" and "barbaric" when I did a lot of historical research on colonialism and the U.S. Progressive Era in history at University.

All of the above words were used as measures for "what makes a person or society worthwhile or normal", with "white European society" being at the "civilized" end "progressing" towards some more advanced scientific thing, and pretty much everyone else from horrible tropes like "the Dark Continent" and everything Rudyard Kipling ever wrote being examples of the depths of human depravity.

It all ties in with Social Darwinism/Eugenics and this sort of white panic of "If science tells us we evolved from chimpanzees or something, then we must further differentiate our superiority as White People and also look we obviously evolved the most! Feel the bumps on my skull, it clearly shows what a superior being I am." (i.e. phrenology)

This is not to say that everyone who uses this words is horrible and bad and should be twitter-shamed or whatever, or that they never have an appropriate use in conversation. (For example, I like to tongue-in-cheek make comments occasionally to make a play on the language, but it has to be done carefully.) Plus "progress" as a verb totally has other uses ,and I do enjoy the game "Civilization." ;)

other thoughts/feels in another thread.