Time & Perspective Quote by Katharine Fullerton Gerould

Civilization, Gerould suggests, isn’t a triumph of institutions so much as a long, finicky education of the senses. The line has the snap of a drawing-room provocation: it drags “civilization” down from marble pedestals and pins it to something embarrassingly intimate - taste. That’s the point. If you can frame progress as an aesthetic upgrade, you expose how much of what societies call “advancement” is really selective comfort: better furniture, cleaner streets, quieter violence, uglier facts pushed out of sight.

“Merely” is the sharpened blade here. It mocks grand narratives of moral ascent by recasting them as a consumer habit: “accepting… nicer things, and rejecting nasty ones.” The phrasing mimics the repetitive rhythm of shopping or etiquette training, suggesting that refinement is less enlightenment than sorting. The subtext is accusatory: what gets labeled “nasty” is often whatever threatens the self-image of the refined - poverty, bodily mess, racialized or classed “coarseness,” dissent that ruins the ambiance. Civilization, in this view, can become a politics of disgust, outsourcing its dirt to other neighborhoods, other countries, other people.

Gerould wrote in an era when “civilization” was routinely wielded as a cudgel - a justification for empire, for policing immigrants, for enforcing gender and class norms under the banner of uplift. Her formulation reads like a skeptical corrective: if civilization is taste, then it’s contingent, snobbish, and easily gamed. The line works because it flatters and indicts at once: you recognize yourself in the preference for “nicer things,” then realize how quickly that preference hardens into a hierarchy.