I find this oft repeated and also historically inaccurate. It confuses the fact that horrors exist in every age with the number of horrors. No time is perfect, but some are definitely better than others.
I think the point is that "civility" is at best orthogonal to the number of horrors: sometimes "civility" is people actually being polite and even kind to each other and sometimes it's an alias for the demand that certain people/groups accept mistreatment without complaining.
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