American Progress conflates cultural domination with technological progress

Evidence

The image of an angel that wishes to forestall progress is all the more remarkable given how often progress itself is what gets deified. One example of this is from an 1872 painting called American Progress by John Gast, meant to illustrate the concept of Manifest Destiny. The painting shows an enormous blond woman in diaphanous white robes striding westward into an unruly, dark landscape, trailed by all the hallmarks of Western civilization. Cultural domination is inextricable from technological progress in this image. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 631

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Technological mastery extinguishing nature and cultures is dominated by men by design — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 55