The point is that the Lisp community was always in some sort of ferment. The number of Lisps that were developed alone is testament to that.
An elegant weapon for a more civilized age without the C language legacy.
that's like saying the 18th century was more "civilized" because we settled squabbles with dueling pistols. people are still people and we are just about as civilized today as we ever were. which isn't saying much.
the analogy holds for programming languages as well as it does for anything else involving people.
Just a fanciful quote with some license. But one might argue the defn of civilization as applied to general programming with so much of it being commodity programming these days. Additionally, I believe an argument could be made that the long-term tyranny of the C bubble has actually retarded the advancement of the art.