is human progress, civilization, inherently forgetful?

well, certainly a lot of humans are inherently forgetful. we forget to do things, and forget lessons taught to us, all of the time. maybe the idea that i'm really expressing is that many of us are stupid, but the way this manifests itself is largely as forgetfulness.

now, the individualist will point out that while many, perhaps most, people are forgetful, there are some people that are not and these people will carry on the thrust of human progress, no matter how forgetful we may collectively be. but, their argument relies on the ideological construct of independence, and this is an empirical question with little evidence supporting it. individualism, at best, seems to be rare. so, these individuals are really left with a curatorial task to remind people of what they've forgotten - they're really just the cleared registers in the collective, trying to avoid the garbage collection from clearing them away, urging for a second chance to exist in memory - and failing. it's like a broken system of error-correction; we can remember and forget at the same time. so, this question of the inherent forgetfulness of human progress does not reduce to a question around independent variables.

it's just a different intellectual conception of progress - not as a linear curve tilting off towards some windmill at infinity, but as this messy, chaotic step-function, full of unpredictable fragments.

there is, of course, a hierarchy of seriousness attached to the consequences of forgetting what is being forgotten. geography can be found easily. a lesson can be relearned. but, forgetting science can be devastating.

this is a potentially unrealized consequence of globalization - when the global culture falls, there will be nobody left to remember what was forgotten.