We certainly lose track of the past fast enough, that it doesn't need to be cancelled. As you argue and to paraphrase; Those who seek to cancel history are likely condemned to repeat it.
The deeper problem is that past hasn't left us with a very clear understanding of the dynamics manifesting this moment in time.
For instance, our cultures and the civilizations built on them, are narrative based, because we are mobile organisms, with a sequential process of perception, so this flow of time, of the present moving past to future, is integral to who we are. Yet it is like seeing the sun rising in the east and setting in the west and attempting to make sense of geocentrism.
As the reality is that change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.
There is no literal dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.
Time is like a tapestry being woven of strands pulled from the past.
Energy is "conserved," because it is present. It creates time, as well as temperature, pressure, color, sound. Frequencies and amplitudes. Time is frequency, events are amplitude.
So the energy, as process, goes past to future, while the patterns generated go future to past.
The energy drives the wave, the fluctuations rise and fall.
Products go start to finsh, while the production line goes the other way, consuming material and expelling product. Lives go birth to death, while life moves onto the next generation, shedding the old.
Consciousness goes start to finish, while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts go future to past.
Yet it is the gut and heart processing and circulating the energy and attention driving us on, while the brain sorts and orders the patterns precipitating out. Leaving the mind as more lens and filter of this awareness bubbling up, than its source.
So we are that tension between the anarchies of desire and the tyrannies of judgement, in both small and grand feedback loops of motor and steering.
When the elements directing the process curl into their own, ever smaller feedback loops and lose track of the forces they presume to direct, the system will fail. Yet some system will emerge, because without structure, we are not just angry brutes, but bacteria, at best. We are a system, as individuals, evolved to function as groups.
Our individualistic ethos has left us with an atomized culture, that is more easily manipulated by institutional authority and mediated by a parasitic financial system. Networks matter as much as the nodes inhabiting them.
One concept our ancestors left us, for formulating society, is monotheism. Yet a spiritual absolute would necessarily be the essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell. The fact we are aware, than the details of which we are aware. More the new born child, than the wise old man. The light shining through the film, than the images on it.
The Ancients were not ignorant of monotheism, but as there was no distinction between culture and civics, it equated with authoritarianism. One god, one ruler. "Divine right of kings."
Democracy and republicanism evolved in pantheistic societies, which were the Ancient's interpretation of multiculturalism. Christianity was adopted and co-opted as a means of incorporating monotheism into the entity of the Roman empire. Though it retained traces of pantheism, in the Trinity.
When the West went back to these more populist forms of government, it required a separation of church and state, culture and civics.
The significant problem Europe has in integrating Muslims, is that Islam doesn't recognize this social schizophrenia. Possibly because the territory of the Middle East doesn't have the degree of geological features as Europe, allowing distinct cultures to emerge, that are not so easily erased by political shifts.
The reality is that good and bad are not some cosmic conflict between the forces of righteousness and evil, but the basic biological binary of beneficial and detrimental. The 1/0 of sentience. All the higher order social, emotional and intellectual constructs; love, honor, trust, respect, responsibility, etc, as well as the negatives, are complex creations, emergent with our evolved situation. So that when good is treated as aspirational, rather than elemental, conflicts do become a race to the bottom, of us versus them. Since all nuance and subjectivity is suspect and not sufficiently absolutist.
Thinking we can understand culture and the complex moral and ethical codes it requires, based on our own subjective ideals, is a bit like thinking playing video games will teach you computer programming. It might create interest, but until one is truly willing to look under the hood, the effort is futile.
To be politically incorrect, what would the African American population be, if it wasn't for slavery? It's like being the child of a rape. Your mother might have boxed you across the ears every day of your childhood and you might hate your father until your dying day, but it doesn't change the fact that had it not occurred, you wouldn't be here.
What is good for the fox, is bad for the chicken.
Yet it is safe to say, any such objective considerations, as these and many more, will have to wait, until the current crop of the woke wake up and see their passions are as destructive as they are creative. Just as the rest of us, who have survived and somewhat tamed our own passions, can attest.
