Are We Just Running in Circles?

While society so readily criticizes our past of slavery and apparent racial discrimination, they, themselves, remain ignorant and unknowing of their own discriminatory actions and opinions. In this example from Anne Kustritz's Postmodern Eugenics, the ignorance of humanity that is apparent even when discussing such an entertaining subject of Harry Potter is astonishing. Kustritz describes the fan communities' discussions of the magical species House Elves: "Failing to recognize the resemblance between their own rhetoric and the arguments of antebellum slaveholders, fan discussions of Harry Potter author JK Rowling’s multi-cultural, post-colonial allegory reveal modern audiences’ deliberate ignorances" (6). Although there are scientific and historical fiction and non-fiction to remind modern society of past moral conflicts and grievances through direct storytelling or through metaphorically developed situations, still humanity does not seem to make the symbolic, or even literal, connection between past mistakes and present issues. In Battlestar Gallactica, many of the conflicts that arise during the war between the Cylons and the Humans are equivocal to those of humanity's past and present in order to remark on societal and political corruption. The show, at the time of its airing, was so influential that, "'the United Nations convened a panel to discuss the show’s treatment of terrorism, human rights abuses and religious conflict'"(Kustritz 7). If a science fiction television show about conflicts of war between robots and humans can affect the opinions of the United Nations, surely this show, among others, should be able to affect the opinions of the audience this show was written for. Are politicians, government officials, and perhaps, historians the only ones actively trying to eliminate past conflicts from the present and present conflicts from the future? Are they the only ones learning from humanity's past mistakes?
Even in Laura Mulvey's article Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, it is exhibited that however much equal rights between women and men are assured through politicians and amendments, women are still readily objectified. Mulvey goes over the idea that cinema is used to satisfy voyeuristic urges specifically aimed at women. She states, "The image of woman as (passive) raw material for the (active) gaze of man takes the arguments a step further into the structure of representation [...]" (208). Without regard to the years and years of women's suffrage movements, women apparently, when faced with a man's interested and forceful eyes, relapse into opinion-less beings solely remarkable as a visual spectacle.
Is any human progress being actually made? Does humanity learn from nothing is overcomes?