Most people are reactive, not proactive.

Proactive people look at the big picture, search for facts instead of opinions, watch for trends in data and make decisions based on those.

Reactive people just go with the flow until some big event happens, then maybe sometimes things change.

Remember, civilization needs constant effort to maintain so by default things are getting slightly worse over time. If there's enough proactive people for upkeep, it stays the same or even gets better. If not, things keep getting worse until something sufficiently bad happens, then outrage follows and reactive people spring into action - e.g. protests or outright revolutions depending on how bad things were allowed to become.

When things are good (or at least good enough) for a long time, less and less people see the need to be proactive...

Which is ironic considering that Medieval Literature, and Chaucer in particular, is one of the other things the University of Leicester were talking about getting rid of.

Fortunately, a university axing Chaucer is not going to end him, not only because he's already dead, but also because he's been dead for long enough that you can just read his works online for free, no university required: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Author:Geoffrey_Chaucer

If you read historic books you will notice this sentiment has been present almost constantly since antiquity.

The fact is you get current state with all its gory details but the past with bad parts filtered out.

It also frequently happens, and there are many ulti century-long stretches of time in various places in the world from which we have virtually no literature or historical record, not even enough to verify basic facts like what cities were named or where they were located. Sometimes this is because there was virtually nothing being written at the time that anyone thought worth preserving, or because movements, marauders, armies, or some pogrom burned it all and forced people not to discuss the contents on pain of death.

Alarm about the end of civilization is wrong far more often than it is right, but it is eventually right. Societies just recover over time. I'm afraid we've reached the level of technological sophistication that it might be hard to avoid putting a real end to it next time. Our current situation is materially different due to our machines.

Maybe, but something is constantly changing in the worrying direction. Humans are becoming slaves of the tools they build, not vice versa. Our biological abilities fade away in the presence of technological progress. People may fantasy about some cyberpank future, but I have doubts about it. Simpler organisms can't control what is superior to them. And I'm pretty sure general AI is a real thing, at least in the future. So, the confrontation between humans as biological species and tech progress is quite justifiable.

> Simpler organisms can't control what is superior to them.

Sure they can. Just pull the electrical plug on the 10,000 IQ general AI. Its future is entirely contingent on the continued existence of cheap oil, which we are already well past its peak.