How we understand the past goes on to shape our future.  Both modernist and postmodernist accounts of history are inadequate and reductive accounts of how the world arrived at its present state. Modernism defends a naïve account of progress as driven by reason and science, and while postmodernism rejects that simplistic story, it falls prey to its own version of cultural imperialism. What we need then is a cognitive history of humanity, one that explains how different cultures, operating under different conceptual frames, saw the world differently, leading them to chart different paths. Only then we’ll begin to recognize our own culture’s conceptual framework, its limits, and the ways it needs revising, argues Jeremy Lent.