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.

The way we interpret history has profound implications for how we understand the present and, most importantly, how we determine the priorities that will decide our future. Modernist interpretations of history, along with more recent approaches colored by postmodernism, are insufficient to provide us with the tools we need to respond to the existential crises our civilization faces this century. For that, we need a new type of history, one that emphasizes the way in which different cultures operate under radically different conceptual frameworks that shape the course they chart.

SUGGESTED READING Nature is a jazz band, not a machine By Jeremy Lent While we may not always realize how historical interpretations influence our values, their power to do so is enormous, precisely because of its implicit nature. As a teenager, growing up in London in the 1970s, I remember watching TV with my father as we avidly soaked up The Ascent of Man: an award-winning BBC documentary series produced by Dr. Jacob Bronowski. For my father, it was a splendid exposition of how “Man” (there were no qualms in those days about giving humanity a male gender) climbed from peak to peak in his ascent to the pinnacle of modern scientific achievement. In contrast to animals who merely adapt to their environment, Bronowski explained triumphantly, Man is “not a figure in the landscape; he is the shaper of the landscape.”