One of the great rewards that comes with developmental/evolutionary perspective is a more systemic picture of history. Such perspective challenges us to revisit not just certain of history’s facts, but also modern notions of what constitutes history. Oscar Wilde wrote, “The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.” Cultural Maturity invites—indeed demands—that we rewrite history. Culturally mature perspective rewrites both what we mean by history and our understanding of ourselves as participants in history.
Cultural Maturity’s cognitive changes alter our conventional modern picture of history in at least three ways. First, it helps us to see the past more accurately, to better recognize the particular gifts and blindnesses that have accompanied each chapter in culture’s story. We could say that cultural Reengagement makes us kinder toward the past—and often it does. But developmental/evolutionary perspective can also make for much harsher judgment. Certainly romantic idealizations don’t easily survive the vantage it provides. But even when romantic projection has not played a role in how we have described history, the sensibilities that have defined modern thought have caused us to miss much that is most important.
The lens provided by a rational/material worldview is able to describe only the most surface layers of history’s full richness and complexity. History, in today’s classroom, too often becomes little more than a chronicling of leaders, wars, and inventions. And what we have missed is often exactly that which is most essential not to miss if we wish to make sense of the values, motivations, and worldviews of pre-modern peoples (including ourselves prior to the Industrial Age). Our modern understanding of history is, in the end, limited when trying to describe the past, to the same degree—and for the same reasons—that Modern Age definitions of intelligence are limited if we wish to capture cognition’s full complexity. The dissolving of cultural amnesias provides a clearer and more complex, if not always so handy and self-affirming, picture of what has brought us to where we are.
Integrative Meta-perspective also reveals a more dynamic picture of history. This comes naturally from what we newly bring to the process of seeing. At the least, culturally mature developmental/evolutionary perspective helps us better put past events in context and sheds new light on how one moment of history ties to another—insight that can radically alter how we interpret events. Along with this, spheres of understanding that we may not have treated as major historical variables—such as art, music, religion, moral belief, and the life of the body—come to have renewed importance. Good teachers of history have always used contributions from these various spheres to help make history come alive, and the best of historians have gone further, noting patterns and relationships. But with Reengagement, these added ingredients stop being condiments and become explicit parts of the main meal.
Finally, the developmental/evolutionary picture that comes with Integrative Metaperspective gives history a new narrative depth. It helps transform history from a chronicling of events and beliefs to a multifaceted study of human purpose and our relationship to it. Such depth has also always been a part of well-told history. But consciously bringing more of ourselves into the story changes the equation. History becomes more directly an inquiry into who we are as storytellers and makers of meaning. It also, by implication, becomes as much about the possible nature of meaning in the future as it is about the stories that have brought us to where we are today.
This more dynamic picture also suggests a “historical” reward beyond history itself. It makes the study of history an important “hands-on” tool for acquiring culturally mature capacities. Just as bridging polarities or deeply engaging the complexities of intelligence can bring us closer to culturally mature sensibility, so too can a sufficiently deep engagement with where we have come from. Each provides a way to make contact with the fullness of our creative complexity.