A way I’ve personally drawn on history in my teaching helps illustrate how developmental/evolutionary perspective can be used as a hands-on tool for developing culturally mature capacities. Its inspiration came from an exceptional series of classes on world music that I took in college. While today it is not uncommon to hear music from far-flung parts of the planet, back then this was a rare and special experience—each morning, with other students, listening to sounds that we’d never before encountered, but that were deeply rooted in time and culture. What I heard greatly moved me and provided many insights important to the later development of Creative Systems Theory.
Once each year during the Institute for Creative Development’s brick-and-mortar years, I did a presentation that drew on those insights. I called it “An Evolutionary History of Music.” Over the course of a day, I played music from each of culture’s creative stages and engaged people—through story, dance, and conversation—in the underlying sensibilities of each stage. It became an anticipated event. (You can link to an edited video of the presentation at the Institute for Creative Development website (www.CreativeSystems.org).
My intent in doing this elaborate and lengthy presentation was to involve people in history in a way that helped dissolve the amnesias that have protected us from our full creative natures and, in this way, to support culturally mature understanding more broadly. Participants described the experience as bringing history alive in ways they had rarely felt. They also found that it gave them some of the most powerful and immediate appreciation for the larger—whole-box-of-crayons—complexities on which future human understanding and choice must be based.