With a Knowledge of History and Context

The image on the History and Context card in the Group Works deck. Image by Nomad Tales on flickr, CC-BY-SA 2.0 (this artist is no longer on flickr). Before our average attention spans were reduced to something less than a minute, we were required, if we expected to be taken seriously in any discussion about the state of the world, to have invested a significant portion of our leisure time to learning the “lessons of history”. Indeed, people who had made such an investment were among our most-respected citizens, and their synopses of relevant history were “required reading” not only in universities and political circles, but often even in water cooler and coffee klatch conversations. Unlike today’s “op-eds”, which are mostly diatribes devoid of novel, relevant and supporting information or coherent argument, these analyses allowed those of us without the time to spend years learning the history of distant nations and the backstory behind long-standing traditions and conflicts, to…