I was having this conversation with a friend a few days before we left on our current Europe/Morocco expedition. She was asking me what I found most interesting as a traveler and why I found it so important to study history. I expressed my phrase, “I like to take the long view”. For instance, I said, on the way in to see you this afternoon I noticed a small building. It was made with concrete blocks and stucco with a small arch and an array of windows reflecting facets of light and life. This wasn’t a particularly attractive building but that was not what caught my eye. What I saw were two thousand year old building techniques pioneered by the Romans that form the cornerstone of some of the greatest monuments of western civilization. Romans invented concrete, clear glass windows and the arch”.
Historically, successful ideas like concrete and the arch lead to the Pantheon and Colosseum, solved problems and moved society and culture forward. To me, the reason the long view has value is because it exposes the causal chains of how one idea leads to another and how additional minds contribute to the subject or idea connecting it to even more ideas as one thing stands upon another.
This is what I crave as a traveler. To understanding the world and the cultures and the people in it is to understand that they are the product of the causes and conditions of everything that has come before them. Understand those causes and conditions and those events and environments and you will have a better foundation to understand peoples, cultures, civilizations and the world. This is the long view.
