[coldtea]

What you describe as desirable is a form of analysis paralysis.

Engaging to the past "on it’s own terms" is noble.

But refusing or failing to find patterns and analogies (lest they not be "perfect"), and to engage with the past as a store of experience to learn from, and leverage the past to inform your understanding of the present, renders the whole point of studying the past a moot endeavor.

[ffhhttt]

Yes but a quite often when you don’t actually understand what you’re looking at those patterns and analogies end up being imaginary.

[coldtea]

I think a much larger problem is that most people are not looking at the past at all, and know very little about it except what they've seen in some movie or, at best, some documentary. Rather than people making distorted analogies based on a less than functional understanding of it.