The Active Art of Learning from History

The second core principle is to embrace the necessity of Contextualization, which is perhaps the greatest barrier to contemporary understanding. It is intellectually lazy and often misleading to judge past actors by present-day moral, political, or technological standards; instead, a serious student of history must strive to reconstruct the "mental furniture" of the era they are studying. This means understanding the prevailing social norms, economic constraints, scientific knowledge, and theological beliefs that shaped the worldviews and decisions of the people involved, ensuring that judgment follows comprehension, rather than preceding it.