Trying to understand history

“It seems only human nature to hang the label irrational on what we do not understand, since it is easy for us to assume that something must be irrational if our ingenuity is unequal to the task of deciphering it. That may actually reflect more on the limits of our ingenuity than on any supposed irrationality in what we are studying. For that reason it should come as a practical and fundamental warning not to impute irrationality to people in the study of history …  too quickly.”

Allen C. Guelzo