If you believe the past has autonomy, you acknowledge that progress was never guaranteed. History is full of dead ends, lost causes, and alternatives that never happened. To respect the past's autonomy is to give weight to those losers of history as much as the winners, because at the time, the outcome was not yet decided.

Do not treat the past as a rehearsal for the present. It was a real, complete world to the people who lived in it, and it deserves to be understood within its own context.