So we have a park and a mess. Let's think about what those two metaphors imply starting with the park.
A park is somewhere you visit and a place you can leave at will. There is a lot of stuff in a park; there are benches, paths, grass, trees, shrubs and play areas. When we exercise our opinions like a whippet we trace a line of convenience across the park and ignore the vast majority of stuff there. Like Cowen's stories, the whippet excludes a whole lot of territory. He is more interested in grass and paths because that suits what he likes to do (which is to run very fast). Likewise, we exercise our opinions by running them through the parts where they can travel easily ignoring the more complex and difficult terrain.
The historian Oakeshott admired the most was a guy named Frederick William Maitland. Maitland didn't write stories, he painstakingly went over source material looking for details that didn't fit stories. His most famous work as an historian was to pour over ancient parliamentary rolls and prove that the story of the English parliaments was NOT what everyone thought it was.
That's all good stuf and I'm with Oakeshott (and Cowen if he wants in) when it comes to history. But history is something we only do sometimes. We can leave history just like we leave the park and get back to our real lives.
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