Originally posted at Virtute et Armis et Mente.
In my introduction, I mentioned that I’m a long-haul trucker. But I started my adult life with a very different dream: studying history. I even earned my undergraduate degree in it.
I still remember one graduate course that irritated the hell out of me — Historiography, the study of the different lenses through which historians view the past. I thought most of it was both stupid and wrong. I didn’t have a fully formed alternative at the time, so as a lowly grad student I kept my mouth shut and passed the class.
But my systems-thinking brain wouldn’t let it go.
History is one of the most useful subjects we can study, yet it’s often taught terribly. Much of that comes from the straight-jackets of modern historiographical schools: Marxists see everything as class struggle, Great Man historians obsess over individuals, Annales scholars focus on bottom-up social forces, and cultural historians frequently reduce everything to oppression narratives.
They’re all limited. Some are actively misleading. It took me years to articulate why.
The core mistake is treating history like literature instead of the study of a living, breathing super-organism: human civilization. The same patterns that govern biology and medicine often have powerful carry-over into how societies live, sicken, and sometimes die.
We can’t put Rome under a microscope and see cell walls, but we can treat civilizations like bodies and draw useful analogies.
Trade becomes the lifeblood that moves resources and ideas. Foreign influences can be symbiotic (like mitochondria powering our cells) or invasive, triggering immune responses — from cultural rejection to outright conflict. Bureaucracy grows like a tumor. Overly restrictive policies act like poor circulation.
Understanding these patterns doesn’t just help us explain the past. It gives us tools to make better decisions now and avoid repeating old disasters.
That’s the lens I want to explore here. I’ll be drawing from Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome, and beyond, testing whether this biological/systems model holds up. I’m also planning to dig deeper into people like Peter Turchin and yes, the old Asimov influence.
Some of you are probably still wondering about the odd Latin name of this Substack and what any of this has to do with “saving the West.”
Good questions. The name — Virtute et Armis et Mente (By Virtue, Arms, and Mind) — is partly inspired by Mississippi’s motto, but it also reflects the three essential pillars Western civilization must understand and wield if it’s going to survive the forces trying to dismantle it.
We’ll unpack that more next time.
Until then,
– G.K. Masterson
