Ecologica Americana is an open source conceptual, framework for American history with a peculiar purpose. The purpose: to cure the subject (that's us) of history. It positions itself in opposition to Plantation History and thus, also in opposition to Plantation Time. A main thread of what we explore here, possibly for collection as a book,1 presents as a conceptual history of a cognitive construction that I call "The Plantation."2 We live on a Plantation, you and me, and sketching the contours of its origin, rise, life and fitful death pangs are fabulously important for understanding how we can do something different.
Whoa, hold on there, you say. We haven't heard from you in months. There are eleven new wars since then! Yeah, I know. This took a long time to get right. But trust me!
In a famous essay titled "What We Talk About When We Talk About History" (famous among historians at least), that has never been adequately processed by either the historical field or the amorphous mass of American intellectual life, Terrence J Macdonald declared:3
"Social and ideological conflict in [early 20th century] American society undermined the correspondence between theories of consensus and latent functions and the reality they sought to explain; the belief in a single, scientific, transhistorical road to cumulative knowledge was assaulted by theories of paradigms and incommensurability; Marxist theory breached the walls of both idealism and the ideology of scientific neutrality only to be overrun, in its turn, by the hordes of the "posts : post-positivism, post-modernism, post-marxism, post-structuralism, and others too numerous to mention. In the deepest irony of all, we are here today, in part at least, to consider whether the oasis of epistemological peace shimmering on the horizon may be "history."“
It has taken me seventeen years to realize the only substantive use of history is to cure yourself of history, and this involves recognizing that talking about history is not terribly different than talking about astrology or the stock market.4 In the same way that Macdonald presents "history" as an oasis, we are all orienting ourselves towards a future. The future is one in which the roads of history are joined seamlessly with our aspirational futures-- a moment when we align cosmologically (astrology), or can cut the chains that attach us to the Plantation's financial demands, in a single moment called the "present."5
When we talk about history, what we are really doing is talking about the future in very veiled mythological terms. A Sun sign, or a technical pattern, or a historical event percieved to bear upon the present are not substantially different. They are packets of data forged into communicable units that make some attempt to guide us to a future.
The road to MacDonald's oasis may, in fact, involve taking our eyes momentarily off the oasis, and pondering how we came to see it. Unveiling, or introducing a mythology may be helpful here.
Mythology is different from ideology. Ideology is prescriptive. It looks at past events and draws a very clear, directional moral lesson from them, a single road. This prescriptive, top down flow of information, whether by manifesto, social media influencers, or what others have called "predictive programming" constitutes "Plantation History" (more on that anon!). It tells you what to do. Mythology is something else-- it is cybernetic, it is interactive. Mythology is simply an input, which produces an output, which is itself another mythological input. It is alive. Mythology is a series of landmarks that can be used by any subject to construct their own meaning and communicate it with others. That is what we do with history, and we use that meaning to talk about our shared futures. We collectively parse one another's outputs, utilize them as inputs, and reveal our own outputs for others to interact with.
History, my formal field of competency, has been broken for a long time, because it has lost a sense of its own purpose. It has attempted to re-constitute itself in an "interdisciplinary" way, that has seen the founding bits of its purpose parcelled off to other disciplines. Interdisciplinary was conceived as a collaboration, but the confines of the Plantation's universities and schools, and the Plantation's internal politics have meant that whatever lofty oasis that “History” was conceived as, have dissolved into the dismantling of historical consciousness. Instead of integrating the disciplines, History, which might have served as the serotonin-like signal medium to flow between them, has been gutted.
Interdisciplinary was conceived, thoughtfully, as an intellectual framework in which "History" became something like the medieval ether, the cognitive infrastructure that bound wayward fields of knowledge and self understanding together. What it has meant in reality, though, is that "business history" was parcelled off to business schools, "history of science" was yielded to the colleges of science, and "religious history" returned to the masters of divinity. It forgot the proclamations of its many founders, like Carl Becker, who imagined "Everyman" as his own historian, synthesizing a whole past of human experience into a personal future.6 Returning to MacDonald again, he warned:7
“This new attempt to "forget one's founders" is particularly damaging for interdisciplinary discussion because it ignores the deep inter-relationships among all the disciplines reinvented in America after World War Two and the ability of those constitutive relationships to continually take this conversation in its most sterile directions. We are working today within, not beyond the disciplinary relationships constructed in that epoch”
By open-source, I am not memeing.8 I mean this this in the truest possible sense. I'm just giving you my code. Seventeen years of it, squeezed through a blog...and maybe a book, and possibly a growing community, to people who are interested. This is how I, Christopher Sandbatch, pour raw information into my consciousness and make sense of it.
I don't think anyone is really *doing* history like this yet. But soon many will be-- not as a result of this publication, but because a massive paradigm shift in the way knowledge is produced currently proceeds well ahead of schedule. The Gulf South, where I am from and currently live, has arrived ahead of the crowd this time, alongside the cats in Berkeley and Cambridge. The Gulf South is another "peculiar" part of this explanation. My code is coded "Gulf South."
Iterating our purpose again, with the specific vantage point assigned-- this is an open-source framework that details a template for the relational network that underpins a conceptualization of history for a specific person with a very tuned radar for history, which can be incorporated (or not) into the conceptualization of anyone's history, to help them navigate the future. It can be re-aligned, re-weighted, used to build the perfect negation, used to build a benevolent arch-intelligence, or used to save the planet. Have fun!
I'm just a code monkey, a latter day grammarian, or even an almost-totally abstracted "storyteller."
Iterate again. The non-abstractions: this map is irretrievably a map of the mind of a Southern, upper-middle class, over-educated, Millenial. The list of filter words continues forever. I have a genuinely interesting set of them.
But that limitation does mean something important. I'm not doing anything but showing and telling. Performing, in a sense, in dingy alley of the public forum. Mumbling in a corner. My intention is only collaborative. I want you to take what I have to say and make something new with it. This is how we make knowledge now! As Dylan once said "don't follow leaders, watch parking meters!"
To that end, Ecologica Americana has two sections (currently). The first, The Gulf Desk act as outputs. These are my "takes". Sandbatchism is long awaited in some quarters, but it arrives in the form of aphorisms and possibly some math. The takes I spew out there, are the result of the relational network that I described earlier. My explorations of that relational network will go in an "academic" section called "Ecologica Americana" more formally.
Why are we doing it this way? After more than a year of trying to figure out why, exactly, the world needed another publication about history and culture, I finally came up with the thing I believe the humanities are really lacking to catch up with the rest of the STEMgang. Ecologica Americana is also wordcel weaponization-- to a degree never before attempted.
"We work now in the twilight of the authorities of that generation of historians and sociologists," MacDonald told us about the theorists, the anti-theorists, and the prophets of the "posts".9 "Their inevitably, *timebound* and theoretically infused version of reality - both social and epistemological -- is crumbling."
Cool!
Why the Gulf South? Well, I have identified an interesting, mostly unexplored cybernetic lineage. Running arguably from Thomas Jefferson's conception of an "Empire of Liberty," John C. Calhoun's "Republic of Sentiment," and Edgar Alan Poe's world rending story "The Man In the Crowd," Southerners have in fact been very near the operational nexus of cybernetic discovery. That lineage briefly appeared to terminate with the death of Cormac McCarthy in 2023, a writer whose residency at the Santa Fe Institute for Complexity studies yielded a final pair of novels, titled *The Passenger* and *Stella Maris* that arguably (and I will argue) fundamentally cracked open the *ideological* prison of the novel, giving us the first truly cybernetic artifact of the medium.
Now listen-- I've sketched a wildly ambitious project here. Let's recap what's on offer.
Ecologica Americana: A series of networked, threaded relational discussions of how I personally have come to see American history. In the past, my attempts at starting a project like this have been too linear and constrained. When I was writing Esoterica Americana, for instance, I was actually almost never writing about America. I have cleared that up here, and have adopted a frame that allows me to spool out the ecological circumstances in which America appeared, has grown, and continues to exist.
The Gulf Desk: This is the “anything goes” section. We are probably gonna hit this one hardest in the early stages, which might be a little baffling, but establishing a character for the holistic project is important. Here we might talk about history, we might talk about community building, we might talk about art (especially music and literature). This is Sandbatchism. You all like me on social media, and some of you like me in real life. We will have fun here.
????? - I conceive this project as expandable, interactive, and modular. It would be very cool if some people hopped in and gave their own inputs to my outputs. It would be fun to do some salons. The sky is actually the limit. We might even sell tye-dye t-shirts.
Now— I have to address a specific group in the assembled audience.
My most sincere apologia10 must be extended to my Southern friends. I am going to appear to flay us hard. There are a lot of reasons for this, and I mean it only with love. The most granular visage of "The Plantation" emerges from our shared past. The most concrete explorations of the Plantation's material, spiritual, linguistic, and temporal residues live most clearly in our minds and in our lived geography. We have strong feelings about plantations, one way or the other.
I am stepping squarely out of an either orthodox or known unorthodox conceptualization of our history. Both Left and Right (and every other kind) commenters will have some cannon fodder when they point out "Hey Sandy, aren't you some kind of bastard Scotch-Irish slavery apologist anyway? Didn't you come from the ole Plantation?"
I've never been any kind of slave apologist-- as just about anyone who watches Twitter can tell. I am probably best called Scotch Irish. Whatever.
More importantly-- I haven't been a plantation-anything in two generations. And *that* means I'm on the Plantation just like everyone else. Fuck that! We gotta get out of here.
My perspective on the world-- history, politics, literature, clothing, opinions, and my life itself has always been impacted, deeply, by a real living experience of Southern intellectual life. I have deeply felt John Crowe Ransom's assessment that Southerners have come to feel themselves "in the American scene as an anachronism, and knows he is felt by his neighbors as a reproach."11
It is questionable to what extent "reproach" is correct about the South from the rest of America now, but without question some fixed kind of "otherness" remains. Ransom continued:
"He [The Southerner] is like some quaint local character of eccentric but fixed principles who is thoroughly and almost pridefully accepted by the village as a rare exhibit in the antique kind. His position is secure from the interference of the police, but it is of a rather ambiguous dignity."
Writing from within two generations of the Civil War, Ransom felt compelled to urge his "wish that the whole force of my own generation in the South would get behind his principles and make them an ideal which the nation at large would have to reckon with."
These words lashed me deeply when I first read them more than a decade ago. They still sting.
Our history, as Southerners, and particularly as "Deep Southerners," down here on the often-forgotten Third Coast, has often been cast as tragic. My belief is that tragedy is a choice, and in the continuing cybernetic spirit in which we have begun, my aim is to represent my home in a way that stakes my personal reputation as collateral against the possibility of finally fulfilling Gould’s request.
There is, also, another very deep connection to Gould and the rest of the Southern intellectuals, who produced I’ll Take My Stand. I have been trying to find my proper role in the commentariat stack for a long time. There have been lots of fits and starts, and promises made but not necessarily kept. The most personal aspect of Ecologica Americana is one that I very nearly left out here. It is, in part, an attempt to heal myself. This is my place to take a stand.
I am going to be public with things that I have in the past kept unrevealed, for a whole host of reasons. The goal is to cure ourselves of history, using history as the signal medium. Remember? That means me too. The world is not in especially good shape right now. There is a “loneliness epidemic,” there is a catastrophic climate scenario staring us all in the face, Millenials are entering middle—age, and as the “culture bearing stratum” for the immediate future, will have to shoulder an incredible weight as we move forward. We have to get ourselves right, because our collective tone will set the pace for everyone else. There is a growing— a very small, but growing culture of healing emerging from within our cohort. My goal is to join it, and to invite the rest of you to join it as well.
Does that sound good? Alright. Deep breath. Let’s play ourselves out with a bit of Nietzsche— for fun. We can all say this, and we can all mean it, and we can all be right.
I know my fate. One day my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous — a crisis without equal on earth, the most profound collision of conscience, a decision that was conjured up against everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed so far. I am no man, I am dynamite.
I’m not gonna Yarvin you, this is really happening.
It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now. (Pynchon)
McDonald, Terrence J. "What We Talk About When We Talk About History: The Conversations of History and Sociology." CRSO Working Paper #442, University of Michigan, October 1990. https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/handle/2027.42/51209?show=full.
Astrology and the stock market are both on the table fellas, get ready.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present. (Eliot, Burnt Norton)
Becker, Carl L. "Everyman His Own Historian." American Historical Review 37, no. 2 (1932): 221–236.
McDonald, Terrence J. "What We Talk About When We Talk About History: The Conversations of History and Sociology." CRSO Working Paper #442, CSST Working Paper #52, University of Michigan, 1990.
The main deviation from classical conceptions of “open-source” is that at some point, if this works, I may start asking you to pay me some money. This will be for my labor, not for my intellectual property, which you can slap anywhere you want.
Ibid.
Meant here in the formal Greek sense, an explanation for my actions and words.
Ransom, John Crowe. “Reconstructed but Unregenerate.” In I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition by Twelve Southerners, 1930. Original manuscript held by Vanderbilt University Special Collections.
We already know the right collaborator
I look forward to Collaborating