Among other things, this blog is about maps.
If you plan on exploring a place you’ve never been—let’s say New Orleans, Louisiana—having a map is a good idea. A political map will tell you that New Orleans is a dot in a boot called Louisiana, which is a boot in a shape called America. You’ll be able to see the dot where you stand, and the borders of all the other states and their relative positions. If you’re Alfred Korzybski in 1931 and you’re going there for a conference, that’s a nice start, but drawing a line between Chicago and New Orleans and setting out on foot might not be the easiest way to get there. For starters, there could be hills. Even mountains. You might want to check a topographical map to find out if veering this way or that might save you some effort, and a map of the waterways and crossings to keep your wool socks dry.
Even easier would be a road map, red lines for the big ones and blue for the back lanes. That should shorten the trip as well as give you an indication of where turn and where to stop the night. Even those decisions could be avoided with a railway map—get on the right line with a sleep car, and you’re there. Now, you’ll need a city map, which is probably the same arm-stretching size unfolded as the political map, but instead of a nation you get the roads, rivers, and points of interest in the Crescent City. Luckily, it’s six feet below sea level so you won’t need a subway map as well. Arrive a day early and you can use the mall map to find yourself a men’s department store and a decent pretzel.
None of these mentioned the unwanted conversation in the dining car, the late trolley, the sale on men’s cologne, the vagrants, or the smell of vomit along the way.
All which might lead you to famously declare to your conference buddies that, “The map is not the territory.”
Then what is it? Well, if it’s good, a map has a similar structure—a relationship—to the territory, which makes it useful for navigation. In other words, it’s predictable. I know not to expect to find a red line when I turn onto Highway 90, but I do expect to find a major road about where that line is, and I expect it to lead me east to west, across the bottom half of the state of Louisiana just like the road map says. If I end up in Baltimore, the map sucks. Without that map or a direct knowledge of the area, I’m feeling around in the dark.
At some point, there was no map of the state. Someone had to explore it, take measurements, and draw up an approximation of what he saw. So a map is also the way the experience of a place is communicated to someone who hasn’t personally experienced it. Just the important bits, though. Or what the cartographer deems important. Necessarily, most things not essential to basic navigation are discarded, to avoid the situation in the Jorge Luis Borges story in which the cartographers’ guild creates a map of the empire the size of the empire, corresponding perfectly in every detail, so that it’s useless in its precision.
Hang on. I promise I’m going somewhere with this.
A map, then, is a metaphor. A direct comparison of one thing to another thing that is obviously not the same thing. It’s a spatial metaphor, i.e. lines for roads and dots for cities, so it’s important to consider the scale. The distance between any two points on the map should be, say, 25,000 times less than the distance between the points it represents. And a map of a country won’t help you in the city, and vice-versa.
Less obviously, it also has a time component, making it a metaphor in space-time. It’s that place at the time it was mapped. If you return to New Orleans in a hundred years, the map may not be entirely useful. In a million, you might prefer a map of ocean currents. So if it’s to remain accurate, it’s a living metaphor, changing with the thing it stands for.
All that to say that map-as-metaphor-for-territory is itself a metaphor for the way we experience the world. Plato had his shadows on a cave wall, but the prisoners could just as easily have been chained in front of a giant map of Greece. I guess he chose the shadows because his students spent more time hanging out in caves than traveling with Rand McNally to unknown lands. It’s well-established by philosophers (for thousands of years) and scientists (fairly recently) that what we experience is not quite the world, but certain sets of data about it, mediated through the five senses. For example, we know the electromagnetic spectrum extends very far in both directions beyond the spectrum of visible light that we can see. And even that light is a one-sided reflection off an object we never experience in totality.
That’s a lucky thing. We experience a small fraction of the world for the same reason a map of America folds into your back pocket: effective navigation versus paralyzing overload of irrelevant information. The territory is always unknowable, but if a species survives, it’s because it learned to pay attention to only the details that are helpful for navigation. Maybe being able to see the radio waves from your favorite station doesn’t help you find food.
For the purposes of this essay and this blog, I’m calling a “map” a metaphor for the experience of something we can’t experience directly that allows us to get predictable, survivable results when navigating that thing. Your senses are one type of map. Or rather, five types, that your mind correlates into a unified experience, which really is easier than having to try to fold up “hearing” the way you found it so you can crossreference it with “sight”.
As humans, we also have the neat trick of being able to think abstractly about the world instead of being forced to respond in literal fashion to whatever sense data is streaming in at the moment. We can think. And when we do, we think in maps. I make decisions on how to interact with people based on a map of social norms I received from my culture as well as my own past experiences, and those decisions are meant to steer me to my desired relationships with various individuals and groups. If the map’s accurate I’ll get there. If I’ve received bad information, or just read it wrong, it’ll be a quiet Friday night this week and every week thereafter. And the way I schedule my day? With a map. Decide what career to pursue? Map. Tell right from wrong? Map. Anything above a basic instinct is a decision driven by a best-guess at the best course of action to take, and I think I could make the argument that even instincts are maps—albeit so essential to survival that they’ve long since burrowed into our unconscious minds where our dumb “rational choices” can’t find them.
The problem with a metaphor is that, taken far enough, it will always fail. That’s fine, so long as you know it’s a metaphor and can switch to another when the first no longer serves. Switch to the New York City subway map as soon as you’re beneath Manhattan. I don’t know how many people do that when they think about their world, though. If someone were to confuse the handful of maps they currently held as one single map, then confuse that map with the territory, I predict that their ability to navigate effectively might suffer.
On the other hand, someone who understood the nature of a map would know that there are many types of maps. That each has its strengths and weaknesses. That new maps can be acquired, even drawn from personal exploration. And that using the right one for the right situation, and then putting it away when the situation breaks that particular metaphor, would make their life a lot easier.