Maps, and how they can help us reconcile conflict and make the world a better place
By: Alex Marten
Tags: Science, Truth, Philosophy, Maps

Jorge Luis Borges — essayist, magical realist pioneer, and all-round dude — once wrote a story about a country where their obsession with mapmaking had reached a point where the maps that were being made were the same size as the country they were mapping. These maps were as accurate as it is possible to get, detailing as they did everything contained within the country, on a scale of 1:1.

This is absurd, of course. Such a large map would be useless (and, as Lewis Carroll wrote in an earlier exploration of the same concept, “the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the country itself as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.”).

But this thought experiment tells us something very interesting about maps, and about our human theories of the world, and about truth.

Image courtesy British Library, no known copyright restrictions

If you want to find your way around London, you will probably sometimes use something like Google Maps, and sometimes look at the Tube map, and sometimes — if you’re particularly retro — use a paper Ordnance Survey map or suchlike. These maps are useful for different purposes and in different scenarios; it depends whether you’re walking, or taking the tube, or you have your phone on you, or you don’t.

That’s all pretty obvious, but it’s illuminating to think about what maps are. They are abstractions from reality; they take the bits of reality that matter in any given situation (e.g. the tube stations when getting across London) and they link them together in ways that are useful for a given purpose (getting from station A to station B).

The key is that a map is as useful for the things it leaves out as the things it leaves in. As Borges and Carroll demonstrated, a map the size of the country it represents — a 100% accurate map — is useless.

As humans, most of the tools that we use to understand and describe the world — scientific theories, religious doctrines, alternative therapies, even words themselves — are also abstractions and, in some important ways, maps. Once you think about it all in this way, a lot of things become clearer, and a lot of the seeming conflicts in our world fall away.

The Tube map of London and the Ordnance Survey map conflict — the relevant distances between the stations do not agree with each other, and there are a lot of things on the OS map that aren’t on the Tube map — but that doesn’t mean they’re not both in some sense true, at least when it comes to navigating one’s way around London. One is useful for some purposes, and the other is useful for others. The OS map doesn’t help much if you’re travelling by Tube, and the Tube map doesn’t help much if you’re travelling by foot.

Now consider the two seemingly conflicting theories of astronomy and astrology. If you’re in a spaceship travelling around the universe and need to know how to get to the next star, an astronomer’s advice would be very useful; an astrologer’s advice would be very much less so. However, if you are struggling to make an important decision, or you are feeling depressed, an astrologer’s advice may be very helpful; an astronomer’s much less so.

Image courtesy British Library, no known copyright restrictions

Maps are abstractions of reality, they are not reality, and every theory we have is a map. It is either useful for our purposes or it is not useful. The same goes for theories of reality; they may seem to conflict (astronomy vs. astrology), but that doesn’t mean both maps aren’t useful for navigating particular terrain in a particular way.

Whether they conflict or not, or even whether they are “true” or not is irrelevant. What is relevant is the question “is it helpful?”.

Reality has no purpose; it has no intention. It is only when humans come along with their purposes and intentions that maps are required, and those maps must be judged on whether they are useful for our human purposes or not, not on some specious judgement of “truth”.

But scientific and religious dogma can and often does very easily slip into making claims about being “true”, and this can be to the point of exclusion of other theories. This doesn’t need to be the case. The fact that a map clings effectively to the truth does not mean it is the truth. As philosopher Alfred Korzybski said, “the map is not the territory”; we must not confuse helpful models of reality with reality itself.

The theories behind Western and Eastern medicine are very different, and very conflicting, which may lead people to take sides, believing only one or the other to be true, but understanding them as maps shows us that we don’t need to take sides. Taking sides would be like refusing to use the Tube map because you believe the Ordnance Survey map to be more “true”. It would be meaningless, and you would be depriving yourself of a useful tool.

The fact that Western or Eastern medicine both leave out a lot is to be expected; as we have learnt, a map is defined as much by what it leaves out as what it retains. We should not expect that these two different maps should agree with each other; they are designed for different purposes, they map different terrain.

Image courtesy British Library, no known copyright restrictions

This doesn’t mean that all theories are true; far from it. There are, after all, bad maps which send you on wild goose chases (though such a map may be useful if you were in fact intending to chase a wild goose). What it does mean is that theories must be judged on their usefulness for their given purpose, not on the impossible measure of how much they cling to reality. When we think we’re testing a theory against reality, more often than not we are in fact just comparing it to another prevailing theory — another map — which is like evaluating the Tube map based on whether it matches the Ordnance Survey map; a meaningless comparison.

So, what can we learn from maps? We can learn that differing theories of the world can seem to conflict but be valid nonetheless. We can learn that truth is merely a function of usefulness. And we can learn that to aim for pure truth — a theory of everything, a 100% accurate 1:1 scale map — is a fool’s errand, and will only end up enraging the farmers.