Of Maps and Viewpoints

A few years ago as my wife and I were returning on a flight from the Eastern seaboard I had a window seat and studied a slice of America from 30,000 feet. It was a clear day and I had several hours of fascinating observation and reflection. The look of the land seemed much different than the sterile maps I often pore over.

Many different kinds of maps can accurately represent any given area, each, though, in its own limited way. There are maps that show elevations; others, highways; still others, geological formations. Plant types, population characteristics, and political boundaries can likewise be represented on maps and yet I could not see them on the geo-physical picture of ‘reality’ I was ‘seeing’. No map (or photograph, for that matter) can show everything about the area it represents, any more than what I could see outside my airplane window would reveal it to me from my perspective.

In order to be intelligible or definitive, a map must drastically simplify things; it must leave out all but what it means to represent. Consider a few examples: Eskimos, I have read, are able to discriminate nine kinds of snow. Characteristics of snow are important to them. To me, snow is snow. Koreans or Chinese, or most other ethnic peoples of the world make sense of spoken sounds that are meaningless to me but are very understandable to them. Meteorologists can see a storm coming when certain kinds of clouds are far away on the horizon or even beyond the horizon, but most people can see only the clouds. What Eskimos, Koreans and Chinese, and meteorologists thus clearly perceive as significant is, in a sense, invisible to others.

A cartographer in making a map wants to accomplish a certain purpose with his map: he includes in it everything that will promote or define this purpose and exclude everything that’s irrelevant to his purposes.

As our airliner flew over the vastness of America I felt I was seeing a synthesis between a land, which scriptures from my Church call “choice above all other lands,” (mountains and plains, forests, rivers and lakes and natural resources) and what man had made of it (farms, roads, cities, smoke—economic and recreational opportunities).

For a person with one preconception of potential (a land of freedom and security, “choice above all other lands”—a scriptural definition) I looked at it one way; and for another passenger flying on this same airplane with a different preconception of potential it could be regarded quite differently (one giant pool of resources to exploit for gain). But instead of being two dichotomous ‘pictures’ of reality viewed through different portholes, or an antagonism or tension between two potentials, could not what was being observed better be considered simply two different ‘viewpoints’ based on different values?

A similar statement can be made about any person’s system of knowledge or world view. It is like a map in that it is selective; that is, only certain things are represented on it while others are left out—by design or by ignorance. It represents and reveals those things that are familiar to the person’s background, interests, desires and goals.

Some of the inclusions on a person’s individual ‘map’ or outlook are those typical of his family and society as he grows up under the influence of parents, teachers, and peers, as he learns their language, history and customs. Thus he tends to adopt their ways of seeing the world as his own. He becomes ethnocentric. But in addition to this social factor, education also plays an important part in the development of the person’s ‘map’ of reality. So powerful is this individual factor that two people having different desires and attitudes and education can grow up in the same environment and yet have strikingly different ‘maps’ based on the breadth of their understanding and thus arrive at different destinations. So, maps are important.

What makes the difference, then, between peoples’ governing or driving outlook on life—or their ultimate destination? It is, in large part, what they have been exposed to, what they focus on, and what they value—and the accuracy and completeness of their set of maps.

It makes sense to me to try to accumulate many types of maps to help us sensibly negotiate life’s landscape. A single distorted, incomplete, or inaccurate map will not do.