QJM Advance Access originally published online on September 12, 2006
QJM 2006 99(10):721-722; doi:10.1093/qjmed/hcl102
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Maps and meanings
If you have ever gone walking in the countryside using Ordnance Survey maps, you will know that they can offer a rather nostalgic picture of the British landscape. Rights of way that are marked clearly on the map tend to peter out into bracken and gorse, or are barred by crops. This is usually the result of decades of disuse, rather than any malice on the part of landowners. Most farmers in my experience seem only too happy to pass the time of day with the occasional rambler, to point out where the original track ran a generation ago, and to show you a short cut across their fields towards your next destination. If your chances of ever completing an entire walk exactly according to the map are pretty slim, your risks of getting seriously lost in any populated area of Britain are also low.
Ordnance Survey maps tell us much about their era and culture of origin: they speak of past military certainty and imperial optimism. Other kinds of maps tell us about the map-makers and their society too. Clearing out the house recently, I came across a concertina file bulging with maps that I had collected on various trips abroad over the years and then filed. There was a glorious contour map of Kilimanjaro, dating from just before Tanzanian independence, with the snowy summits coloured in lovingly, and with illustrations of the local wildlife, as if the colonial surveyors and cartographers had wanted to create a memento to take home with them to the grey shores of England. There was a map of Moscow that I purchased in the dreary days of Brezhnev: the flimsy paper, dull colours and stark typography told you everything you needed to know about the Soviet attitude towards pleasure. By contrast, I also found some joyful maps of Prague and Budapest, bought in those cities when they finally freed themselves from communism, and showing all the monuments and great buildings as if seen from the air in three dimensions. And then there were five or six maps apiece for places like Paris, Venice, Greece, New York and California, not just because I had visited these destinations more than once, but symbolizing the fact that no one guide could possibly capture their complexity and potential.
‘The map is not the territory’. This famous axiom (from Alfred Korzybski, the Polish-American philosopher of semantics) is both self-evident and deeply challenging. We laugh at maps that show Rome, Jerusalem or the River Ganges as the centre of the known world, but seldom give a second thought to the fact that the meridian on a globe passes through an outlying suburb of south-east London, or that the north pole is always depicted above the south pole. Maps seem so convincingly to show things as they really are. I wonder if any Westerner can ever encounter someone from Africa without being subliminally influenced by an image of the monolithic vastness of that continent. Equally, can any African meet a Briton without a degree of puzzlement that this small, jagged and oddly anthropomorphic island has in its time possessed so much of the planet?
Korzybski's axiom, of course, refers not to literal maps but to metaphorical ones—the conceptual systems that we all use to navigate our lives. He had in mind particularly the limitations of biology (we can only recognize what our nervous systems have evolved to perceive) and the limitations of language (we can only make sense of objects in terms of the words and syntax provided by our cultures). He wanted to remind people that the descriptions of reality that we toss around all the time—even those that pass for scientific ones—can only ever have the loosest and most provisional connection with what is ‘out there’. We are, for instance, deluding ourselves when we believe that something called ‘right wing’ genuinely exists in politics, and that it lies on the opposite side of something called ‘left wing’. We are prey to a similar delusion in medicine when we assert that brain, gut and skin are separate tissues, or when we regard the brain as being in some kind of superior relationship with the other two. Such ‘maps’ merely offer an artificial punctuation of reality. They tell us more about our own mental systems than they do about the world itself.
Since Korzybski formulated his ideas 70 years ago, we have perhaps become even more uncertain about the relationship between map and territory than he was. A whole range of biologists, philosophers and social scientists have proposed in various ways that nothing actually exists at all outside our maps. According to such ideas we are entirely incapable of ever knowing what is ‘out there’. Indeed, the whole notion that there is anything ‘out there’ is sometimes described as a kind of neurological or linguistic illusion: all we can ever do is construct the world in the limited ways that our minds allow us to. The map, it seems, is the territory. Intellectually, I find these theories appealing and a helpful antidote to prejudice and certainty. However, I also have a sense that there is always something a bit tricky about any ‘claim to know reality, which at the same time claims that it cannot know reality’, as one critic has put it. Ultimately, it is probably better to go out into life with a faith that maps (Ordnance Survey or not) really do correspond more or less to some kind of real territory, so long as you take with you a compass, an anorak, a large bar of chocolate, and a willingness to ask the way when lost.
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