Maps: Accurate or Useful?
The London Underground came together in 1908 when eight different independent railways merged to create a single subway system. Initially, the map of the recently connected railways caused confusion for many subway travellers. The maps were logical and well intentioned -- every station was spaced to geographic scale with the above-ground streets and intersections. Rivers, bodies of water, trees and parks were also included, imposed on top of the below-ground subway lines. Because of the faithfulness to scale, stations were crammed together in the city center making them nearly illegible while other stations located further away had to be omitted completely. For commuters the map was geographically accurate, but was not so useful.
In 1931 Harry Beck, a 29-year-old engineering draftsman who had once worked for the London Underground had a key insight: people riding underground in trains don't really care about what was happening aboveground, they just wanted to get from station to station. It was the system that was important, not the geography.
Beck’s map skewed its scale, placing the stations at equal distances from one another, and removed the above ground street grid. This disproportionately enlarged the area around central London and made the surrounding suburbs look closer. The lines also only went in three directions: horizontal, vertical, or 45 degrees. Likewise, he made every station color correspond to the color of the line. What Beck did was make something that wasn’t so much a map as a diagram.
Beck's design was an instant success and has become the template for the way we think of metro maps today. Tokyo, Paris, Berlin, São Paulo, Sydney, Washington, D.C. -- all of them prioritize usefulness over accuracy, converting complex geography into easily interpreted geometry.
As far as we know, we are the only species in the universe that has the potential to be aware of our place in the universe. We have not stopped reeling from this realization. This reeling manifests itself in the maniacal pursuit of wealth and status, dogmatic religious devotion and limitless self-delusion. All of these outcomes are attempts at dealing with our precarious situation as humans, not unlike Beck’s reaction to the confusing and unhelpful original Underground map. Due to the overwhelming complexity (not to mention existential dread) of the universe, we too use self-made representations of reality as our guide rather than a literal understanding of the meaning of life (or lack thereof) as we go about our day-to-day lives.
As always, Ernest Becker in The Denial of Death lays out our situation with laser-like accuracy:
“Man cuts out for himself a manageable world: he throws himself into action uncritically, unthinkingly. He accepts the cultural programming that turns his nose where he is supposed to look; he doesn’t bite the world off in one piece as a giant would, but in small manageable pieces, as a beaver does.... The result is that he comes to exist in the imagined infallibility of the world around him. He doesn’t have to have fears when his feet are solidly mired and his life mapped out in a ready-made maze. All he has to do is to plunge ahead in a compulsive style of drivenness in the “ways of the world” that the child learns and in which he lives later as a kind of grim equanimity.”
The illusions we live by are not necessarily accurate, but they are useful. So useful, in fact, that they are necessary.
Becker’s “ready-made maze” of life is the inescapable culture we are born into. While the analogy of Beck’s map is illustrative of Becker’s point, the maze is a better analogy for one important reason: while a maze and a map can both lead you where to go, the promise of a maze is that there is a way out. Maps are open-ended, the maze of culture provides a definitive solution. While to you the maze may feel tedious, to others it feels like progress and you may call finishing the maze a “grim equanimity,” while others call it winning. This is the point: the “ready-made maze” works. It’s useful.
Jordan Peterson nailed it in 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote for Chaos, when he said:
“[Culture] crushes, as it hammers us into socially acceptable shape, and it wastes great potential. But it offers great gain, too. Every word we speak is a gift from our ancestors. Every thought we think was thought previously by someone smarter. The highly functional infrastructure that surrounds us, particularly in the West, is a gift from our ancestors: the comparatively uncorrupt political and economic systems, the technology, the wealth, the lifespan, the freedom, the luxury and the opportunity. Culture takes with one hand, but in some fortunate places it gives more with the other. To think about culture only as oppressive is ignorant and ungrateful as well as dangerous. This is not to say that culture should not be subject to criticism...We might instead note with gratitude that a complex, sophisticated culture allows for many games and many successful players, and that a well-structured culture allows the individuals that compose it to play and to win, in many different fashions.”
Most of civilization’s history has been the forging of mazes: structures of security and appropriate loyalty symbols to announce and defend one’s identity and one’s group. We need religions to make exclusive truth claims that are absolute. We need various certitudes, constants, and insurance policies at every stage of life. The mistake that is easy to make when you find yourself lacking freedom, dignity, and hope is to think the answer is that mazes are useless. What it really means is the “ready-made maze” you’re in should be substituted with a “personally-made maze.”
RIchard Rohr in his book, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life describes the first half of life as (sorry, one more analogy) the “container”. He says:
“The task of the first half of life is to create a proper container for one’s life and answer the first essential questions: “What makes me significant?” “How can I support myself?” and “Who will go with me?” The task of the second half of life is, quite simply, to find the actual content that this container was meant to hold and deliver.”
A too-fixed obsession with upholding the status-quo of the “ready-made maze” can cause just as much pain as trying to escape from mazes altogether. Instead, our task is to tailor whatever maze we were handed so as to prioritize usefulness over accuracy.