The Regent
Winter 2011, Volume 23, Number 1
ground-truthing
Loren Wilkinson
A
few years ago, in the west of England, I had the privilege of spending an afternoon with the Mappa Mundi in Hereford Cathedral. It is the biggest and most detailed medieval map of the world, drawn in remarkable detail on carefully prepared vellum (the skin of what was once a very large cow). It is, in its own way, a sort of 13th century “Google Earth,” and it reflects humanity’s deep fascination with maps: with being able to step outside our own skin and have what we imagine to be a sort of God’seye-view of a place. I love maps. Forty years ago, when I wrote my doctoral dissertation, far from my beloved west coast, I covered one wall of my dingy Syracuse University office with a nine-map rectangle of large-scale Geological Survey maps of the mountains of Northern Washington. I spent too much time (away from Heidegger and Barfield and the Romantic poets) standing in front of my map wall and making imaginary trips: we could hike up Thunder Creek and camp there, and the next day climb over Park Creek Pass…and so on. Shortly after coming to Regent thirty years ago I discovered the map room in the old UBC library, and could procrastinate for hours by working up the BC Coast fjord
by fjord, glacier by glacier. I suspect you all have similar stories, whether with road maps, atlases, or the increasingly sophisticated on-line tools that let us navigate the globe or zoom in on a single street. Maps are marvelous tools: mindexpanding, time-saving, sometimes even life-saving. Yet they are, of necessity, deceptive and dangerous tools as well. Forgetting that the map is not the territory can lead to big trouble—especially in this era of GPS maps in cars—luring people into thinking that the lines on the screen are more real than the world outside their windows. Map-makers simplify and distort; no map can present things exactly as they are; this is a necessary physical limitation. But maps also embody a more subtle problem: Every map is also a philosophy: it presents a kind of argument about the world. The roughly circular Mappa Mundi in Hereford, for example, has Jerusalem at its exact center; is that wrong? Not necessarily, for one who believes the meaning of life is centered on the events that happened there, but physical navigation by that map would be difficult. When I used to pore over maps of the BC coast I discovered, to my consternation, that the only political lines crossing the vast forest valleys were labeled “tree-farm license.” What did that way of mapping the territory imply about its value? And how many Australian students at Regent have, somewhere, a map with Australia at the top and the other continents grouped subserviently around it, an arrangement that is no less (or more) right than having Europe or
North America front and centre, and North at the top. Maps reflect a distinction which Martin Heidegger made clearly: between earth, which is the rich and inexhaustible mystery we humans encounter when we venture outside our cars, cities, and the regular lines of our maps, and world, which is the human meaning we necessarily map onto that mystery. We can’t help but surround ourselves with worlds of our own making. (This little publication is called “The Regent World.”) And we drag our innumerable worlds with us across the earth. These worlds (which our maps reflect) are sometimes a glory, sometimes a horror. So it’s good to keep checking the map against the territory. Map-makers use a lovely word to describe the essential discipline of checking the map they are making, however perfect and satisfying it seems, against the uneven ground of the earth it pictures: ground-truthing. They get away from the table, outside the car, and walk across the earth, which is always bigger, richer than the map. Maps are useful guides. But we need to keep checking them against the bumpy ground we walk on. The intertwined pleasures and dangers of maps are especially good to be aware of in a school of Christian theology like Regent: for theologies too are maps—human worlds imposed on the mysteries of God’s action. It is all too easy to become overly comfortable with our world of necessary maps. Perhaps, then, theological students—and professors—must, more than anyone, cultivate the discipline of ground-truthing. Loren Wilkinson Professor, Interdisciplinary Studies&Philosophy