Prologue On the Earth- Where Are We? Maps, Mercator Illusion, Creative Disorientation
The condition of not knowing where you are is called being lost. Our maps of the world, the ideas within which we live our lives, are defective. The vast majority of the world’s literate people, when asked what thisimage is:
Mercator Map
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_map_projections
GET ALL THE RELEVANT MAPS HERE (SEE BELOW)
Will answer “the world”. Regrettably, it is a map, not the world, and like any map it necessarily contains built in omissions and distortions. It was drawn up by Gerardus Mercator in 1579. It was useful to contemporary European mariners for purposes of navigation and thus became a standard image. The particular distortions of his map are greatest as it moves across latitudes from the equator to the poles. The more northerly or southerly areas near the poles are drastically expanded compared to the equator and tropics. However few mariners intended to go to the polar regions, so the distortions didn’t matter much to them. The sailor’s pragmatism was local, but Mercator’s problem with distortion was universal. It is an unfortunate mathematical fact that there is no perfect way to represent the surface of a sphere without distortion on a two-dimensional surface like a page.
One unintended consequence is that those who have the advantage of education have sometimes imagined that their mental maps are not distorted. This hybris is dangerous to you and the people around you. The smarter you are, the more you need to remind yourself that every insight is partial blindness. Look at the map above. Areas far from the equator are distorted in terms of their distances and are shown much larger than they actually are. This is one of the major issues with a projection of a globe onto a cylinder. In fact, Greenland is nowhere near the size of Africa, despite appearances; Alaska is smaller than Mexico, despite appearing to be triple the size; China is quadruple the size of Greenland, not roughly equal. In the Mercator projection, Canada, the US, Greenland, Iceland, Scandinavia, and Russia are inflated, as are Antarctica, New Zealand, Australia, plus the areas around Cape Horn and the Cape of Good Hope. Europe is inflated as well. The tropics, particularly Africa and South Asia are relatively larger than they appear in the Mercator projection. It is worth wondering if the regimes and policies that emerged in the US and Russia been exacerbated by the fact that their world map makes both of their territories look so much larger than they really are. Mercator is not alone:
The world might also be mapped like this:
Dymaxion Projection
And a different set of distortions would be implied.
Other accurate, differently distorted maps look like this:
Polar Projection
https://www.dreamstime.com/stock-images-world-map-polar-projection-image13080214
and this:
Behrman Projection
And this:
Healpix
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HEALPix
And this Upside Down N/S map
https://www.mapsinternational.com/upside-down-political-world-wall-map.html
And this world map centered on Chicago:
https://manywaystoseetheworld.org/products/custom-city-centered-world-map-prepared-for-you
which could as easily be centered on Shanghai or Johannesburg or Buenos Aires or some coral flyspeck in Polynesia, all with dramatically different results.
As long as the principles used in making a map and the relevant unavoidable defects are acknowledged, they are all true, but they are of varying kinds of utility, depending on what purpose the map is to serve. There are different ways of mapping the same world, apparently vastly different, because of markedly different choices among misrepresentations. No map of the world is undistorted, yet they are indispensable, because without a map there is no way to know where you are and where you wish to be. You can’t even properly get lost until you know where you are. Get used to the fuzziness of maps. It is the price of clarity. Get over the distortions in maps, they are unavoidable. They make accuracy possible. Imperfection is inevitable but improvement is possible. As Borges cleverly pointed out, maps must necessarily omit some things so that other things can be presented. Everyone is inclined to put the thing that concerns them the most in the center of their maps, thus the Chinese “Middle Kingdom” and the Roman capital city in the center of the “Mediterranean Sea”. Epic poetry or epic history also begins in the middle of things, temporally rather than spatially.
The shape of time is inevitably that of human life. Our stories and our lives have plots. They are dynamic artifacts of memory integrating space and time and matter into us. Right on the cutting edge of temporality where now happens we exercise will: transforming potentiality into actuality. Yet our understanding of space and time is flawed. We know they are infinite. Some impressive science says so. Yet we can have no clue what “infinite” space or time means in any human sense. We know space as local, bounded like us. Time is similarly constrained. Nobody has ever experienced “infinite time” in any way that can be communicated. Our time is a journey from a beginning to an end and literature reflects this. Comedy is about revocable mistakes and first half of life, which ends in marriage. Tragedy is about irrevocable errors and the second half of human life, which ends in death. Epic is our collective, common story through history. Joyce saw that our story is about a finite past and an infinite future swinging like a hinge on the immediately experienced present.
One of the earliest known maps of the world
PHOTOS:
Anaximander’s world map
,
1565 English world map
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Old-world-map.jpg
satellite photo 4.0 of planet
Like photographs, the value of maps is practical; their worth depends on what you are trying to do with them. A satellite photo may fail to show your dwelling, even at the highest resolution, but it may show the location of a hurricane. Whether the photograph is a good photo or not depends on whether you are selling real estate or forecasting weather.
No human representation, whether of space or time is perfect, lacking in distortion but there is more than what we get wrong. The best art tells us lies that reveal the truth about who we are and where we are and what our future could be. Maps are never as accurate in representing space as we might wish. It is the same with journeys through time, the collected sagas of our species are fractured reflections of who we were, who we are, and who we might become. History on a global scale in the twenty-first century is the convergence of hundreds of centuries of stories lived by billions of people in vastly different circumstances which might be mapped in an infinite number of different ways, for different purposes, without any one map necessarily being either perfect or useless. This Big History is one of those stories composed of other of stories intended to remind the reader that the Delphic Injunctions are both good as ends in themselves and as a means in addressing the Great Task: the reconciliation of love and reason. As is traditional, we begin, not at the beginning, but in medias res, with human beings of our age symbolically mapping the world around them, pursuant to knowing their world and themselves.
The World Historian’s Art As the Mapping of Human Time: What Are We Doing?
The study of world history in the last century has gone through three stages.
The first stage began during the era of WWI. Roughly a century ago scholars began to produce histories of world civilizations. These studies focused on the independent development of disparate civilizations, searching for their unifying principles and life cycles. The two most influential practitioners were Arnold Toynbee and Oswald Spengler. They drew a very broad readership because they combined their scholarship with a concern among the western readers for the future of their own culture/civilization, a future that many perceived to be in doubt. Spengler’s Decline of the West first published in 1918, second volume 1923) was a pessimistic cri de coeur from a German intellectual that diagnosed a dying civilization and attributed cultural exhaustion, creative bankruptcy and self-destructive politics not just to Germany but in the West as a whole.[1]
Toynbee’s massive twelve volume A Study of History, (1934 to 1961) treated world historical civilizations as independent organisms that follow a universal pattern of “life” from genesis to disintegration.[2] He argued that in every civilization, a “creative minority” enabled their civilization to respond to the challenges posed by environment, geography and outsider peoples. The rise, efflorescence, and ossification of these “creative minorities” contained within them the fate of their civilizations. Both Spengler and Toynbee were the spokesmen for historically traumatized peoples whose cultures had been mortally wounded by the mutual suicide pact of the World Wars. These world historians were especially influential among mid twentieth century Europeans because they addressed the anxiety about the future, the crisis of confidence and the spiritual malaise that resulted from the irredeemable self-immolation of the World Wars.
In the second half of the twentieth-century a new generation of scholars re-engaged with the study of world history. Unlike the first wave, these authors defocalized individual civilizations or culture zones, and instead examined how large scale natural or interactive patterns worked across time and space to change the human condition, sometimes in ways that had little or nothing to do with nations and kingdoms or civilizations. The French Annales school pioneered in examination of history during the “longue duree” a period of time covering centuries rather than years and large geographical areas that combined various political or cultural domains rather than discrete civilizations. The initiator of this school, Fernand Braudel, showed in his book The Mediterranean (1949) how regardless of religion or political community, the Mediterranean basin formed a single zone of exchange and culture over an extended run of centuries from the late medieval through the early modern period.[3] His Capitalism and Material Life 1400-1800 (1967) examined the change in wealth during the transition of feudalism to capitalism and how this gradually modified everyday life.[4] The Annales School focused on long term processes rather than political events, whole populations rather than individuals. They led to a new level of abstraction in historical writing. Braudel’s History of Civilizations (1995), focused on the almost imperceptible effect of how large-scale elements like technology, geography, climate and environment shaped daily life as well as precipitating prominent historical events.[5]
William McNeill’s The Rise of the West (1963) was a result of a ten-year project: a comprehensive history of the origins of Western civilization.[6] Once a civilizational backwater, McNeill traced in great detail the world historical connections that eventually made the West the dominant power that it has been for the last five centuries. Explicitly intended as a response to Spengler’s Decline, McNeill offers a far more optimistic account of the convergence of the disparate strands of world history into a global narrative. McNeill also wrote what is arguably the most important history book of the twentieth century. In Plagues and Peoples (1976) he created a groundbreaking, comprehensive account of all the major epidemic diseases globally from the beginning of recorded history to the present.[7] He managed to plot the European Black Death (usually treated in isolation by specialists) from its initial outbreak in India through its transmission along trade routes to China, Central Asia, the Middle East, Africa and finally Europe. He also did the same for other epidemic diseases, which was an immense project. This analysis gave him a powerful tool to explain the European destruction of the Mesoamerican civilizations: Old World microbes that the inhabitants of the Americas had no resistance to created mass death far beyond what Conquistadors could have done with mere gunpowder. McNeill’s breakthrough was to decisively connect natural science with social science by bringing biology and history together.
Philip Curtin showed in Cross Cultural Trade in World History (1984) how trade created a mutually beneficial commerce in ideas that was far more influential than the mere commerce in goods.[8] Carrying his analysis from the ancient river valley civilizations to modernity, he shows how portable human ingenuity is and how advantageous it is for every culture not to have to re-invent the wheel. Intercultural exchange is shown to be a positive sum game. In the Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex, (1990) Curtin showed how a vast network of cross-cultural trade effectively created an “Atlantic Sphere” uniting Africa, the Americas, and the Western European littoral over a period of centuries.[9] Curtin’s final work, The World and the West (2000) covers the trajectory of Western expansion, dominance and decline over the last 500 years, with examples drawn from not just from the west but also from Siam, Ghana, Japan, Buganda, Indonesia and the Ottoman Empire as well.[10]
I sat in on McNeill’s history of the world lectures while I was in college at the University of Chicago; Curtin was the department chairman who hired me for my first job out of graduate school at Johns Hopkins. I agreed to construct and teach a history of the world from scratch. This work is an elaboration of that course I taught almost forty years ago. The second wave of works by Curtin, McNeill and Braudel has received immense academic acclaim, but they have not had much impact beyond the scholarly community. This is largely because they are rather erudite and “academic” in their orientation and, unlike the first wave, they do not try to directly respond to ongoing concerns in the broader culture.
The third wave of world history addresses concerns prominent in early twenty-first century civilization: environment, technology and the acceleration of historical change in a globalized world. This third wave draws on the second by assessing natural and “material” influences or readings of history, but does so in a way that directly, if narrowly, connects to contemporary anxieties. Jared Diamond has argued in Guns, Germs and Steel(1997) that Spain was able to colonize and conquer New World civilizations because the east-west axial alignment of Eurasia gave its Civilizations a vast advantage in terms of biological and epidemiological diversity.[11] The explicit purpose of Diamond’s intervention was, of course, to show that it was not racial superiority that led to Europe’s advantage, and that the imperialist pretensions of the West that were based on that presumed superiority are indefensible. In Diamond’s work Collapse (2005), Diamond examined a varied collection of historical peoples, from Greenland to Easter Island, whose culture drove them to an avoidable extinction caused by environmental collapse.[12] Cultural dysfunction combined with a failure to meet the challenges of environmental degradation on small scales portended a global environmental catastrophe in the twenty-first century.
[1] Spengler, Oswald, The Decline of the West, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1932). For those that are paying attention, it is worth noting that Spengler is the conceptual Ur-source for the contemporary racist/nationalist Alt-Right, which does in fact have an intellectual tradition. The fact that the race baiting, quasi literate canaille who agitate for white identity ethno-nationalism are generally unaware of Spengler and his successor, the Nazi Carl Schmitt, does not make these writers any less relevant.
[2] Toynbee, Arnold, A Study of History, 12 Volumes, (London: Oxford University Press, 1961).
[3] Braudel, Ferdinand, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 2 Volumes (New York: Harper Colophon, 1976).
[4] Braudel, Ferdinand, Capitalism and Material Life, 1400-1800, (New York: Harper Collins, 1973).
[5] Braudel, Ferdinand, The History of Civilizations, (New York, Penguin, 1995).
[6] McNeill, William, The Rise of the West, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963).
[7] McNeill, William, Plagues and Peoples, (New York: Anchor, 1976).
[8] Curtin, Philip, Cross Cultural Trade in World History, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
[9] Curtin, Philip, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
[10] Curtin, Philip, The World and the West: European Challenge and Overseas Response in the Age of Empire, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
[11] Diamond, Jared, Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, (New York: Norton, 1997).
[12] Diamond, Jared, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, (New York: Penguin, 2005).