It’s a still, steamy morning. A heavy sky presses down on the already heavy air. Summer green deepens, bird song slips between the heavy foliage and atmosphere as an ever-so-slight breeze parts the humidity. Layers of air like rumpled sheets and blankets; layers of scents: moldy earth, damp cotton, pencil shavings.
I recently had the privilege of attending a Whole Measures Workshop co-hosted by Center for Whole Communities (CWC) and the Interaction Institute for Social Change. As described on the CWC website:
Whole Measures is a tool… developed to offer a means of describing and measuring the healthy relationships between land and people that we seek to create. It offers the beginning foundations for a highly integrated, whole systems approach that effectively embraces a wide variety of practical issues including biodiversity, social equity, human rights, civic engagement, and landscape-scale conservation.
My next few blog entries will be devoted to reflections inspired by my experience in the workshop. I begin with what is a central analogy that is used in CWC Whole Thinking Retreats as well as the Whole Measures Workshop: the four quadrant map.
Appropriately, the symbol on the bottom of the wooden bowl I chose at the start of the workshop was a north, south, east, west, quadrant diagram. Receiving the gift of a wooden bowl at the start of a workshop or retreat is part of the ceremony of any extended visit to Knoll Farm. To make sure we can all keep track of which bowl is ours, their is a unique symbol drawn un the underside. Using wooden bowls for meals a CWC retreats has its origin in Helen and Scott Nearing’s practice of eating from wooden bowls and with a wooden spoon. Helen and Scott were inspirations for CWC founders Helen Whybrow and Peter Forbes.
Map paradoxes
In a previous post on identity and difference I mentioned Lewis Carol’s paradox of the complete map. It’s worth quoting from Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893) where it appears:
“That’s another thing we’ve learned from your Nation,” said Mein Herr, “map-making. But we’ve carried it much further than you. What do you consider the largest map that would be really useful?”
“About six inches to the mile.”
“Only six inches!” exclaimed Mein Herr. “We very soon got to six yards to the mile. Then we tried a hundredyards to the mile. And then came the grandest idea of all! We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!”
“Have you used it much?” I enquired.
“It has never been spread out, yet,” said Mein Herr: “the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.”
We can compare this to nineteenth century philosopher Josiah Royce’s reflection in The World and the Individual (1899):
Let us imagine that a portion of the soil of England has been levelled off perfectly and that on it a cartographer traces a map of England. The job is perfect; there is no detail of the soil of England, no matter how minute, that is not registered on the map; everything has there its correspondence. This map, in such a case, should contain a map of the map, which should contain a map of the map of the map, and so on to infinity.
These two related paradoxes speak to a fundamental problem of knowledge: the map (a representation of the world) is not the territory (the world itself). Perhaps this is self evident, but it begs two questions: what about the map is the same as the territory, and what about map is different? We want our maps to be useful and meaningful so that what they show helps us navigate. We want to leave out the inessential and keep the essential. What we deem essential will depend on the task is hand. Do I need a map to show me how to get from point A to point B in a car? Or do I plan to hike off-trail across the mountains. In the first case a simple road map showing me routes and destinations in bright lines and with labeled points does the trick. In the second case, I’d do better with a topographical map that allows me to see elevation gain and shows rivers, ponds, swamps and peaks.
Despite the seeming obviousness of the map is not the territory idea, we often make the mistake in thinking that the lines, polygons, points and labels that color and demarcate our representations clearly correspond to reality without our picking and choosing — a road is a road is road is a road… We might ask, what’s in a map? — Would a road by any other name smell as sweet (or foul)? As a trail tender, I am very aware of how sometime the names for things do matter.”
The philosopher Wittgenstein tells us:
Hegel seems to me to be always wanting to say that things which look different are really the same. Whereas my interest is in showing that things which look the same are really different. I was thinking of using as a motto for my book a quotation from King Lear: ‘I’ll teach you differences’.
A map seeks a correspondence between a picture of the world and the world itself. However, since a map is not the world, there must be differences as well as correspondence. We are usually focused on correspondence — we want our representations, our maps, to be accurate and to guide us on our way. What if we focused on differences instead?
Using the language of the Whole Measures guide, attention to difference moves us up the ‘ladder of inference’ so that we can see the ‘lens’ or ‘filter’ we use to sort through ‘actual data.’ The guide tells us:
Our capacity to process large amounts of information depends on selective perception… Remembering the ladder inference helps us to make explicit the unconscious assumptions and self generating belief systems we hold (WM section 6, p. 1).
In the July, 2011 Whole Measures workshop I felt this difference as I looked at the Four Quadrants. This map is designed to nudge organizations into thinking beyond the isolated northeast, northwest, southeast, southwest ‘silos’ that inhibit organizations from seeing the relationships between ‘people and nature’ and ‘haves and have nots.’ This it does, but are my specific navigational needs met by this map? Are the Four Quadrants a road map when what I really need is a topographical map? Having nudged me to see something new, do I now need to construct yet another map that helps me navigate what may be a different territory?
Four those coming to the workshop with distinct needs and experiences, the four quadrants map is a start. It would be useful to go through the exercise of drafting a map from the ground up, so to speak — which is what I will try in my next post.
***
It has taken a few days to complete this post as I find time to wordsmith. Thunderstorms burst through the hot weather and cool, crisp air and blue skies have replaced heavy, saturated air. Summer green deepens.
