Not Knowing Things

Wednesday, October 2

Today’s text is from guest author Bridger Gordon. The text is Jorge Luis Borges’s one-paragraph short story titled “On Exactitude in Science”.

…In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

—Suarez Miranda,Viajes devarones prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658

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Wonderful. The story pretends to be a fragmentary excerpt from an old historical document, which I think is part of the reason it works so well. It rapidly develops this alternate world; originally an idea from a Lewis Carroll novel, Borges presents in a neatly condensed way the hubristic rise and fall of charting knowledge. Later, Umberto Eco’s essay “On the Impossibility of Drawing a Map of the Empire on a Scale of 1 to 1” gives expansionary consideration to the realities of this idea.

But I find this story to be worth a timely consideration. The quickest aim of progress in my own lifetime has been the quest to map the entirety of human knowledge through machines. A huge amount of time and resources have become committed to the task of reading in the most complete corpus of digital knowledge and creating statistical connections between points. The rise came as if from Borges’s fictional empire, focused on perfection and escaping dissatisfaction. First, the accumulating of small sand dunes of information on the early internet. Then, the searching through and mapping its unmarked hills. Next, the categorizing of relative place and use. Suddenly, the more rapid collection of points.

And now, the map speaking back to us. I find the current machines somewhat adolescent, but I imagine what the complete map may look like one day soon. I imagine what the world will be like when I can ask a question to my machine about science or philosophy or recommendation and get a most-informed synthesis. And I can’t help but despising it.

The joy that I find most purely in learning something new is the element of discovery. Whether reading, listening, or thinking, when I discover a new idea, it feels as though a new area of the map is being drawn for me completely new. The grey fog of war which previously covered it has cleared away. With all knowledge mapped and all questions answerable, I fear we will leave the mapping and memorization to the machines and find meaning in other, less joyful places. How are we to experience new, sincere things for the first time if other than through the exploration of unmapped areas of our lives ... social, professional, geographic, intellectual, etc.? Will we care as much about the real world, which those before us have already mapped and conquered? Or will we start to live in the hyperreal copy of it, where we have so much information we no longer care to explore? Will we be living in the empire or on the map lying atop it?

This is not to say that the charting of human knowledge is a wrongful cause; simply it is that we cannot be hubristic about its solutions and lazy about our curiosities. When most intellectually-blocked, I will feel as though all of the good ideas have already been created. It will seem as if the early thinkers had the relatively-easier task of picking the low fruit off the tree of knowledge. But I’ve come to understand that as the surface area of human knowledge expands, so too does its perimeter. There are so many wonderful fields which depend on all who came before. I love being in a world of quantum physics and abstract art and critical history, because those ideas are new and exciting. But I find them so much more satisfying to discover when I get to walk my way there, to discover freshly their ideas, and to form my own synthesis.

For today, all I ask that you try something new. Anything new. Go to an area of your city you’ve not been before and wander. Write something new. Ask your mom for a new recipe and cook it. Map the world for yourself and try – sometimes – not knowing things.