As we watch the Electoral College use maps to color states red or blue based on their residents’ votes, it’s easy to forget maps’ true purpose.
Today, maps hardly exist in their former Rand-McNally glory. With the innovation of personal GPS devices, gone are the road trips with dad battling the accordion map while swerving across a foreign interstate.
Functionally, maps are used for traveling. But theoretically, maps were created for containing.
People understand concepts they can contain, especially those that can be organized within neat, color-coated lines and shapes.
Journalist Robert Kaplan calls today’s map “an invention of modernism, specifically European colonialism.”
“The map, based on scientific techniques of measurement, offered a way to classify new national organisms, making a jigsaw puzzle of neat pieces without transition zones between them,” he said.
Our European ancestors sent ships with curious explorers down rivers and across oceans (hoping they wouldn’t fall off the edge of the flat world) to locate and quantify the whole of existence.
They thought they knew so many things. Their own discoveries proved them wrong about most of them.
America loves to be right, especially on our view of the world. And we are right until proven wrong.
We know all about other countries and their issues and their weapons — until we find out we don’t.
Many of our efforts in other countries will prove fruitless if we do not take great lengths to understand the cultural spheres beyond the borders our country once drew.
Our systems of defining are outdated in today’s increasingly borderless world of globalization.
Internationally, we struggle to understand a Middle East divided by distinct groups that pervade the borders drawn by now-departed European powers. Kurdistan, for example, is a cultural entity of about 20 million people that spreads over parts of Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Syria and former Soviet republics.
We entered the region with an understanding of the borders. The intersecting cultural spheres that define the region and maintain its instability greeted us instead.
Nationally, the election season illuminates our intended purpose of borders. The Electoral College combines the races, religions and lifestyles existing between a state’s lines into a few votes, the number varying by population. Thus, millions of people and their opinions are easily measured, examined and ranked.
The system makes the season a little jollier for politicians and journalists. Candidates focus their efforts on the swing states, and journalists can create headlines like this one in the New York Times: “McCain fights to keep crucial blue state in play.”
Overall, Americans don’t fuss much over the ancient and largely defunct method, and some center their largest boasts on this system of statehood (i.e. Texans).
But there are many wrongs found between our borders and within our system of bordering.
Before our country jumps into another war or another election, we should devote a few brilliant discussions in the Senate and Congress to our methods of defining the world.
When in doubt, I vote for a lot more sitting down and thinking before we do things. Our instincts and those of decision makers are largely learned. If the example we follow is wrong and we do not examine it, we will perpetuate that wrongness.
Our intuition teaches us that if the world has outgrown the clothes we’ve dressed it in, we should add another layer of labels on top of those that exist, breaking it into more digestible parts.
Though breaking borders down completely is an idealistic and impossible solution, reconsidering them is necessary.
As cultures change, the maps by which we define them should too.
Thomas Jefferson did not buy the Louisiana Purchase and leave it off the map. He sent Lewis and Clark to explore it. If we hope to gain more ground as an international generation that transcends and deconstructs the definers of culture, we must set our minds on a new front of discovery.
Our culturally outdated maps just won’t do.
Whitney Coleman is a journalism senior. Her column appears every other Friday.
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Chestertonian 3 years, 7 months ago
Dante wrote the Divine Comedy with a clear understanding that the earth was round several hundred years before Columbus. Before you poke fun at the ignorance of your ancestors, you may want to enlighten your own ignorance.
tommyscheurich 3 years, 7 months ago
Very interesting thoughts. But keep in mind that you may be attributing too much importance to political maps. Nobody draws them supposing Oklahoma to be a state full of Republicans and California full of Democrats. The maps are for convenient projections of candidates' likelihoods of winning Electoral College reps from states, and thus elections. In this way, oversimplifications of regional politics are actually "enshrined" in the Constitution. Unless it is amended...