M.E. Monday #7

M.E. Monday comes this week from Lance Strate:

"Individually and collectively, the relationship between human beings and their environments is one that is fundamentally indirect. Externally, stimuli excite and irritate our sense organs and nervous systems. Internally, we construct a map of the environment out of the various excitations and irritations that we experience, a map that may be more or less structurally homologous with the outside world, but a map that is, simply stated, not the territory  itself, as Korzybski famously put it...And out relationship to the outer environment, being indirect, is therefore mediated, hence McLuhan's observation that the medium is the message" (On the Binding Biases of Time, 2011).

Following on from last week's M.E. Monday from Carey, here we see Strate connecting to the role of communication as an intricate part of how we both understand the world, and how we are also shaped by it. Bringing together Korybski and McLuhan to connect two independent but influential sources who sought to bring clarity to our inability to directly know. What there is, there is, but we are only able to, as it were, draw symbols on a map. And as Korzybski noted, and as Strate refers to, whilst a map may be high in detail an accuracy, it is not the territory itself. It is the territory mediated through the symbols that have been agreed that enable the map to bring meaning to those who have been trained in how to read maps. Ultimately, it is but scribbles on a page. But with the references to understand and interpret those scribbles one can chart a path through the territory it represents.

So as daunting as it might sound, to be bereft of any certainty as everything is mediated, it brings forth a level of humility when we start to see that we are but doing our best to scribble something of value onto the map of what is. This doesn't mean that our scribbles are either meaningless or worthless. But such a perspective can hopefully give pause before we decide to scribble all over the maps of others just because we have determined a different way to draw our maps.