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In-Depth Information
Figure 1.13.
A typical bolt of lightning as seen from the shore coupling the sky to the water. It takes little
imagination to realize how awesome this spectacle must have been to primitive man.
of the shaman is exploitation of the masses by religion, but to others this is faith-based
modeling of the unexplained.
Meaning and understanding are intertwined, inextricably tied together. The world of
the primitive was no less understood than is the technological society of today. The map
is not the reality, but the map is what we humans have. The map changes over time,
sometimes in systematic ways and other times in jumps, with the future being discon-
nected from the past. For example, Benjamin Franklin changed the map by showing that
lightning is the discharge of electricity from the clouds to the earth and thunder is the
subsequent slapping together of the air masses that had been so dramatically cleaved by
the discharge. This scientific understanding of the phenomenon is part of a mental map
that today captures physical phenomena in a web of interleaving theories.
This change in understanding of the physical world has brought with it an associated
change in meaning. In the case of lightning the change is a loss of teleologic meaning, in
the sense of phenomena having no more purpose than the unfolding of physical law. But
to some this in itself, the manifestation of scientific law, is equally a manifestation of
god; a god that is as pervasive as, if less personal than, the god of the primitive. Others
completely disconnect the scientific laws from any idea of a god and are left only with
the map.
