Or, the Google Maps View

 

Going on with what it means to be a Centrist; today we don’t need mountaintops to provide the view from above.  We’ve got Google Maps!  Gone are the old atlases, and the paper maps we used to pick up at a service station when visiting a new place. (Or there was the visit to AAA for travel maps, of which I still have a box. I also have rolls of section maps with detail of the county I used to live in.  I love maps.)

But with Google Maps, as with GPS, there’s a caveat.  Following step-by-step directions to a destination is like living down at the base of the mountain: you’re only seeing the area close to you.  It’s like driving on your road through the valley, wondering how this river drainage fits with the next one.  To get the big picture, one has to spread out the map.

This Is what Centrism offers: the big picture.

You have a great little newspaper/news site that is pretty balanced, you think, and gives you all the news you need. Or maybe you just bounce around, picking the news you want to read. First of all, you have to trust that source. We all know people who don’t trust entire  sets of news outlets.

Trusting your source is essential, just as trusting your GPS is.  Ever been taken on a wild goose chase by a GPS? (I’ve ended up out in the wild at least once; another time got stuck going in circles in Turlock, California. ) GPS is great, but it’s even better to know as much or more than it knows before you start.

Same goes for your news source. If you know the basics of the situation before you listen, you can avoid being led astray by the innate bias of any source. This isn’t God’s voice thundering on the radio waves, but that of a human who might have been influenced by someone who knows less that you do, if you’re being your real, intelligent self.  That human might EVEN have an ax to grind, an ideology to promote, a wacky theory to air.  If you don’t know, you have to trust that voice; but do you?

Again, we’re not talking about the Middle of anything here. Think of the GPS again. The middle is wherever you are right now.  Everything fans out from there, and you can enlarge your screen to  see father out.

You can find graphs showing the relative left- or right-orientation of various media sites. I’ve shown these to various people, and there is a definite tendency to see your own views as moderate, no matter what they are. To gun-loving conservatives, PBS is way to the left; to a universal-health-care progressive, the Wall Street Journal is right-wing.

The Middle is relative to where you are coming from, in every sense of the word.  The Center is the big picture. It’s what you get when you drop the news site and go to the history book. Yes, book, and, ideally,  a book from someone who has put in time and research in order to get the facts in order.  And even there you will find bias, so it might take more than one historian.

Finding the Center is not a quick fix. Not just Googling an answer. Rather, it takes time to see how all the parts fit together. If you like puzzles, it’s fun!