The View From Nowhere: From Galileo to Ohio

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Can the expansion of Western culture from the sixteenth to the twentieth century be described in terms of a growing totalitarianism of the grid? -?Bernhard Siegert

The story of how Ohio came to be broken up into six-square-mile squares really starts with Galileo who did two things:?First, he said the Earth was neither the center of the universe nor our solar system. He was right, and he wasn’t even original. Copernicus had said this almost a century prior, and a Greek guy named Philolaus a thousand years before that. But, he said it louder than the other guys so the Catholic church could hear.

In challenging the church he made the heliocentric model a?matter of concern?to society. It clashed with church cosmology and pointed out something the church was wrong about. This delegitimized the church and in doing so stirred a controversy. Now it was not just the scientists that cared about the heliocentric model, but the whole of the Western world. Oh, the Drama!

The?second?and much more important thing that Galileo did was generate a new common sense?point of view?that we all today take for granted. By?point of view?I mean literally, a point of view, a place to look from, a vantage point, from the top of a mountain or from a plane. People have called this point of view “the view from nowhere” or the “perspective of the universe.” With Galileo the sun not only became the center of the solar system but a point of view from which to look at Earth that has since become durably attached to a “rational” and “scientific” common sense.

With Galileo,?to know?became?to know from the outside. The most rational perspective became not only outside of nature, but outside of terrestrial life entirely. Rather quickly?place became space. As I write this I look at a globe I stole from the home of a famous movie director.

I was drunk, sue me.

The globe feels natural to me. To look at this sphere from this point of view, I am the sun, I am God. Teach the middle schoolers (x,y) geometry so that they always imagine themselves outside the graph. Give toddlers globes so they “get it.” But this perspective didn’t really occur as common sense to people before Galileo.

To look at the (x,y) graph we call the Earth as though I am the Sun or God opens up the possibility of ideas like demographics, Google Maps, and the nation-state. It leads me to believe that good knowledge comes from satellites. And yet this shift in everyone-as-God rationalistic point of view, the view from nowhere, took time. The best place to watch its evolution is in maps.

Above is a funny map of ancient Rome. Notice that there are no grid lines. There are now 90-degree turns. Everything is relative. The shape is radial, not gridded. We are not directly above the city, but instead at a sideways glance as though we’re on top of a mountain looking down. There are no streets.

Below is Lisbon, Portugal today. The area was “settled” in about 1,200 BCE and although it has been ruled by various power since, it has never totally been leveled. As a result, the streets maintain the organic character that predates?the view from nowhere?and thus the grid. If you can find a right angle in this image let me know. It is not geometric, but instead a dialectic between land and society. Now let’s contrast Lisbon with Lima, Peru because it was really in the “tabula rasa” (ugh) of the New World where Europeans could start to put this theory of turning place into space into practice.

Lima was settled by Europeans in the late 1500s, about the same time that?place was becoming space. Below is Lima today. You’ll notice that although the grid is emerging, it is always anchored first in some physical aspect of place. In the San Juan de Lurigancho area you’ll notice that there is clearly a central thoroughfare that follows a river at the base of the valley and from that central river line a grid sort of emerges.

In the central part of Lima the gridding is anchored by the ocean. But in all cases here you can see that in Lima, the gridding is anchored by something in the physical reality, whether an ocean or a river. In Lima, we see that the way people imagine?space?is still anchored in part by the?place. The theoretical grid lines are organized by the physical environment.

Now let’s look below at Manhattan, which came under European control a few hundred years after Lima. While it was New Amsterdam, the area was still organically rooted in place. We see Broadway (then, Brodweg) heading to the right (North) into the woods and farmland, which was a thoroughfare for bringing resources into the walled town.

Eventually New Amsterdam turned to New York and was gridded. In the map below however we see the legacy of Broadway, and how it doesn’t really fit into the picture, but instead squiggles North-ish through the crystalline grid. We can also see the legacy of New Amsterdam in the southern end of Manhattan where it feels as though the grid wants still to be rooted in ocean, then there’s a sort of grid compromised zone before the true (x,y) axis begins. Anyone with a middle school math education—aka a Galilean space education—can intuitively navigate New York.

But, of course, Manhattan does not run directly North-South, and so in some ways the grid of NYC is not entirely constructed from the perspective of the sun or of God or of the Universe.

The real moment when space became totally detached from place was when a bunch of rich New Yorkers after falling in love with their Manhattan grid got together with the US Federal Government and invented Ohio. It went something like this:

US Gov:?Hey, we’re super indebted because of the Revolutionary War and haven’t figured out how to actually collect taxes yet. What if we like, sell all the land West of the Ohio River. Would you all want to buy it?

Rich New Yorkers:?Do you all know what’s out there? Is it mountains, lakes, what is it? Is there gold?

USG:?Sort of…I mean, it’s a lot of land and trees. We think some of it’s good farmland. There’s a huge swamp near Toledo. There might be some people from the Miami tribe out there too.

Rich New Yorkers:?Okay, we’re in. But how do we break up the land?

USG:?We can send some surveyors out there, but like, the best they can probably do is a gigantic grid because all they’ll have is a compass and they’re pretty bad at their job. All the boxes will have to be lat-long. This guy Thomas Hutchins is really good at making 6-square mile squares. That’s probably the best we can do. He knows about the grid and geometry and stuff.

Rich New Yorkers:?Great. We love grids. We?get?grids. We can think of how all that space out there is actually a grid. We’re willing to gamble on grids. We’ll buy it all sight unseen.

USG:?Okay, but it can’t be like, all of it. This is what we’ll do. Within each 6-square mile block we’ll call it a?township?and break each?township?down into 36 1-square mile squares. You know, 6x6=36! And we’ll keep numbers 8, 11, 26, and 29 for ourselves and in every square numbered 16 we’ll put a school.

Rich New Yorkers:?Great. We’ll buy it all.

Since Ohio, everything West of Ohio has become Ohio. Today we design even our small towns based on compasses and the magnetic grid of the Earth and now satellites. Here’s the small town of Jackson, WY where I lived for a long time. It looks like a crystalline colony. It could exist anywhere. We look down from Google Maps and it make sense. It is a universal geometry. The compasses and now satellites that generate our common sense point of view of space and thus place have made us each God. We think we know about places, but all we know is spaces. We’ve left the Earth.

When my Prussian ancestors moved from the European plains to (42.237343, -97.017113) in Wayne, Nebraska Territory I wonder if they’d learned about (x,y) coordinates. To them, I wonder if the land appeared as a sea. Get your bearings from the convolutions of the liquid core of the Earth that as it moves generates a magnetic field that lets us make squares. If the convection currents in the mantle ceased tomorrow our sense of space and places would cease to exist. We’d have to explain to future generations that back then there were these things called compasses. They might ask why we just didn’t look at what was around us. You don’t get it. The Earth used to be a Globe.