Perspective Is All
Siepmann, C. A.
Perspective Is All Some Things Worth Knowing, by Stuart Chase. Harper's. 278 pp. $3.95. Reviewed by C. A. Siepmann -"rpniNK like a wise man, said Aris-totle, "but communicate in the language of...
...Perspective is all...
...But even more alarming is the paradox that, like the old woman who lived in a shoe, we have so much knowledge nowadays that we don't know what to do...
...It is nothing less than a synoptic grasp of the significance of man's accumulated knowledge and experience...
...Because he is alarmed at the rate at which most of us today are losing touch with reality...
...The first is education and the way we handle it...
...People on the right and on the left are rapidly becoming isolated from reality in a fog of slogans...
...The second is the countervailing force of mass communication which, in its studied contempt for wisdom, constitutes a roadblock to maturity that, until we remove it, leaves good men like Stuart Chase out on a limb...
...Why has he undertaken such a Herculean task...
...His latest book is his most ambitious, for in it he tackles not just one subject but the funded knowledge of mankind...
...Gen-eralists are needed in great numbers to offset what the specialists are doing to us...
...For many years Stuart Chase has been trying to do just that...
...The approach to knowledge and the areas of knowledge which his book invites us to explore are already the property of any really educated men...
...The 21 chapters in between (ranging in length from six to 16 pages) prepare us for this test...
...For Chase is scared by "the extent to which specialists have distorted the environment of the world today and pulled human behavior out of scale...
...Whether Chase successfully imparts this insight is perhaps another question...
...Taking us for what we are, it keeps us where we are, denying us that which we have in us to become...
...But the dangers of such shorthand treatment of huge subjects is illustrated by the few pages devoted to the subject of religion which are so superficial as to be positively ludicrous...
...Among the subjects surveyed are the origin and nature of the universe, the history of man, the story of language, science, economics, psychology, and political behavior...
...It ends with a quiz of Chase's own invention, intended as a sample measure of our hold on useful knowledge...
...In book after book he has chosen important subjects and, without oversimplifying, has tried to make them clear and interesting to the lay reader...
...Here is an aspect of our time, a "force" more insidious and dangerous, surely, even than the specialist whose myopia Chase sees as the great danger of our age...
...Why," he says, is a vastly more important word than "what...
...Read the book, and you can pass the test...
...Reviewed by C. A. Siepmann -"rpniNK like a wise man, said Aris-totle, "but communicate in the language of the people...
...Making sense, or finding perspective on ourselves and the universe, is the urgent responsibility of what he calls the "generalist," and his book is an invitation to you and me to become a generalist—to offset the menace of the specialist...
...Knowledge is useless other than as it throws light on principles...
...Chase admits that his "selection of areas of useful knowledge is a highly personal one...
...Not all knowledge makes for wisdom...
...Failing to recognize that he is merely demonstrating how and where he himself looked for wisdom, many will take the knowledge he imparts as itself a key to wisdom, and the final quiz will encourage them to do so...
...Chase agrees with A. N. Whitehead that wisdom is "the way in which knowledge is held...
...This is the Reader's Digest fallacy, and it is dangerous...
...What puzzles me most about the book is its silence on two subjects which, conceivably, account for the fact that so few are "generalists" today or likely to become such tomorrow...
...A good deal depends on the reader...
...Chase's goal is clear and admirable...
...The main problem is to make sense out of the vast deal that we know...
...There is no harm in that, as long as you recognize that he is merely demonstrating an approach...
...First is the fact that so many of us still let emotion, not reason, govern our outlook and behavior...
...For some of those who are not thus educated his book may be a snare and a delusion...
...The book opens, therefore, with an attack on quiz programs for glorifying useless knowledge...
...Would not true education lay the groundwork for the approach to wisdom (and the desire for it) that Chase bespeaks so clearly and so well...
...Two things, as he sees it, account for this...
Vol. 23 • January 1959 • No. 1
