Design for the 60's
Lampman, Robert J.
Design for the '60s Live and Let Live. A Program for Americans, by Stuart Chase. Harper. 146 pp. $3.50. Reviewed by Robert J. Lampman In this, his sixteenth book, Stuart Chase offers a...
...Clearly the most fundamental changes are technological in nature...
...To build a world where people live and let live in reasonable security we must solve the two leading problems of how to avert nuclear war and "how to raise living standards around the world and so help to balance the present unstable condition of humankind...
...Our greatest problems are not on the domestic front, except insofar as the domestic situation blocks their effective consideration...
...His scope is set wide enough to catch all the essentials of this period in history...
...There is no clear connection between the international crisis and such matters as the domestic farm problem...
...Chase does not have any unique set of proposals about how to meet these international problems...
...it is here that Americans must concentrate their thinking in the years ahead...
...However, this slender volume disappoints the reader's hope that it, like the earlier book, might be a significant tract for the times...
...In this sense it is a sequel to his book, The New Deal, which was written almost thirty years ago...
...and political (world-wide upsurge of nationalism and the rise of new world powers...
...Chase observes that all the big questions are in the field of international relations...
...At the same time, he finds that the most important problem of qualitative standards is beyond the reach of legislation and will hinge upon "educating people to be bored with junk...
...In his preface the author asks the reader to consider the work as incomplete and in outline form...
...He lists a great variety of changes, which may be reduced to three kinds: military (nuclear weapons...
...Yet, in opening his writer's notebook and sharing his developing thoughts about problems and priorities, Stuart Chase has made a useful contribution to the discussion of national goals...
...He almost says that this kind of change itself is the problem...
...Planning, defined as "cooperation with the inevitable," is also offered as a way to solve our domestic problems...
...Thus, he writes, "The crisis of our time is applied technology, growing at an exponential rate...
...while the leading problems are recognized as international in character, more than half the material in the book is about domestic affairs...
...Reviewed by Robert J. Lampman In this, his sixteenth book, Stuart Chase offers a disordered beginning of ordering the problems of the 1960's...
...economic (increasingly "closed" or "organization" character of national economies, population pressure upon limited resources...
...The political problems will be solved only by a basic change of attitude on both sides of the Iron Curtain...
...Chase's general method seems to be to identify problems by locating big changes...
...Raising living standards around the world is a problem for local, national, and international planning...
...Nor is it clear that we can gain much understanding of the critical problems of today's world from a review of American history...
...The author's emphasis upon the planning method is epitomized by his proposal of a World Planning Board...
...Perhaps the book itself is the best evidence of the cultural lag about which Chase writes...
...The author has identified and ordered the problems technology has cast up for us...
...But the book is less than this modest claim would suggest and is best described as a collection of miscellaneous notes on a variety of topics set down in a bewildering pattern...
...The book has a disjointed character...
...But neither he nor anyone else has yet drawn up a cohesive and compelling program of action which will bring our domestic concerns into clear international focus...
Vol. 24 • September 2006 • No. 7
