"Way of Looking at Things"

   One of the most significant and least noticed revolutions going on in the United States today is a profound disillusionment with the methods of thinking of the immediate past and the search for new ways of thinking. The old ways which did so well in the nineteenth century and brought us to a peak of material power and physical affluence do not seem to work so well in dealing with social or personal problems. Those old ways were associated with analytical methods: the way to think about anything was to isolate it and take it apart. The new way, sometimes called contextual thinking or ecological thinking, is rather to look at the problem in its total context with all its possible ramifications. This puts the problem into a larger framework and emphasizes qualities of context rather than the older method of analysis and quantification.

   The most obvious example of this change is in biology and the “Life Sciences” which were originally built on analysis and classification in categories and sub-categories based on Linnaeus. The shift in biology from the taxonomic to the ecological approach has given rise to a bitter debate among biologists between the “reductionists” who believe that life processes can be reduced to the laws of physics and chemistry and the “anti-reductionists” who deny this. The growing victory of the latter group among biologists has been accomplished by the spreading of the ecological point of view, under such names as “field theory” or “general systems approach,” and has produced numerous books, such as Arthur Koestler’s “The Ghost in the Machine” (MacMillan, 1967).

   DeBono’s book is an effort to present this “new” method of thinking in the simplest possible way, with considerable use of diagrams. He calls it “lateral thinking” and contrasts it with the “older vertical thinking.” His book is brief, clear, and almost too elementary. But it is presented in an interesting and imaginative way and is a good introduction for anyone who is new to this problem, which may well be vital to our future survival.

   Those who like it may want to go on to somewhat more advanced works, such as another little volume, “Robots, Men and Minds" (Braziller, 1967) by Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Koestler's teacher in this subject and one of the chief architects of "General Systems theory," which got McNamara into such troubles in the Pentagon; or look at the most recent volume in this rapidly growing subject: Fritz Zwicky's "Discovery, Inventions, Research, Through the Morphological Approach" (Macmillan, 1969). This subject is growing so rapidly that every well-informed person should get acquainted with it. De Bono's is the most elementary introduction we are likely to get on it.

—CARROLL QUIGLEY.