Making Sense Out of Things in General

O~XNE of the points of Alfred North White** head's concluding chapter in Science XJ and the Modern World, some four decades ago, is that the idea of professionalism is a modern one, and that the development of professions is both essential to the advance of civilization and dangerous to that advance. The danger he saw was the inevitable limitation of specialization which some one else has explained in a pithy dictum: "Any special way of looking at things is a myriad of ways of not looking at them." In some realization of the problem Whitehead posed, persons academically or administratively concerned with the conduct of affairs have been disposed to draw a sharp distinction between "specialists" and "generalists." One result of this distinction was the useful dictum I have heard attributed to Harold Laski: "Experts should be on tap, not on top." But the usual thing is that many experts are perennially unhappy about the "ignorance" and "superficiality" of administrators and politicians. Each variety of specialist inevitably regrets that other people don't have the same kind of specialized equipment. In the United States, the mutually-inspired frustration of administrators and politicians, more or less on the one side, and of the many varieties of specialists on the other "side," is especially marked. Here, we have carried the development of specializations and sub-specializations further faster than anywhere else in the world. Here, we experienced an unprecedented pioneer situation in which rugged individualism had its greatest, and shortest, day as we moved into an even more completely unprecedented condition of high interdepend-