Mankind has made great progress in understanding everything except himself, his social institutions, and relationships with his total environment. Our capacity for contriving complexities through piecemeal actions has developed more rapidly than our capabilities for comprehending them — and the gap is widening.

This should not be surprising, for we have directed our energies to the creation of myriad specialties of one sort or another in the belief that an “invisible hand” would somehow tie them all together. Unfortunately, this logic has prevailed in academia as well as in business and government, with the result that we are now attempting to deal with a tangle of threatening problems through a hodgepodge of expedient studies and programs.

The fundamental question is: Can we continue to deal with problems of integrity of government, population growth, threats to human freedom and justice, economic development, stagflation, and many others, in an ad hoc way, as if they were only a collection of unrelated problems? The answer is that the course of world history testifies to the failure of piecemeal approaches to integrated problems.

There is an urgent need in every sphere of endeavor to develop and enlarge the habit and capability for thinking in the large, to confront what others have called the world problematique. This need may be particularly urgent with respect to the role of the Western democratic values of individuality, variety and political participation; values which either now or in the near future could become expedient or unintended casualties of a continued failure to address problems in a global perspective.

To be sure, society's problems cannot be shelved while we search for a deeper insight, but it should be no less obvious that much greater attention must be given to fundamental scientific studies of human social systems if we are to avoid or deal effectively with future problems.

Such studies, although drawing on ideas from diverse natural, social and humanistic inquiries, will require not simply a “holistic,” “interdisciplinary” or “multidisciplinary” approach but recognition of the unity of physical, biological and social systems in the universe and the search for fundamental laws governing the creation, behavior and interdependent evolution of such systems. The problems call for scientific thinking in the large, for the natural philosopher’s perspective, for a heretofore neglected emphasis on the systematic, integrative dimensions and methods of natural inquiry rather than an arbitrary amalgamation of disciplines and specialties. This constitutes a scientific challenge of a new and higher order.

Once again, the concern is to promote a habit of and capability for thinking in the large — for comprehending immediate problems in their larger context — and thereby to encourage a more responsible approach to planning and decision making on the part of leaders in business, government and the public at large.