Starvation or Plenty? By Colin Clark Taplinger, 180 pp., $4.95 Professor Clark moves in an exceedingly straight line, and if you let him get a grip on your hand at the outset he has a good chance, step by step, of marching you quick-time right to his objective, which is not so much a false one as too quickly (by Blitzkrieg) carried. So don’t put your hand out. Draw back a little, and reflect: A statement slanting in on things from one angle may be true to everything it touches as it goes through the tangled mass. It is customary to call such partial insights “half-true.” If that were the case, our problem would be simple—to find the other half of the truth. But a multiplicity of views, angled variously in, may report nothing but the truth of what they touch, be “whole” truths in that sense, yet only thin truths, cutting a small laser-path of light through a subject, not flooding the situation with light all around, making it glow with light all through. This latter kind of “whole truth” is rare. .Most views are more or less inclusive “thin truths”—and no better example of this could be found than Professor Clark’s thin truth.
He argues that we can feed any foreseeable number of people; that we have the resources, if only we will use them; that we are better equipped to feed the mass of men than any preceding age; that this challenge, once embraced, could lead us on to great achievements (e.g., the settling of space, pushing out frontiers, humanizing the universe).
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