Buckminster Fuller and Robert Pickus
Gene Keyes's essay-review "Bucky and Pick: Two Grand Designers of a World Without War."
"Buckminster Fuller and Robert Pickus" is an essay-review written in 1970 by Gene Keyes, then an undergraduate at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, where Fuller was loosely affiliated as a University Professor. Subtitled "Bucky and Pick: Two Grand Designers of a World Without War," it pairs two war/peace books published in the winter of 1969–70: Fuller's Utopia or Oblivion (compiled by Robert W. Marks) and Robert Pickus and Robert Woito's To End War. Fuller himself sent a handwritten letter urging Saturday Review editor Norman Cousins to publish the piece, though it did not appear there; Keyes reprinted it online in 2009.
Keyes argues that Fuller and Pickus, though apparently working on different wavelengths and seemingly never having met, shared a comprehensive grand strategy for interdicting war and a mind fast enough to "sweep in larger patterns" than their contemporaries. He traces Fuller's World Design Science Decade (1961) — a ten-year, student-led effort to triple the use-efficiency of world resources so as to serve 100% of humanity — and its successor the World Game, alongside Pickus's parallel 1961 effort, Turn Toward Peace, to coordinate non-communist peace groups. Both efforts, Keyes notes, suffered "magnificent organizational failures."
Robert Pickus (1921– ) was a Jewish/Quaker pacifist and peace organizer who headed peace-education work for the American Friends Service Committee, helped write the influential 1955 pamphlet Speak Truth to Power, and founded the World Without War Council in Berkeley. Keyes's review, while broadly sympathetic to Pickus, judges that Fuller had the greater sense of technology and prophecy on world development, and singles out Utopia or Oblivion as an especially valuable contribution to the literature of ending war.
See Also
- R. Buckminster Fuller (R. Buckminster Fuller) — the central figure
- Gene Keyes (Gene Keyes) — author of the essay-review
- Utopia or Oblivion (Utopia or Oblivion) — the Fuller book reviewed
- World Game (World Game Institute) — Fuller's peace-through-design proposal discussed in the essay
Sources
- Buckminster Fuller and Robert Pickus (Gene Keyes)