After almost a generation of cold war and bipolarity the international situation is said to have been transformed. We have entered the postwar era at last, an age characterized by multipolarity and the sober pursuit of national interests. America, Russia and China are assumed to have at last abandoned their crusading approach to world affairs. In the Moscow, Shanghai and San Clemente communiqués issued after Summit conferences in 1972 and 1973 these great nations “took the pledge” to exercise restraint, moderation and similar virtues. A war- and world-weary United States eagerly embraces a lower profile abroad, gratefully bidding goodbye to thirty years of globalism.

Since Vatican Council II issued its Decree on Ecumenism, the rapprochement between churches has moved many a step forward. To be sure, one no longer finds the enthusiasm of the 1960's, but the dialogues between churches have gained in depth and seriousness what they have lost in facility and popularity. Again, the statements issued by the Lutheran-Catholic Conversations in America (on The Eucharist as Sacrifice, 1967; Eucharist and Ministry, 1970), or by the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Conversations (Windsor Statement on the Eucharist, December, 1971; Canterbury Statement on Ministry, December, 1973) may be neither complete nor final; yet they witness to a growing consensus which would have been unthinkable twenty years ago. This consensus gives the lie to what had been for years an axiom in one stream of the ecumenical flow: Doctrine divides, service unites. The current ecumenical moment has put this maxim to the test and uncovered its inadequacy. It is not too optimistic to say now that doctrine is in the process of uniting.

I am sitting by a candle beneath a shuttered window in a city blacked out against aerial attack. There is little intelligible news from the front, and the long hours between news reports are filled with old Palmach songs and coded messages calling reservists to their units.

The dimensions of this war are still unclear, but I fear that the shrill wail of yesterday's siren has shattered our peace for a long time to come. Each of us has already fixed in his mind the moment war broke in to violate our private lives and mock our petty dreams of tomorrow.

Historians may conclude that the Vietnam war ended some time during the week beginning March 25, 1973. Certainly in the news media—and no war has had its signposts so vividly marked out by press and television—it was ending throughout that week with increasingly complex last-minute drama, right up to the conclusive pictures of “one of the last U.S. soldiers out of South Vietnam” and “the last prisoner out of North Vietnam.” The last prisoner, more than anything, was the definitive image. Other official aspects of impending peacetreaty negotiations, troop withdrawals, cease-fires, lulls, resumptions, “peace in our time” speecheswere worn thin by months of assertion and publicity. They were no longer quite powerful enough to symbolize finality. It was the last prisoner of war physically out of North Vietnam that allowed the New York Times to announce on March 30 that “the U.S. war role in Vietnam is ended.”

There are not many things we leave at home when we undertake a foreign expedition. We take not only our traveler's checks (I saw one countercultural type in New Delhi present an order for four thousand dollars!), our penchant for acquisition and our instamatic insights, but also our convenience consumerism. This is the form of modern tourism—a containerized, SEA FREIGHT sort of business, in which prepackaged and unpleasant surprises, such as currency changes, are smeared over with cosmetic preparations like Tip-Packs—“Take along your own small change in ten currencies.”

Tourism has became an entirely predictable extention of hectic, humdrum life, with predigested extravaganzas and expatriates to assure us of the integrity of the hedonistic life we are seeking. Although there are as many psychologies of tourism as there are tourists, I will attempt to embrace them all by considering three types of judgments which a tourist is (a) most likely, (b) less likely and (c) most unlikely to make concerning those among whom he has visited.

It is difficult to evaluate a document intended to justify the slaughter and summary imprisonment of tens of thousands of citizens of what was one of the world's most vibrant democracies. It is hard to be impartial toward a regime that commandeered air raids on the presidential palace, oversaw the wholesale burning of books, bookstores and publishing houses, executed citizens whose crime was the possession of leftist literature and dismantled one of the most distinguished university systems in Latin America, replacing rectors with military officers and abolishing sociology and journalism departments. Libro Blanco, the Chilean junta's apologia for last year's coup, is issued by men who have installed a reign of terror with the professed purpose of purging the country of an entire political sector.

These are times that try men's Anglophilia. Britain is in the midst of a largely self-made energy crisis, owing very little to the Arab oil cutbacks. The threat of massive unemployment, the lost production, the cold and darkness as winter goes on is largely a part of Britain's continuing saga of bloody-minded industrial relations. But while many of the elements here are, at the moment, peculiarly British, there is reason to fear a repetition of events like these elsewhere and, eventually, globally.

The immediate problem is a threat to the nation's coal and electricity supplies due to “industrial action” by the coal miners and railroad engineers. One says industrial action because the “actions” are not strikes but yet have effects almost as severe. Perhaps because they were so long excluded from effective political power, British working men developed over the decades the art of industrial action to a refinement unsurpassed anywhere.

One of the most rapid and thorough intellectual revolutions in recent times took place in Latin America during the last decade. In the early 1960's the notion of “development” (desarrollo) still had an almost religious connotation to it, among intellectuals as well as politicians in Latin America. Today it is overwhelmingly decried as “developmentalism” (desarrollismo), an ideology-serving the interests of U.S. imperialism and serving to obfuscate the realities of exploitation. This dramatic change has far-reaching political implications. The present article, which Dr. Kahl, Professor of Sociology at Cornell, has adapted from his book Modernization, Exploitation and Dependency (soon to be published by Transaction Books), traces the change in sociology, a strategically important field for Latin Americans' self-interpretation. Its focus is on the work of two men who today are the most important Latin American sociologists, Pablo Gonzalez Casanova of Mexico and Fernando Henrique Cardoso of Brazil.

Names such as Armor, Pettigrew, Glazer, Jencks, Herrnstein, Clark and Moynihan have not yet appeared in the pages of Ring magazine, but it seems only a matter of time. It is no secret, after all, that these men, all intellectual heavyweights, are engaged in an ongoing, fierce slugging match over a host of issues related to the “limits of social policy.” Their verbal fisticuffs have been characterized by a good deal of fancy footwork, plenty of hard hitting, some low blows and inevitable cries of foul. For some time Public Interest was booking the best cards, but with more than 150 pages of its February, 1973, issue devoted to a detailed critique of Jencks's Inequality, it may be assumed that the Harvard Educational Review became, as it was during the Jensen brawl, the main arena of conflict. The bulk of recent attention was focused on the hard punching of Jencks's critics, but it would be a pity if the brilliant footwork of Kenneth Clark went unnoticed. His performance is simply remarkable.

Hillel Levine's “An Open Letter to Father Daniel Berrigan” (Worldview, February) seems to me to reflect the strengths and weaknesses of much of the response to Berrigan's talk from the Jewish community. To have received from a man so identified with Abraham Heschel (and with whom they themselves so identified their own consciences) such a diatribe—which evoked all the traditions by which Christians have appropriated the identity of the Jew to vilify the Jew himself—was a blow to which the Jewish community seems able to formulate only a partly coherent reply. A wound kept raw through a thousand years of pogroms is opened again. There seems to be pain too deep to be translated into clear prose nicely balanced against the political realities of Arab-Israeli conflict.