Till now, mankind has either taken it as a matter of course that it is going to survive, or, alternatively, assumed that its destiny will be decided by forces beyond human control: the gods or God or Nature. We have now woken up to the truth that, today, we are in greater danger of extinction than we have been at any time since the date —perhaps 30,000 years ago—at which our ancestors gained the upper hand over all other forms of life on this planet except microbes and viruses. In the present age we have discovered and conquered the microbes, and we have hopes of getting the better of the viruses. But our recent victories over non-human menaces to human life are far outweighed by new threats to us from ourselves. These threats have no precedents; for man, armed with the power of science applied to technology, is a vastly more formidable enemy for man than any non-human enemy that man has yet encountered.

More car for less money" might be the salesman's pitch for the diplomatic bonanza promised in the Nixon Doctrine. The focus on partnership with friendlv nations will lower America's cost in meeting her obligations, we are told, but the saving is not at the price of an inferior product. On the contrary, it assures a superior one. There is, to be sure, a reduction of America's load, but without damage to our vital interests or to world order. Indeed, the reduction is intended to further those interests and that order.

A few days before Christmas, 1971, the Protestant Federation of France published a 12,000-word draft statement, Eglise et Pouvoirs, which immediately caused repercussions around the world. The extraordinary, and for the French Protestant leaders startling, controversy over the statement was initiated by the French centrist newspaper Le Monde. On December 19 it printed a full page of extracts from the document under the provocative title “The French Protestant Federation declares: Our society is unacceptable.”

Immediately, all the French dailies and weeklies came out with numerous quotations and analyses, constituting a press reaction greater than any ever caused by a church statement in French history. The foreign press, notably the New York Times and International Herald Tribune, were not far behind. Press, radio and TV reporters brought a sudden and unwonted animation to the offices of the Protestant Federation of France (an old building, the House of French Protestantism, on the Rue de Clichy across from the Casino de Paris, famous music hall of Mistinguett and Maurice Chevalier).

Aformer "church-in-silence" is babbling anew. After the silence of most of the 1960's, religious Cuba is speaking out. Many of us may not be ready for what we hear.

Our unreadiness flows from a variety of sources. One is that the United States policy of isolating Cuba not only isolates Cuba but also isolates us from it. Another source may be the traditional expectation that a church in a Communist country stands in unrelenting opposition to the government—or else retreats into the catacombs. Many Protestants, Roman Catholics and Jews in Cuba have rejected (or are rejecting) the two traditional alternatives of sabotage or withdrawal to silence, even though both alternatives were tried, to one degree or another, for the bulk of the past decade.

There are now two stylish things to say about Populism. One is that the Populists were bad guys, the other that the Populists are again among us in such figures as John Lindsay and George McGovern, on the one hand, and George Wallace on the other. Unfortunately, the intellectuals talking about Populism know very little about it. Even Jack Newfield and Jeff Greenfield, in their wellintentioned but superficial little book, A Populist Manifesto, shudder at the nineteenth-century Populist reality which, they say, was “afflicted” with “paranoia and racism.”

The Populists, it will be remembered, were members of the People's Party, which existed from 1889 through the election of 1896.

Men and women receiving their bachelor's degrees now have for the most part been those who entered college near the end of what has been the greatest boom period in American academic history. With accelerating momentum during the last four years, it can at least be suggested that the academic analogue of the Great Crash of 1929 has occurred. Universities are even more diversified than the securities listed on the stock exchanges; they are not so closely interlinked; hence, what is a depression in some institutions is a mild recession or a plateau in others, and perhaps a pause that refreshes in still others. There are surely some institutions (until recently, the University of Texas was one) so richly supported that they could use the slack market for faculty as a time for academic bargain-hunting.

An occurrence in 1968 far from China's borders may have contributed substantially to bringing about a change in Peking's foreign policy. On August 20-21, there was the startling intervention in Czechoslovakia by the USSR and four other Warsaw Pact powers. A warning letter the five had sent previously to the Czechoslovak Communist Party set forth a significant rationale: “… we cannot agree to have hostile forces push your country away from the road of socialism and create the danger of Czechoslovakia being severed from the socialist community… . The frontiers of the socialist world have moved … to the Elbe and the Bohemian Forest. We shall never agree to these historic gains of socialism … being placed in jeopardy.” The Brezhnev Doctrine of “limited sovereignty” had been born, and if it were judged warrant for taking action against unorthodoxy in Czechoslovakia, it was in logic equally applicable to China. In any event, Moscow's military action against the deviant Communist state was by itself an indication that, in some circumstances, the Soviet Union might be prepared to employ its armed forces elsewhere outside its borders.

The cold war is dead and the autopsies have begun. It lasted nearly a quarter of a century, or twice as long as Hitler's thousand-year Reich. It left scarcely any nation of the earth untouched—and even extended into outer space—as America and Russia struggled over a world they thought must belong either to one or to the other. Caught in the grip of the equally powerful ideologies of communism and anti-communism, and in a consuming aspiration of world leadership, the two superpowers sought security in the elusive quest for military supremacy.

In 1964, when race relations in America were under the sway of Martin Luther King's dream of future amity, and before President Johnson's war policy had destroyed the moral cohesion of the country, Paul C. Nagel published his impressive study, One and Indivisible: The Union in American Thought, 1776-1860. Now his second massively researched volume, This Sacred Trust: American Nationality, 1798-1898 (Oxford University Press; 376 pp.; $9.50), brings his account down, with some shift of emphasis, to the debates over imperialism occasioned by the War with Spain. Though the book ends almost seventy-five years ago, it has an obvious timeliness—not only because American imperialism is again a subject of worldwide debate but because American commitment to a sacred trust is seriously weakening. The traditional grounds of American loyalty are rapidly dissolving.

The focus of the world press upon Salvador Allende has, in 1972, given Chile the center stage occupied by Cuba fourteen years ago. For the first time in history a Marxist candidate who respected the rules of the game was freely elected by a democratic nation. So much is well known. What the “Popular Unity” program is all about and the difficulties encountered in the first year of government are not so well known. Nor, more particularly, have Christian attitudes toward developments in Chile received the attention they deserve. Both in Chile and in other countries many people are disoriented by the outcome of events, finding it difficult to understand how a nation with a Christian and democratic tradition could freely choose the leadership of a declared Marxist.

In April, 1952, I traveled to Lambarene, then in French Equatorial Africa, to try to enlist the leadership of Albert Schweitzer for the cause of world peace. I was disappointed to find him basically unconcerned about world politics, skeptical of the United Nations, indifferent to disarmament, and unwilling even to lend his name to peace efforts. A decade later, in June, 1962, I saw Schweitzer for the last time. He was then a world leader in nuclear disarmament, and my task this time, also unsuccessful, was to discourage his indiscriminate endorsements of some peace efforts which I believed misguided.

George Kennan, a prominent spokesman of the "realist" political school, said some years ago: "Let us face it: in most international differences elements of right and wrong, comparable to those that prevail in personal relationships, are— if they exist at all, which is a question—simply not discernible to the outsider. Where is the right and wrong of the Kashmir dispute? I am glad it is not my task to seek it. And how about the conflict between the Israeli and the Arabs? The very establishment of the State of Israel, at which we Americans warmly connived, was—whether right or wrong—essentially an act of violence."

I have already lived in three different theological climates, during three periods marked by quite different hopes and expectations for the future of humanity. I am not sure whether or not we are entering a fourth period, but the pattern of both commitments and hopes is less clear than it seemed to be in the recent past.

Before 1930 and back into the late nineteenth century there was the period of the Social Gospel, which was a great force in the churches and which reflected the secular expectations of progress that were general at the time. I was part of this movement myself and to a large extent shared its hopes, though I never believed that progress was inevitable or irreversible.

At Miami Beach last summer Norman Mailer decided that George McGovern is “the first tall minister I ever really liked.” He was so carried away by this discovery that he used the word “tender” when he spoke to McGovern about the mood on the night of the acceptance speeches. Before he reached that pitch of endorsement he had worried repetitiously about McGovern's undersupply of “charisma,” regretted the Methodist candidate's insufficient use of metaphor and found the convention that nominated McGovern boring because it lacked drama and there was not enough evil in the room. In these past twelve years Mailer has often seemed to be judging American politics by one criterion: whether it provides the right sort of material for his writing.