In his study of U.S. Vietnam policy, The Limits of Intervention, Townsend Hoopes ruefully admitted that “nothing is more difficult to confront than the need to outgrow conceptions that have had undeniable validity—have been in truth basic reference points for thought and action involving the life of the nation. It is a difficulty that persists even when one is intellectually aware that familiar conceptions no longer fully square with the facts.” Hoopes intended his strictures to apply to the cold war tenets which for so long provided the guidelines for U.S. foreign policy. They apply with equal force, however, not only to either official policies and orientations but to the conceptions of their critics.

The world community does not seem to care." This judgment appears in almost every analysis of the situation in Bangla Desh, formerly East Pakistan. North Americans know little about the politics of Pakistan, the geography of suffering, the moral issues involved. What is more, "compassion fatigue" has set in and our capacity for moral outrage is dormant, at least where the agonies of remote millions are concerned. Still we can, as Hugh McCullum, for example, does in the September, 1971, Canadian Churchman, make an effort to personalize the plea to help save the life of a Bengali refugee.

Recent setbacks notwithstanding, the Nationalist Chinese government of Chiang Kai-shek still has a tight grip on Taiwan. Beyond maintaining effective control over its diverse constituents, the government has also brought reasonable prosperity. Just as clearly, however, the regime has feet of clay.

The entire political system of Nationalist China rests upon the myth that it is the government of all China. The myth has finally been exploded in the diplomatic realm, but on Taiwan it remains the fragile foundation of the regime's power and very existence. The legitimacy of the regime derives from legislative and electoral bodies elected on the Mainland in the 1940's.

Today, July 25, 1972, is Constitution Day. It is the twentieth anniversary of the founding of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, or, more accurately, of “The Free Associated State” that links a speck in the Caribbean, 110 by 35 miles of subtropical hills and beaches, to the United States of America. It is also the seventy-fourth anniversary of the day when American troops landed in Guanica, Puerto Rico—just about where Columbus landed on his second voyage in 1493—to take possession of the former Spanish colony, ceded at the Treaty of Paris, America's victory prize in the Spanish-American War.

I begin by declaring my intellectual interest: I share the cold war convictions and the counterrevolutionary attitudes which Richard J. Walton attributes to President Kennedy in Cold War and Counter-Revolution: The Foreign Policy of John F. Kennedy (Viking; 234 pp.; $7.95). What he states as accusations are beliefs which I—and I think the late President—would willingly avow. Moreover, in the nearly nine years since Kennedy's death when the revisionist attacks on his presidency have steadily mounted, my own admiration for Kennedy has grown. I thought fairly well of him at the time. In the light of what has happened since his death, he seems to me an absolutely towering figure. I am either the worst or the best possible person to comment on this book.

Whenever the word “security” is mentioned, the words of a well-known hymn run through my mind. It is one some of us sing on New Year's Day and on historic occasions. It begins, “O God our help in ages past,” and the second verse runs:

The author of this hymn was Isaac Watts, a divine So prolific in his day that his hymns, especially his Psalm,paraphrases of which this is one, dominated many hynanals of the eighteenth century, both in England and in America.

I should be glad to believe with Mr. James Reston that God is not mocked and that the crimes of statesmen and of peoples obtain their just due at the hands of history. But I find it difficult to divorce myself from the thought that, at any rate in the long run, it is the conquerors and the big battalions that determine the verdicts (despite some shining exceptions) of historians. Over a century and a half ago, Immanuel Kant wrote, "If those revolts which gave Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Great Britain their constitutions, and which are now praised as so felicitous, had failed, historians would see-in the execution of their originators the deserved punishment of major criminals" (from an essay entitled "That may be all right in theory, but it does not work in practice," 1793).

Bernard Häring is one of the foremost theologians of the Catholic Church. His theological skirmishes and battles over the last several years are a record not only of a personal journey but of the contemporary vicissitudes and transformation of the oldest continuous institution in the Western world.

Häring's difficulties with the Holy Office, the Vatican's once-powerful heresy-hunting tribunal, began during the first sessions of the ante-preparatory commissions for Vatican Council II. Employed as a professional theologian by the German bjshops, he ran into immediate difficulty with Cardinal Ottaviani and Archbishop Pietro Parente, the two top men at the Holy Office, and with the violent-tempered Franciscan, Ennenegildo Lio, Defender of the Bond, whose persistent efforts to smother any suggestion of progress in the documents to be debated at the Council were constantly and successfully challenged by Häring.

Ideology is a discredited term in some circles. The geopolitical map of the twentieth century is pockmarked with ideologies gone bad. With the Utopian thinking of the Enlightenment came the conviction that “Ideals can transform reality.” But ideologies that undermined one repressive order in the name of progress became the zealous gods of another. Ideologists credit their Idea with omnipotence, borrowing the techniques of medieval casuistry) to reduce the more blatant discrepancies between the ideal and real.

It is true, streets plastered with slogans and millions of people waving little red books are frightening. But the possibility that the technocrats shall inherit the earth is also somewhat disconcerting. The excesses to which “total” ideologies lend themselves should not blind us to other aspects of the ideological enterprise; bloody revolutions and totalitarian regimes do not exhaust the possibilities.

Since no movement is without its extremists, we should not be surprised to discover in the current fuss over the environment an element committed to Preserving Our Great National Heritage, the Wilderness. Their devotion to the mystique of wilderness is very nearly tantamount to a new religion.

The wilderness bunch is unusual in that they are neither wild-eyed nor, in the conduct of their other day-to-day affairs, abnormal To the contrary, they are handsome, urbane and articulate people, highly educated, often professionally employed, well paid, and more given to conservative suits of expensive tailoring than to the flowing robes of, for example, the Jesus freaks.

Until a few years ago the term “racism” seemed to have a fairly precise meaning. It meant the attribution of various forms of social inferiority or superiority to certain groups of people by virtue of their biological makeup. In its more developed and systematic form, racism was a theory of genetic determination postulating a causal link between the physical appearance (phenotype) of people and their social behavior and attitudes. While ethnocentrism (preference for one's own culture) is universal, racism is exceptional, though not unique, to Western cultures. The overwhelming power and wealth of Western societies, however, made Western racism by far the most widespread and violent strain of the virus.

What are the imperatives for strategic thinking for the seventies? At the beginning of the seventies the United States adheres even more firmly to a policy of minimum or finite deterrence. Our power at all other levels of war and deterrence is increasingly challenged or outstripped. Even the possible vulnerability of our nuclear forces is tolerated for the sake of strategic disarmament treaties to come. It is difficult to tell the difference, for example, between editorials on strategic questions in the New York Times over the past two or three years and Dulles's “more bang for a buck” policy. The upshot seems clearly to be a i greater reliance on the most politically immoral nuclear posture imaginable, namely, Mutual Assured Destruction.

A remarkable series of events in the first half of this year altered the customary pattern of relations between Africa's Arab nations and its black African states.

Suddenly events suggested that the Arab nations might manage a resurgence of their influence in black Africa. They broke the normal pattern in which feelings of indifference, and sometimes distrust, are submerged in the name of continental unity and in the practice of a you-scratch-my-back-I'll-scratchyours kind of Third World solidarity. Even more, it appeared as if conditions south of the Sahara might favor this resurgence of Arab influence.

I take this opportunity to correct at least a few lingering misunderstandings of my old book. I am sometimes asked whether race relations in America, rooted in centuries of tragic and often hideous history and still injecting its peculiar bias in all social, economic and political relations in the country, could be “resolved” like a mathematical problem or an engineering project. Even after another thirty years we will be living with it, though it will have altered. I do hope that changes will proceed more rapidly than in the last five or seven years and that they will more consistently move toward a greater fulfillment of American ideals and aspirations.

Ushered in with hosannahs of critical praise (“If you plan to read only one book this year, this is probably the one you should choose”—New York Times), B. F. Skinner's Beyond Freedom and Dignity has made the bestseller lists for six months. Now that “the growing international storm” (Newsweek) over the book has subsided, a second look is in order. What, precisely, did he say? How persuasive is the behaviorism he trumpets? How does his argument stand up scientifically and philosophically?

Skinner proposes to take us “beyond” freedom and dignity because, in his view, people have no freedom, and human dignity is an illusion. These ideals always were mythic, despite their honored place in the literature of our civilization. The “literature of freedom and dignity,” as Skinner describes it with barely concealed contempt, fosters a wholly false doctrine of the nature of man and nurtures our fear of the developing “science and technology of human behavior” because it reduces our opportunities for self-praise and self-esteem. These opportunities shrink as it becomes increasingly implausible to appeal to mysterious powers of the mind in order to explain heroic, clever or original conduct.

Medieval schoolmen used to illustrate the problem of free will by telling the story of Buridan's ass. Standing at an equal distance between two bales of hay, the ass died of starvation, unable to decide whether to turn right or left. Modem theology is becoming anemic as it stands indecisively between two extremes. On the right everything is tagged by the prefix “re.” “Re” is going back —return, restore, revive, recover, repristinate. On the left the prefix is “de.” The “de” process is the style of modernist reductionism—demythologizing, desacralizing, dekerygmatizing, dehistoricizing, deeschatologizing. To escape the fate of Buridan's ass, an anemic theology needs another alternative.