Growing tensions in the Persian Gulf area threaten to plunge this oil-rich region into violent conflict. The conflict could well become a full-fledged Middle East war involving the U.S. and the USSR as these superpowers go in turn to the aid of their clients. The recent clashes between Iraqi and Kuwaiti troops, Iran's decision to buy $2 billion worth of U.S. arms and political disputes in Pakistan between Baluchi tribesmen and the government are all signs of the tensions.

Who are the antagonists? On the one side, the radical Army-Ba'ath regime in Iraq, with its predominantly Arab population of over nine million, makes no bones of its conviction that the Iranian monarchy is doomed, that the Persian Gulf area (which it terms the Arab Gulf) should be dominated by Arabs, and that Iraq is the natural leader of the Arabs of the Gulf area.

A remarkable number of Christian theologians are, perhaps surprisingly, praising B. F. Skinner's Beyond Freedom and Dignity. A number of others believe his work incompatible with Christianity. Both may be wrong.

Professor Skinner would be the last person to claim autonomous credit for Beyond Freedom and Dignity. It was not he, it was the environment that controlled the book's coming into being. And if we suppose that Skinner is a latter-day Thomas Aquinas, we might well imagine on his lips the echoes of an ancient outlook: "It was not owing to anything in me; everything was gift. Yet, I set hand to paper, but only through God's grace sweetly disposing all things…." We recall the countless unsigned medieval masterpieces, the anonymous achievements of Chartres and that now lost social and cultural sense which did not attach much significance to which individual it was who expressed best the artistic genius of the age. It was enough, in those days, that the people, the culture, flowered. So imagining, so remembering, we recover more fully the shock of the sudden birth of ego: the Eenaissance, the Enlightenment and the Age of the Individual.

Ernest Gellner's "Reflections on Philosophy, Especially in America" in the June Worldview contains so many perceptive and challenging statements that it merits a reply. It is also sufficiently confused and dubious in its conclusions as to require criticism. As a teacher of philosophy for over two decades, I am concerned about philosophy's role in contemporary and national life, and hence I am stimulated to make the following points.

What is the essence of Professor Gellner's assessment?

The force behind the egalitarian impulse to create a society of equals is a basic human desire for justice, "for a temporal order of things that 'makes sense.'" So Irving Kristol said in a recent essay. He is, of course, right. However, this isi where the true problem, the puzzle, begins. For our ingrained sense of justice produces identical "gut ' reactions," such as feelings of indignation, in regard to very different, indeed sometimes even diametrically opposed, alternatives.

I have been told that when Charles de Gaulle was asked what something he had said would mean to an ordinary Frenchman, he replied, "I do not know, I'm not an ordinary Frenchman." Similarly, I suppose I am not an ordinary reader of this book, A Religious History of the American People (Yale University Press; 1158 + xvi pp.; $19.95), but one who has for many years been surveying the same hills and valleys that Sydney Ahlstrom has traversed with camera and notebook. But while I have worked more as a topographer with the hope of making a usable map for the guidance of any who might wish to follow, Ahlstrom has pulled together an imposing slide show of the terrain and its inhabitants—a travelogue made up of thousands of discrete snapshots given unity primarily by the fact that all were taken by the same historically conditioned person.

A certain eclecticism is perhaps the most conspicuous feature of American philosophy. The deep structure which generates the whole range of views and positions in American philosophy is quite easy to locate. It is this: there are fifty states in the Union. These can be listed in one column. In a second column, one can list all available philosophic schools: positivists, pragmatists, Platonists, Thomists, Hegelians, Wittgensteinians, existentialists and so forth.

There is now a very simple and absolutely reliable law, which runs as follows: To every possible pair of elements, drawn one each from the two columns, there corresponds at least one living, real, concrete professor of philosophy. In other words, there is at least one Texas Hegelian, one Nebraska phenomenologist, one West Virginia Wittgensteinian, one Ohio Kantian and so forth. Of course there may be more than one, but in all circumstances there is at least one.

Can a moderate parliamentary democracy survive in the tensions of the Middle East? This is the question confronting Lebanon in the face of military raids by its neighbors and potential civil war. Israeli attacks and Palestinian pressures create a continuing crisis which has undermined the foundations of both Lebanese moderation and democracy.

Since independence Lebanon has maintained its position as a nonmilitaristic democracy supporting moderate solutions to the conflicts in the Middle East. Despite great pressures it has remained Western-oriented and has withstood the siren calls of radical socialism and militant nationalism. Yet when Lebanon was under threat and attack, it received remarkably little concrete support from the major Western powers. One result has been a growing frustration among Lebanese, many of whom believe that no matter what they do they will be attacked and possibly destroyed by forces beyond their control.

What is happening in Chile? Aside from the widely publicized "March of the Empty Pots" in December, 1971, and the revelations about interference in the 1970 elections, the American press and media have carried almost nothing about developments in Chile since Salvador Allende's installation two and a half years ago as the first freely elected Marxist president in the Western Hemisphere. Until recently book publishers were doing no better, but now a surprising number of new books on Chile, of varying quality and political orientation, provides the basis for some preliminary judgments, on the nature of the changes that have been taking place there in recent years.

The "peaceful uses only" clause is one of the most widely used and abused clauses in the postwar history of nuclear politics. Contrary to what we might expect, the terms "peaceful" and "military," as defined in various atomic energy agreements, are not antonymous. For two decades the terms have been used in different ways without any consensus about what they mean even between two parties to an agreement. The various meanings given the terms reflect certain value-premises, and the values are in turn based less on logic than on the policy needs of specific states. Definitions reflect and foster a distinction between nuclear weapons states and nonnuclear weapons states, between the nuclear superpowers and those states which have sophisticated civilian nuclear programs.