To look at some of the most prominent conditions of contemporary politics, is in fact to identify the circumstances within which the Churches must work in trying to promote human rights. Human rights may be identified abstractly, but they do not exist abstractly. Tbey exist, where they exist at all, within political confines; and these same confines suggest what the proper role of the Churches may be. If this seems a harshly limited basis for defining the Churches' role, it is not because this writer seeks to limit, but rather because the limitations are genuinely there, and the Churches are unlikely to do effectively even their limited task unless they concentrate their energies on these channels.

Charles de Gaulle has always been a rather enigmatic figure, and from his earliest days as an officer he carefully cultivated this image of himself. In one of his books he wrote that it is the leader's destiny to remain aloof and shoulder silently the burden of responsibility. And he considered himself as the future leader of France back in the late 1920's when one day he confided to a fellow officer his premonition that the country would yet call upon him to save her.

To his contemporaries. the enigma seemed more often than not ominous. Once in the mid-30's Leon Blum named him in a warning to the National Assembly against setting up an armée de metier, an elite corps of motorized troops “ready for any adventure.” Blum added that M. de Gaulle copied the idea from experiments in the German army, a statement that certainly did not endear the politician to the colonel. The latter claimed-to have been an innovator in the matter of using rapid armored divisions in a future war.

Historic and fundamental issues of human rights will remain with us as long as man is his less than perfect self. No end is foreseen to the struggle between the evil in man's nature and his ideals of justice. But to these traditional problems of human rights a new element has been added. There are new challenges to the interrelation of men — challenges at once novel, frightening and complex. They hold enormous promise for good and evil. We have not begun to think out their implications; indeed, we have just become dimly conscious of them.

Both the long, unending war in Vietnam and the sudden, brief Arab-Israeli conflict continue to provoke strong — and diverse ethical assessments. In the blizzard of righteousness which is piling up around us we are told by many that the Johnson Administration is immoral, by others that it did or is doing the only thing ethical realism finds conceivable. Sometimes the judgment is made within-the framework of what is usually called “situation ethics.” sometimes it proceeds instead from an “ethic of principles.” From the evidence of the articles themselves the method does not evidently ordain the conclusion; or if it does, then there are some verv clever knaves at work twisting each method to yield the wrong answers.

Even today, politics is based on power relationships and the kind of calculations that have been canonized since the rise of the nation-state. Get a group of Washington practitioners together and you will still hear echoes of the old saw that “politics is the art of the possible.”

But this kind of thinking, in our new situation, has already brought mankind to the brink of disaster and promises to destroy political life altogether. It is so clearly anachronistic, at least to the young, that the newest postwar generation to come to maturity simply refuses to play the game. To their ears, even the soaring political rhetoric of John F. Kennedy sounds hollow and unconvincing. I recently heard a brilliant college student charge that the President's famous “Ask not what your country can do for you …” smacked of fascism. Taken literally that, of course, was nonsense; yet I think I know what the young man was trying to get at.