Many intellectuals sensed the dawning of a "new generation" in the activism, idealism, and moral pronouncements of the student movement of the 1960's. This movement seemed to be reaching fruition with the "revolutionary" tremors that the youth culture let loose on college campuses and throughout American society in the wake of Cambodia, Kent State, and Jackson State during the spring of 1970.

But less than six months later, the "sounds of silence" on the college campuses became deadening, and the savants of the "new society" expressed disillusionment and bewilderment.

For a generation now, America has played a significant role in world affairs. Until Pearl Harbor a reluctant belligerent in World War II, this country was also slow to respond to the challenge of the Soviet Union in the immediate aftermath of that gigantic conflict. But for almost twenty-five years American Presidents have been more or less guided by the policy of “containment.” Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson all introduced variations on the multiple themes of the policy adopted by Harry Truman. Yet each concluded that the world situation allowed no reasonable alternative to an activist American foreign policy in most areas of the globe.

During these last few months, in the furor surrounding the Calley trial, the Berrigan indictment and the exposure of F.B.I, documents stolen from its office in Media, Pennsylvania, many Americans have become aware, on a new dimension of intensity, of the way in which our public institutional life has become corrupted by governmental efforts to repress dissent. Much must be blamed on the Vietnamese war, to be sure. But public disgust over the war merely brought this corruption out in the open. Every revelation of the extent of the development of an internal police network to repress dissent has revealed that its roots go back not only to the early days of the Civil Rights movement but that it is a survivor of the McCarthy era of Red-baiting.

"Free enterprise has destroyed itself," Pope Pius XI said in 1931, and has been replaced by an "international imperialism whose country is where profit is." No wild-eyed radical or flaming liberal, Plus XI was one more in a long line of conservative Roman churchmen raised to the papal office. His elaborations about the world's economic systems, delivered in his encyclical Quadragesimo Anno, have particular relevance this year, since the whole network of international trade and finance has come under severe attack by the actions of President Nixon in August, and the subsequent reactions of other nations.

The most perplexing problem which the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China raises for analysts concerns the view of history with which to interpret it. Most Westerners have a unilinear perspective which sees a straightforward transition from traditional society (with its agriculturally based economy, diffuse social relationships, and custom-bound orientation) to modern society (with its industrial economy, rational and functionally specific social relationships and secular mentality). This tends also to be the official view of the social sciences as they have developed in the West as well as that upon which governmental policies, journalistic commentary and individual judgement are most often based. Warren Mason teaches political science at Miami University in Ohio.

The main issue I wish to raise here is not that the rhetoric of recent discussion of foreign policy (which was petulant from the first.teach-in) became outrageously reckless and uncivil. It is, rather, that emotion- laden speech too often contains a category-mistake or wrongly uses a term. The first betrayal in moral and political discourse is always a betrayal of the language through which men seek understanding. It is not the fury of disagreement, though no doubt the former fuels the latter.

There are hatreds which are devoted to real things and people, and there is a hatred which displaces inner violence onto any accessible external object. The deepest causes for hate are racial, fraternal, communal. No trip by Henry Kissinger will mend the savagery of Moslem Pakistani toward Bengali Hindu or solve the fixed enmities of Ulster, for such wars are merciless and personally felt, "popular" in the most terrifying significance of that word.

America's turbulent relationship with China, and the Kissinger expedition, cannot be understood in terms of such hatred. Yet one does find in American feelings toward China a violent and unstable emotion that cannot be accounted for in a relationship based solely on rational calculations of interest and advantage.

The words are those of Mr. Nixon and Mr. Kissinger as they confront North Vietnam. Does North Vietnam resist our will? We will bomb their missiles, their trails and bases. Do they attack again? Do they punish the South Vietnamese? Interfere with our plan to win victory while withdrawing? We will do such things. …

Yet we know not what they are. Our bombers make cautionary raids across the border. We feint with naval forces along the North Vietnamese coast. We avow to the North that we will no longer be bound by the conventions of the past. We make vague threats of invasion, deny them, disclaim the denials. Our officials call attention to President Eisenhower's warning, twenty years ago, that he might use nuclear weapons in Korea; then we deny that we would use such weapons—in foreseeable circumstances.

The key to Marcuse's thought is his thesis that effective social criticism depends upon a philosophy of two-dimensionality-that is to say, philosophy conceived primarily as a criticism of what is. Alasdair Maclntyre rightly points out that Marcuse thinks the central concern of philosophy should be "with the structure of what can be thought and therefore confronts actuality with possibility." His is a driving passion to correct. And the basic distinction that runs through all of Marcuses works and defines the dual dimension which generates serious thought is the distinction between things as they are and things as they might be.

When I first began to study philosophy, there was not much concern with its political implications. One thought of philosophers as being a few removes from the public forum, concerned with loftier matters, operating far from the untidiness of the social scene in a cool oasis where the imagination could play and consciousness unfold at its own pace. It was a pure world, to be sure, and the purist view is by no means an obsolete one. Just the other day I heard a well-known philosopher in heated argument with a campus activist say that the responsibilities of a professional philosopher end with his profession, that his political obligations qua philosopher were nil.

There is a certain level of writing on social and political issues that stands between good journalism and genuine scholarship. Good journalism attempts to assemble and report as much pertinent data as is available, Genuine scholarship, by making clear a theoretical framework or a verifiable testing technique, considers the weight that should be given to various facts to be used for explanatory, interpretive or constructive reasons. These two books fall at that certain level (though Melman's tends more toward scholarship and Plate's toward journalism). Both men assemble a wide range of pertinent data and place it in a particular framework (for both authors this framework is their concern that America pursue a path to peace).

Religion, long dead, is now coming back to life, moving at a steady pace to the center of our cultural interests. Times of crisis are propitious for religious rebirth. When, the idols of human aspiration have fallen and the old gods have died, the stage is set for new beginnings, a new upsurge of religious creativity.

To trace all the steps by which the rebirth of religion has come about would require a volume or two. One would have to mention first the great renewal in biblical studies that has been going on since the nineteenth century.

Are the message, structures and socio-political implications of Christianity in harmony with the teaching, person and life of its Founder? To the degree that one of its functions is to examine this question critically at every moment, theology today is confronted with urgent revolutionary imperatives.

This reflection may possibly seem applicable only to the Western or Euroamerican world, and it is undoubtedly true. However, two things are clear: First, the present epoch requires that everyone return to his sources and examine his own roots inorder to assume his identity creatively rather than accept it passively.

The Treaty on the Nonprolrferahon of Nuclear Weapons (N.P.T) has been in effect since March of 1970, the debate over its wisdom has quietly passed into history, and we seem to be living comfortably with the notion that its ratification was a significant step toward international peace. I want to suggest here that we have yet to face up to the problems which almost inevitably lie ahead.

The N.P.T. as Alliance. The N.P.T. concept dates from a time when most of us looked upon the nuclear world as truly bipolar. Both the U.S. and USSR felt that it would be better to deal with the certainties of this bipolarity than with the uncertainties of proliferation.

It is a truism that knowledge is power and that secret knowledge is secret power. Both are a threat to democratic governments. One of the reasons why the totalitarian governments of both Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany were able to enslave their peoples was the fact that their security police and intelligence agencies expanded their legitimate security functions to include widespread political surveillance of all persons suspected of being ”subversive.“

Inevitably, in an atmosphere of heightened political and social tensions, one man's liberal is another man's subversive. The definition of “subversive” can easily be expanded to include anyone who in any way opposes government policy or criticizes the established political and social order.

Despite its creaking inefficiency and patent injustice, the American courts have twice proven their superiority to the myopia that reigns in the Justice Department. Although it can never restore to victims the brutal years lost in prison, the courts in New Haven and New York have managed to unravel two more of the Government's pet conspiracy indictments and released the victims. Let us hope that the labored victories won in the cases of Bobby Seale, Erica Huggins and the Panther Thirteen can be repeated in the case of the Government against Angela Davis if, as it seems, it is equally contrived.