This fall and winter promise to be among the most significant periods in the history of European diplomacy. The divided halves of Europe have locked horns in two sets of negotiations— mutual force reductions (MFR) and the conference on security and cooperation in Europe (CSCE). They may transform European and world politics in fundamental ways.

Robert Heilbroner's Human Prospect would change everything. Suddenly and radically our future is transformed. Only yesterday morning science and technology—aided by expanding industrialism—painted for us a future resonant with promise. Now we knew how to know; and in knowing all, we could control all. Thus the future was to be a realm of unlimited freedom; freedom over the forces that formerly bound us in necessity, even, said some, freedom over evolution, freedom from the limits of space and time, from want, from labor, possibly from disease, from genetic faults and from social maladjustments. Only yesterday afternoon gospels of political, social and theological liberation painted a future of self-realization, a future where the chains of oppression and exploitation are broken. Here too the future is a realm of hope, the realm where, as futurist theologians have told us, God's rule will be fully manifest.

Martin Niemoller, a German pastor, experienced what he called his “second conversion” while imprisoned by the Nazis during World War II. Niemoller had so despised the atrocities of the Hitler regime that he came to hate the prison guard who brought him his food each day. Seeing the Nazi insignia on his uniform, all the indignation and outrage Niemoller felt toward that evil system was directed against that guard. Then one day Niemoller suddenly realized that Jesus Christ died on the cross for that guard, that Christ loved him that much. Niemoller knew that he was bound to love that guard, and to love every man. The atonement of Christ took on a whole new meaning for Niemoller. Its implications were revolutionary.

Tie American Left helped win some extraordinary battles during the 1960's and early 1970's. All it lost was the war.

Its two most important achievements during that period are obvious enough. The Left made a significant contribution, in militancy as well as theory, to a civil rights movement which swept away the juridical system of Jim Crow (even though the economic infrastructure of racism was left pretty much intact). And it provided activists and ideas to the teach-ins, the marches, and the political campaigns of 1968 and 1972 which turned American opinion around on the issue of Vietnam. There were other victories: for example, the destruction of the doctrine of in loco parentis on the American campus; the delegitimatizating of the House Un-American Activities Committee; participation in a woman's movement which is still demonstrating great vitality and potential; the opening up of the Democratic Party to entire new constituencies.

Anything I write may be quickly overrun by new developments—in Cyprus, in Greece and Turkey, at the United Nations in New York and Geneva.

I started to write in a plane flying from New York to Geneva to see Prince Sadruddin, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees; I went on in hurried interludes during a hectic general election in England; I finished on another plane to New York.

There is a crisis in public morality. Apparently the decline in our standard of behavior is so obvious that, despite our political and class and religious differences, we can agree upon the disorder if not the therapy. I therefore propose not to document our ills any further, but I do wish first to diagnose them and only then to suggest a line of significant treatment.

In the fall of 1939, in my native city in Vietnam, the now sadly famous imperial capital of Hue, a young poet, Luu Trong Lu, published his “Tieng Thu” (“The Sounds of Autumn”). Overnight he became our idol. He wrote of the “murmurs of autumn leaves,” of a “startled golden deer walking on dry yellow leaves,” of a “front-line soldier's silhouette in the heart of his lonely wife.”

I was then in the last year of high school. My classmates and I were all enchanted by his verses. We copied them in our notebooks to read during our mathematics classes. We had enjoyed a relatively peaceful year and a bountiful harvest, although some among us sensed that the war in Europe might soon affect us. But we did not care. We loved our poet all the same.

In a 1970 decision the United States Supreme Court approved the exemption of church property from city real estate taxes, noting that “separation of church and state” was thereby well served (Walz v. Tax Commission of the City of New York). The Court stated: