The centenary this year of Gandhi's birth provides an occasionJ to reassess the significance of the Indian leader. His political ethics and supporting notions about man and the state seem to me especially important in his teachings and practices. They have their weaknesses, but they should not be overlooked in any effort to reassess the complex and at times baffling Mahatma. Because Ganhdi's ideas about government and politics have been likened to those of Henry David Thoreau and Leo Tolstoy, his unique contribution has often been obscured. Gandhi borrowed Thoreau's term “civil disobedience” which the New England individualist had coined to explain his kind of opposition to the Mexican war and slavery. Yet there is a considerable gap between Gandhi's metaphysics and Thoreau's. As to Tolstoy, Gandhi's premises resemble some of the convictions of the Russian writer after he became a Christian anarchist. But the Indian leader placed more trust in the perfectability of public institutions than Tolstoy did. Without denying the utility of the frequent and inevitable comparisons, Gandhi's synthetic political philosophy is best seen by itself.

Nationalism is of course a state of mind. It is a way of thinking which seizes a rather large group of people, usually all living in the same area, and causes them to consider themselves a nation; that is, as an actual or potential governing organization to which they give their loyalty. We continue to live in an era of nation-states. To give one's primary political loyalty to a sub-national group is to be provincial, to give it to another nation is to skirt being subversive, and to give it to a group of nations is to espouse supranationalism. In this context, what docs it mean to speak of “the new nationalism“?

There are many surprises in the use of the term “new nationalism.” It sometimes refers to nationalism typical of a new nation.

It is, of course, trivial to say that the foreign policy of the United States is not only in a political and military crisis — and financial crisis you might add — but also in a moral crisis. This moral crisis has particular significance for the United States. Take, by way of contrast, the moral crises through which Soviet foreign policy has passed since the end of the second world war. Take, for instance, the moral crisis which it faced in consequence of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, and the moral crisis it is still facing by virtue of its invasion of Czechoslovakia last year. Obviously those crises considerably decreased the prestige and influence of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union has emerged from tbose crises as something different from what it was before. For the Soviet Union today can no longer claim to be the fatherland of socialism, the disinterested vanguard of the international proletariat.

International education is in a state of extreme crisis. The International Education Act signed into law by President Johnson on October 29, 1966, has yet to be funded. Recent congressional allocations with respect to international exchange programs have been slashed by an unprecedented 30 per cent — from $46 million to $31 million. Hardest hit was the Fulbright program whose funds were reduced approximately 72 per cent. The Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs which oversees the exchange programs has planned an overall geographic cut, and Western Europe which traditionally has received the most grants will experience the largest numerical cut.

In his classic Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville expressed doubt that this country would be able to conduct a wise foreign policy. He argued that democracies lack the qualities necessary for such a stance in world affairs. In his words, “… a democracy can only with great difficulty regulate the details of an important undertaking, persevere in a fixed design, and work out its execution in spite of serious obstacles.” Through the second world war, many students of American foreign policy felt that de Tocqueville's pessimistic expectations had been proven valid. Since 1898, this nation seemed to oscillate between extremes of adventurous activism and sullen isolationism.

The attention of the Western world has been concentrated very forcibly in recent years on the meaning and the place of the university in contemporary society. Student unrest and political “activisim” have gained widespread publicity in all communications media and in every legislature. In France, Mexico, Czechoslovakia, Japan, Germany, Spain, Italy, and the United States, the university confrontation has occasioned grave civil crises that have shaken the very stability of government itself. The origin and nature of this phenomenon is rooted in the intellectual history of the modern world which has sought to effect a humanism totally subject to man's intellectual and technological control. What we are now seeing is how this control is passing from thought and technique to political and messianic action, to movements which profess to “re-create” man in the midst of his most pressing crises of poverty, race, war, and equality.

Our age, with its many disquietudes, has been peculiarly open to radical critiques in ethics and polities. Peter Brock's account of pacifism, therefore, appears at a time when interest in the subject should be greater than in certain previous periods. We have not had comprehensive studies of the American peace movement since those of Devere Allen and Merle Curti. Brock's very detailed work does not, of course, purport to be an examination of the peace movement as a whole but only of the pacifist stream within it — that tendency which in principle rejects all war, whatever the professed goals, and stresses the notion” of non-violence. Although be treats the theme only down to 1914, some of the seminal issues of pacifist thought and practice in any age — including our own — are illustrated in this massive volume. The extensive bibliography could be a point of departure for many specialized studies.

After centuries of discussions and disputes over the church-state relationship, it would seem that there is little to say about the “Christian and politics.” The reality is that the relationship is more disputed today than it has ever been. Nor has the theology of the secular, so extensively developed over the past few years, increased the area of agreement about the perspective from which the Christian should look at the political order, how he can speak to it and to what extfent the emphasis should be placed on “Christian” or on “politics.”

There have been few political systems in man's history which have not appealed to God in one way or another for their justification or foundation or mission.

With the publication of Hans J. Morgenthau's Scientific Man vs. Power Politics more than two decades ago, one might have thought that the dragon of creeping scientism would have been laid to rest by now. But Scientific Man, self-confident and potentialiy omnipotent, dies hard.

Last December, for example, Donald F. Horning, President Johnson's science advisor, urged the creation of a Cabinet-level Department of Science with a starting budget of at least $2 billion. He was referring, of course, to the physical or “hard” sciences. On the “soft” side, President Johnson reportedly had privately criticized the “kooks and sociologists” who'used the War on Poverty as a living laboratory for their research experiments. I don't know if Mr. Johnson said this, but as a “soft” scientist, I kind of wish he had.

It is invigorating to speak of “man come of age” and to proclaim that modern man has marched, with noble maturity, from his sacral and myth-bound past into the secular present. An abundant and exuberant literature has celebrated this grand event. Sacral man, however, is alive and thriving and finds himself in something of the position of Mark Twain who, when he read of his own death in the paper, immediately wrote to the editor: “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.”

“There are two kinds of truth,” the Danish physicist, Niels Bohr, used to tell his students, “small truth and great truth. You can recognize a small truth because its opposite is falsehood. The opposite of a great truth is another truth.”

I suggest it might be helpful to view Christianity and communism as two great truths, in Bohr's sense. The issue between them is not so much one of truth and falsehood as the more comprehensive opposition of the kind exhibited by different philosophies of life, each making claim to man's total allegiance. This opposition ought in fact to be a form of creative collaboration, for the truth never'competes with itself, only with error.

Pain and tragedy often teach men, and sometimes nations. Comfort mothers conceit more surely than necessity does invention, and torment accompanies die birth of thought as it does that of men. Even in Vietnam there is that much hope; national anguish may lead us. to a new and better understanding of the world and of our role in it, and to a foreign policy which avoids the grim and needless alternatives that have confronted us in Southeast Asia.

The hope, however, is ambiguous. Pain should stimulate the search for causes and cures, but it may produce no more than flight. In intellectual as well as physical matters, there are hurts so great as to be “blinding.”

Confusion and a deep division within the American public over die value of an anti-ballistic missile (A.B.M.) defense system was reflected in the midsummer vote in the Senate to authorize about $900 million for expenditure in fiscal year 1970 for President Nixon's Safeguard A.B.M. system.

During the debate that preceded the Senate vote, public and religious presses carried many articles that presented forceful arguments against the Safeguard program. These seem to boil down to two principal issues of moral concern: it is alleged, first, that the Safeguard A.B.M. would introduce a destabilizing element into the strategic nuclear balance just at the time we are attempting to enter negotiations with the Soviet. Union for limitation on strategic armaments; second, that deployment of the Safeguard system would be wasteful of national resources needed for pressing domestic problems.

There are presently 6.7 million students in some 2200 American institutions of higher learning. Their numbers have doubled in the past ten years and will double again in the next ten.

This statistic alone indicates that the university is no longer a shady retreat where scholars and students leisurely engage in the search for truth. The university has become a major power in our societal life. It shares with society in general a frenzied dynamism, the pursuit of immediate objectives, a labyrinthian structure and the lust for prestige. One couldn't imagine a university without, for example, a well-staffed public relations office. The American university today is in almost all senses of the word a new university.