Writing from the court of Gustavus Adolphus in 1620, Cromwell's puritanical ambassador to Sweden, Bubtrode Whitelocke, painted a dreary scene of what he could discern through the drizzly, leaden gloom of a five-hour Swedish November day … roads little more than rivers of mud, primitive strip farming, millions of acres of seemingly endless solemn pine forests, log shacks mortared with moss, a dismal diet of “boiled, roast or fried cow,” and nearly universal, perpetual intoxication.

If Ambassador Whitelocke had returned to Sweden at the dawn of the twentieth century he would have had little difficulty recognizing the place.

This is a population conference, and therefore we must talk about population and not about reforming the worldl” That sentiment was expressed repeatedly in one form or another at Bucharest last August during the United Nations World Population Conference. It was a cry of anger, an expression of dismay, an admission of defeat. It was also, unfortunately, an acknowledgment that many people failed to recognize the very changed character of discussions and decisions about “population.”

The U.N, Conference was the result of over two years of careful planning. As the first political meeting to address the issue of population at the international level, the Conference had generated considerable attention in governmental, nongovernmental, and academic circles. More than four thousand persons came to Bucharest as members of official delegations, as observers, as delegates to the nongovernmental Population Tribune held simultaneously with the Conference, and as journalists. All came to talk about “population,”

Jerusalem. The Old City. The Wailing Wall. Jom Kippur, 1974. The sun is bright, the sky blue, the air clear and crisp as worshippers first straggle and then seem to flow into the large square and toward the Wall, having first passed—as we all must—through the narrow funnel of military inspectors. Neither a Jew nor an Israeli, nor an uncritical admirer of the State of Israel, I nevertheless feel the special quality of this religious observance. It is marked not only by its usual solemnity but by the burden of being the first anniversary of the Yom Kippur War of 1973, the war that destroyed. the semieuphoria in which Israel had existed since 1967 and placed in new perspective the shifting relations of the nations of the Middle East.

The United States was never an isolationist country except in a Pickwickian sense of the term. It went through no period of excluding the outside world, as the Japanese did for two hundred years. On the contrary, the United States, in consequence of its openness to immigration, linked itself, between 1790 and 1920, ever more closely by ties of culture and blood to the various countries of Europe. It engaged in trade with them, allowed and invited their economic support in the task of settling and exploiting the American continent, and sent its upper-class children and its best writers, artists, and scientists on mandatory tours of Europe for the good of their souls. Culturally, ethnically, in its historical affinities, the United States has been perhaps the least isolated of nations.

Two major events that bracket the past decade like a set of bookends are the Vatican Declaration on the Jews (Nostra Aetate No. 4) in 1965 and “Guidelines for the Implementation of Nostra Aetate No. 4,” issued in January, 1975.

There are two striking aspects to these events that immediately invite comment. First, they are both Catholic developments; there seem to have been no comparable developments of similar import for Christian-Jewish relations during this entire decade in Protestant and Orthodox Christianity—certainly none that come to mind as strikingly as do the two Catholic documents. Second, it took a full decade’ for the Catholic Church to issue instructions to its faithful to guide and encourage the implementation of Nostra Aetate.

Grandfather was seventy-one years old when he met King Faisal. Saudi Arabia was the first foreign land he ever lived in. It happened that when grandad came to visit us in Saudi Arabia eleven years ago, Faisal had just ousted his senile brother from the throne. Grandfather managed to have himself invited to a diplomatic function honoring the new king—and there he shook the Arab monarch's hand. A world apart, no two men could have been more different, yet in some basic manner both were bred in the old, less mechanized world. Both men, the crusty and pious desert king and the retired Oregon lumberjack, had fought a harsh and unyielding land, and both carried the visible scars of their hard lives.

The principal occupation of the Nixon Administration was an attempt to build what it called a “structure of peace.” President Ford has made it perfectly clear that he agrees with the basic thrust of his predecessor's foreign policy. Public opinion polls show that a majority of the American ipeople share Ford's assessment of the Nixon Administration's alleged achievements in world affairs. I propose to challenge the basis on which they intend to build that structure and to pose an alternative basis. Before positing that alternative I will compare the Nixon-Kissinger grand design with other policies that compete for our allegiance today.

It was hardly more than a year ago that his grandiose dreams were scoffed at as the ranting of a petty tyrant and megalomaniac. In the aftermath of the “energy crisis” and quadrupling of oil prices, however, the world is beginning to think twice about Iran's monarch, Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi, or Shahansha (King of Kings), to give him his formal title.

Though he came to the throne in 1941, the present Shah of Iran did not really hold the reins of power until the overthrow in 1953 of the militant nationalist premier, Mohammed Mossadegh, in a CIA-sponsored coup.

I cannot deny that I was surprised and confused when I first read the Hartford Appeal. It seemed to me that every Christian theologian would reject the theses proscribed in this document. But then, why was the affirmation made? And why was it made at this time? In this year, dedicated by Pope Paul VI to reconciliation, I would have expected Christian theologians in the USA to make an appeal for amnesty. This topic is of special interest to Canadians, since we are acquainted with many draft resistors who have come to live among us. I cannot imagine who the theologians indicated in the Hartford Appeal are. Who holds these views?

Although there are minor technical disagreements about the exact rate of economic growth in Brazil, few dispute that it has been very high, far above that of the years immediately before the 1964 coup and far above the average of other Latin American countries during the same period. The rate of growth, plus the political stability achieved by coercive and other means since 1969, has made Brazil something of a model for conservatives elsewhere. Before the September, 1973, coup I visited Chile twice and often heard the expression “the Brazilian miracle” or “the Brazilian model” used by the old Chilean elites dissatisfied with the equalitarian policies of Salvador Allende.

The people have a long history of being hostile to outsiders, wrote Louis Jaffe, Harvard law professor, about the inhabitants of Boston's South End. As a consultant to the Massachusetts Department of Education Jaffe urged that the impending federal court desegregation ruling exempt “Southie” from any busing plan. Jaffe's warnings went unheeded, and the buses rolled between the overwhelming black Roxbury ghetto and the neighboring, predominantly Irish South End, sparking an onslaught of racial violence one journalist described as “unparalleled in modern Boston history, a day of hatred against outsiders not witnessed here in decades.”

Southeast Asia is now being stripped naked. Bewildered by the toxicants of modernization and buffeted by the gales of international politics, Southeast Asia has lost its sense of direction and suffers unfathomable despair. In this context Japan has become a strong target of criticism. This criticism is not wholly superficial, and if Japan is both to further its own interest and to contribute to this, area of the world it must understand and cope with that criticism. The most important feature of the anti-Japanese criticism in Southeast Asia is that it is based on “despair,”

At any international gathering these days the dominant theme is likely to be the obvious interdependence of all nations in a global environment that is now perceived to be sharply limited. There is, of course, nothing new in the twin concepts that the world is one and that it is not infinite. For some years prophets, statesmen, scholars, and humble citizens have been blowing on these two horns with increasing vigor. But it took the oil shock of the autumn of 1973 to transform these ideas from the realm of provocative theory to chilling reality. An interdependent, limited world was until quite recently an interesting, slightly worrisome concept, but hardly more immediately threatening than the theory of an ever expanding universe. Suddenly it seems more like the hypnotic eye of a striking cobra, inducing a mixture of terror and immobility.

The tremendous interest that Existentialism once generated has not quite simply abated. Historians of ideas will of course continue to write about it, and philosophers will continue to borrow and modify some of-its concepts; but still it does not have the immediate and even urgent impact it once had, both deserved and exaggerated, Seldom any longer will one hear a friend say, “I am grateful to Sartre. He gave me a language to describe fears and feelings I really had when I….”

Existentialism has receded to a distance where it can be viewed with more calm and detachment; but such was its nature, its considerations—“alienation,” “engagement,” “authenticity,” existence(!)—that this recession means in a sense that it has lost part of its meaning. It is now perceived as a kind of intellectual institution, energized by only flickers of urgency, a body of ideas instead of an activity, a vital intellectual engagement with the world, a philosophizing.

All I demand of the reader, James Joyce is supposed to have remarked of Finnegans Wake, is his lifetime. Fortunately and unfortunately, Karl Marx makes the same claim. Fortunately, because his work is so vast and rich that you can profitably spend a lifetime assimilating both its specific insights and a methodology that enables you to confront new and unprecedented realities. Unfortunately, because it is impossible to dabble in Marx. Such otherwise brilliant scholars as Karl Popper and Paul Samuelson have often written downright silly things about Marxism after acquiring a tourist's knowledge of it. There is probably a larger library of worthless writings on Marx than on any other major thinker in Western culture.

War may be launched by the Arabs in six, nine, or twelve months’ time,” warned Israel's Defense Minister, Shimon Peres, just nine months after the end bf the October, 1973, war, and only a few weeks after Syrian and Israeli forces disengaged from the Golan Heights cease-fire lines. A couple of days after Peres's statement, commanderin- chief “Motta” Gur was a little more precise: “The Arabs,” he stated, “may start a war at the end of 1974.”

Jewish tradition holds that ever since the destruction of the Second Temple prophecy has become the province of fools and infants. But after four or five Mideast confrontations in under three decades predictions of war have been too often verified to be lightly shrugged off as either childish or stupid.

When I first grew up and had to have a job, I was defined as a sociologist because that is the degree I got—Political Sociology from the University of London. But since I had done research in Ghana (and hence studied black people), it was commonly felt that I must be something of an anthropologist. For a long time, when I was asked the question you asked, I would tell students that sociologists study white people arid that that was the only useful distinction— the most parsimonious distinction—one could make between sociology and anthropology. I have since come to think that the distinction is more serious, chiefly because anthropologists still retain a lingering interest in human beings, while sociologists have become, in a certain sense, condemned to being concerned with systems.

Adolf Hitler and those of his fanatical . henchmen who shared his last days shared also a belief that from their ashes a cult would arise. As early as 1942, when his Russian plans had gone awry. Hitler spoke to his entourage of the satisfactions of dying on “a magnificent funeral pyre.” In his last testament three years later he wrote of his oneness in sacrifice with his soldiers, which would be “the seed of a radiant rebirth of the National-Socialist movement….” Martin Bormann hinted at a Wagnerian myth when he wrote in his last letter to his wife of perishing “in King Attila's hall, like the Nibelungs of old.” Joseph Goebbels, dramatic to the end, de claimed at his last press conference about “the fine color film describing the terrible days we are living through,” which future audiences would see.