In the closing pages of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904) Max Weber mused on the shape of things to come: No one knows who wilt live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of self-importance. For of the last stage of this cultural development, it might be said: “Specialists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.”

Brazil has always been an inward-looking country. The national consciousness is transfixed on the mystery of Amazonia, the nation's own dark heart. And it has been the abiding dream of generations to conquer the country, to open that heart. In the past the lust for adventure and sudden wealth, the lure of the wilderness, drew some over the water highways to the outposts of the gem seekers. But no great number of Brazilians ever penetrated the Amazon region. It was always too difficult, the forest too resistant.

The sun comes suddenly each day over the Amazon: It warms the gliding brown rivers, the veins of the living forest that feed the giant trees. It gives the jungle back its voice, muted by the night.

In the early 1960's, before the military coup, Paulo Freire and his collaborators experimented with a new method of literacy education in the Northeast of Brazil. The basic idea was simple: Teaching literacy was not to be an isolated activity but part of a larger broadening of die intellectual horizons of the previously illiterate. An important aspect was political. The illiterate were to learn reading and writing at the hand of topics (Freire called these “generative themes”) that concerned everyday experience. For the impoverished and rural proletariat of the Northeast this was to a high degree an experience of deprivation, exploitation, and oppression.

Wilfred Owen, one of the poetic voices stilled by World War I, chose as his subject “war and the pity of war,” finding his poetry in the pity. It can be argued that even then the pity had gone out of war. It is certain that the events of subsequent wars—large and small, local as well as worldwide—have been so pitiless in character and conduct that little or no “poetry” remains.

We are three-quarters through a century of unprecedented violence, with the grim prospect of even greater evils tying ahead. In his Twentieth Century Book of the Dead Gil Eliot offers what he considers a reasonable estimate of 100,000,000 “man-made” deaths since 1900. That figure alone is enough to give us pause. But it is not merely the number of deaths that should concern us here, but who is killed and the manner in which the victims are killed. In World War I, of the ten million or so victims, 90 per cent were soldiers. The carnage of World War II was so great and so indiscriminate that an equally simple estimate is almost impossible to contrive.

Ten years ago, in an address to an audience of German students, Peter Lotar, author of Das Bild des Menschen, raised the question of how the years of the Third Reich's power and crimes shall be dealt with.

The last twenty-five years or so have seen some fundamental changes in the setting in which the relationship between nationalism and internationalism takes place. Before that time the discussion of that relationship was dominated by the feeble efforts of the League of Nations, the ethical thrust of transnational communities of the Faith—Muslim as well as Christian—and by the claims to international solidarity of the working-class movement (to the point where it degenerated at least in part into an instrument of the cold war). Now what shapes the perspective within which any review of that relationship has to be conducted is the new technology of weapons and communications, the increasing interpenetration in the relations between nation-states, the growing awareness of the finiteness of physical resources and ecology.

The Turks have few claims on Western sympathies. They did not build the Parthenon, nor did they invent the word democracy (although in the last generation they have been more expert than the Greeks in operating one).

But about Cyprus they are right. The only workable solution is partition of the island between Greek-Cypriot and Turkish-Cypriot entities with a loose confederal linkage. Efforts to force the Turks into other solutions, by such means as Congressional insistence that military aid to Turkey be cut off, are counterproductive. On the one hand, U.S. pressure on Turkey resulted in a tougher Turkish stand. The Turkish-Cypriots have, at Ankara's suggestion, proclaimed their own autonomous state in the 40 per cent of the island held by the Turkish Army.

It is a sign of the speed at which events are moving that Hurst and Blacked's unexpurgated edition of Mein Kampf, published only a year ago, is edited from a pro-Hitler angle. The obvious 'intention of the translator's preface and notes is to tone down the book's ferocity and present Hitler in as kindly a light as possible. For at that date Hitler was still respectable. He had crushed the German labour movement, and for that the property-owning classes were willing to forgive him almost anything. Both Left and Right concurred in the very shallow notion that National Socialism was merely a version of Conservatism.

Then suddenly it turned out that Hitler was not respectable after all. As one result of this, Hurst and Blackett's edition was reissued in a new jacket explaining that all profits would be devoted to the Red Cross. Nevertheless, simply on the internal evidence of Mein Kampf, it is difficult to believe that any real change has taken place in Hitler's aims and opinions. When one compares his utterances of a year or so agoVith those made fifteen years earlier, a thing that strikes one is the rigidity of his mind, the way in which his world-view doesn't develop.

The overwhelming vote against Israel by Third World nations in the U.N. has raised some interesting and important questions about die attitude toward Jews in those countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, whose populations, after all, represent the majority of the human race.

Puzzlement over this issue was expressed by Saul Bellow at the December P.E.N, international writers' conference in Israel. “It is a remarkable thing,” said Bellow, “dial nations which have no knowledge of, or contact with, Jews, no history of anything to do with Jews, should become consistently hostile. Why should the new nations of Africa and Asia turn against us? Can it be put down to the influence of the.'Arabs?”

Bill Moyers: When Thomas Jefferson became Secretary of State in 1790 there were to be representatives of four foreign countries in Washington-Britain, the Netherlands, France, and Spain. Jefferson's chief problems were to negotiate commercial relations with each of the four countries, to gain from three of them control of territory surrounding the new nation, and to maintain neutrality in the war that raged between two of them.

Now there are 128 diplomatic missions in Washington, and while the chief problems continue to be commerce, war, and peace, the world is a far more complicated place. As we move toward the end of the twentieth century the problems we face are a crisscrossing web of issues, each of which is tangled with the next, so that today's solution may be tomorrow's headache or war.

The current passion for a “theology of ecology” got its chief start with the appearance in Scietice in March, 1967, of an article titfed- The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis.“ Its .author, medieval historian Lynn White, Jr., of UCLA, is an engaging raconteur with a gift for the memorable phrase and the arresting thought. He is professionally adept at rummaging through heaps of historical scraps and making sense of them, frequently rather novel sense. Specializing in the development of technology in the Middle Ages, he links happenings from seemingly different realms, particularly ideas and artifacts, so that once familiar history suddenly looks quite different, rather like the shock one gets when old stories of kings and armies and conquests are retold from the medical point of view.

We need now to make a structural change in our way of thinking about U.S.-Soviet relations. Our habit since World War II has been to move back and forth between) simplified extremes—to vacillate between overly sanguine expectations in which the inevitable difficulties in relations with the USSR are minimized and overly pessimistic and emotional positions in which the elements of change in the relationship are neglected. It is hard for public opinion in this country, perhaps in any country, to face up to emotionally unsatisfying ambiguities.

Of books and studies on multinational corporations there is, apparently, no end in sight. Nevertheless, little attention has been given to the various factors that cause employee-corporation relations to vary from country to country.

From my trade union experiences in the USA and parts of the developing world I have learned that employee relations are heavily influenced by factors such as the strength of the trade union movement, national labor legislation, the labor market, and conditions affecting job security. Because these factors differ from place to place, it is impossible to generalize about the employee relations of any single multinational corporation; we often find multinational corporations with good employee relations in one country and poor relations in another.