The study of time in personal perceptions and social lives is hardly a new enterprise. A rather large body of literature on these subjects exists, and much of the material is utterly fascinating. People have examined orientations to the past, present, and future, the tempi of living, cycles, biological and social rhythms, the meaning of expectation, and of course memory. One of the more popular areas of research involves categorizing people as past, present, or futureoriented. These so-called temporal orientations are associated with various personality traits, as for example the heightened past orientations of anxious people, or the characteristic future orientations of highly achieving people. It has also been common practice to label according to various social classes within a society: the poor, present-oriented; the middle class, futureoriented; and the affluent, past- or, more precisely, tradition-oriented.

With the coming of Jimmy Carter something ended, and something else began. As if to celebrate—however sadly—the end of an age, more than eight hundred surviving members of Roosevelt's New Deal recently gathered in Washington for a party. "We didn't want to wait another year," said one of the organizers of the occasion, "because some of these people won't be here then".

September 26, 1977, marks the eightieth birthday of Giovanni Battista Montini. This does not make him the oldest pope of this century by any means. The first pope to die in the twentieth century was Leo XIII, who was ninety-three and who finished a good part of his well-known work after eighty. No man, fortunately, knows how long he will live, and Paul VI has mentioned several times that he cannot expect to be about for long. But this is mostly the wise insight of any elderly human being. (I myself have no doubt that the character of Paul VI is such that he would resign were he seriously incapacitated.) In any case, change of power, not least that of ecclesiastical power, remains one of the most fascinating of cultural questions. And Paul holds whatjs by far the oldest continuing office in the world.

Human rights is at present a.much discussed issue in American foreign policy. What has not been discussed is the extent to which this represents a major change in American foreign policy. Consider: In 1974 the Secretary of State devoted exactly one sentence to human rights in his speech to the United Nations General Assembly. In 1975 there were four paragraphs of fairly standard rhetoric, apart from the proposal to establish a U.N. study to determine how widely torture was used as an officially sanctioned instrument of government. In addition there was an intimation of change in this sentence: "There is no longer any dispute that international human rights are on the agenda of international diplomacy." Yet there was then no evidence that Secretary Kissinger had changed the approach characterizing his tenure in office; nameiy, that American foreign policy cannot concern itself with the domestic policies of the governments with which it deals, even if they entail gross violations of human rights. We can, he insisted, only use private methods of persuasion and pressure. Foreign policy deals with the foreign policies of governments.

In accepting the Democratic presidential nomination in July of last year, candidate Jimmy Carter said that when the United States was founded its commitment to certain moral and philosophical principles "created a basis for a unique role for America: that of a pioneer in shaping more decent and just relations among peoples and among societies." He sketched the task facing us: "Nothing less than a sustained architectural effort to shape an international framework of peace, within which our own ideals gradually tend to become a global reality" (emphasis added). In his inaugural address of January 20 President Carterelaborated upon the concept: "We will not behave in foreign places so as to violate our rules and standards here at home, for we know that this trust which our nation earns is essential to our strength." He remarked that a new spirit now dominated the world: "People more numerous and more politically aware are craving and now demanding their place in the sun—not just for the benefit of their physical condition, but for basic human rights."