THE VALUES OF SURVIVAL

...But his prescriptions are negative rather than positive, "aiming less at envisioning and creating the good than in understanding, limiting and forestalling evil...

...But his description of the new culture is necessarily formal rather than substantive, since it is logically impossible to speak of boundaries and limits without at the same time defining shapes, impossible to judge and control technology without a new positive image of man which Callahan does not provide...

...Technology provides another, indeed the penultimate, example of how man in seeking to improve his condition ends up as badly or worse off than ever...

...It is a sprightly, fascinating book, full of aphorisms and proper nouns, concrete rather than abstract, written in a compacted and often obscure idiosyncratic prose far removed from Callahan's explicit, sometimes plodding style...

...For the first time, two research sociologists examine and report on the many faces of gay religion in contemporary America, including homosexual theology, gay church outreach, and the conflict of spiritual with socialsexual goals...

...Rieff is too historically sophisticated and too tough-minded to accept the current myth of 'Judeo-Christian' values...

...such rebirths would be aborted by publicity...

...The Tyranny o[ Survival has a patchwork quality...

...He has, alas, seized upon Freud---explicitly Freud as interpreted by Rieff-as a point of departure...

...Teachers, he insists, "are the real police...

...Much if not all of what Callahan says is true and worth saying, especially when he gets down to cases...

...Save for the material on Freud most of it was written for other occasions, and the only fully developed treatment of particular technological problems is in the chapters dealing with population and genetics...

...The Gospel and the Land: Early C h r i s t i a n i t y and Jewish T e r r i t o r i a l Doctrine W. D. DAVIES U. o/Cali]ornia Press, $15 BRUCE VAWTER The distinction between Israeli and Jew, though recognized by the constitution of the State of Israel itself, is frequently blurred inside and outside Israel, and sometimes for self-serving reasons, whether pro- or anti-Jewish...

...Honestly facing the short-comings of the church's response to matters of sex, Rinzema discusses the biblical view of sex, the anti-sexual tradition in Christian theology, and Victorian morality...

...Publisher's Weekly 144 pages, paper $2.95 cloth $4.95 WM...

...In Callahan's view technology, though both natural and necessary to man, is presently doubly menacing: the radical individualism postulated by Freud induces man to use technology in ways which damage his fellows and ultimately himself, while the problems of controlling technology and its effects if the human race is to survive lead to a "tyranny of survival," in which man may choose means of dealing with these problems which will imperil both his genetic and cultural integrity: "The central question is not so much whether the human species will survive, but how it will survive...

...Callahan concludes by calling for the creation-somehow---of a new culture which will provide the basis for a "cultural superego" capable of setting ethical norms for technology...

...being mere interpreters of interpreters, not ourselves prophets...

...Not only is the nineteenth-century pseudo-science of Freudianism a poor guide to understanding human psychological and social dynamics (one might as well discuss the uses of atomic power on the basis of belief in the "luminiferous ether" or genetic engineering in terms of the homunculi of the preformationists), but Freudianism proclaims the bad news of original sin without redemption, without grace or the possibility of channels of grace...

...Repression is both good and necessary...

...Technology will be controlled and the slide of contemporary culture into barbarism will be halted not by any science of limits based on despair however fashionable--but only by a developed science of man based not only on that Christian hope implicit in the whole of Western history but also on a psychology and political theory which permit a reconciliation between the individual and society...

...All Rieff, like Callahan, can do is plead for a "science of limits," regarding the possibility of which he is less sanguine than his disciple: "I see no promise for any rebirths of interdictory meaning...

...We need, he contends, a " 'science of limits', which seeks less for what should be done than for those boundaries which should not be transgressed in the process...

...He is balanced and judicious, sometimes almost to the point of blandness, eschewing passion and extremes...

...it challenged the order of reverence and justice...

...In contrast to the "proud, elitist culture of Israel," Christianity and its successors directed a terrible hatred "at the highest, the noblest aspects of human achievement...

...teachers educate...

...Rieff like Callahan denigrates all schools of thought which, like the counterculture ("primitive rudeness"), hold out greater hope for man than that vouchsafed by the saintly Freud, whom both embrace as a "moralist without a message...

...112 pages, paper $1.95 THE BAY CHURCH by R0nald Enroth and Gerald E. Jamison Established to meet the spiritual needs of the homosexual, gay churches are growing throughout the country...

...B. EERDMANS zo9 PUBLISHING CO...

...The formula will not work, obviously, for now that it9 in the open we need to understand and deal with it THE SEXUAL REVOLUTIOH by J. Rinzema A frank discussion of the dizzying changes in sexual morality that touch the lives of Christians everywhere...

...Thus the common inability of Callahan and Rieff to provide any guidance in our current distress has theological as well as scientific roots...

...Nothings would be instantly everythings by imposing a love that was utterly mendacious...

...Repression subserves interdicts, and interdicts, "what is not to be done," are "the primary forms of high culture," rather than the arts and sciences...

...Fellow Teachers is a long monologue, inspired by a discussion Rieff once participated in at Skidmore College...

...A surprisingly good and objective account of the brand new and snowballing phenomenon of homosexual churches and religious parishes . . . an admirable early work on a subiect that will doubtless draw other writers...

...The Tyranny o~ Survival is the product of philosopher Callahan's search for a perspective from which to judge the present and pending developments in biological technology with which he has been concerned for several years as director of the Institute of Society, Ethics and the Life Sciences...

...The major curse of the modern scene, Rieff argues, is that Freud has been massively misinterpreted so that we are undergoing an orgy of "desublimization," destructive of all culture...

...Messages and positions are the death of teaching...

...Because of the very nature of the human psyche happiness is an illusory goal and technology simply another fore-doomed means of searching for it...

...The first step toward its creation, however, is for all of us to abandon the illusions and break through the repressions imposed on us by Freud and his disciples...

...Unable to accept completely the despair of his chosen mentors, he holds out hope that man can control technology for the sake of other goods and postulates "the social need for a normative ethic...

...2%5 3EF~'s ~'S,r)N AVF S E GRANO ~AP]DS MICH 49502 Commonweal: 219...

...Th.e gospels were not good news, the ungospeled present has its supremely pleasant feature, the death of the church . . . . The Christian mystery-cult evolved into the most terrible rationalizing of transgressiveness ever to curse our culture . . . Christendom's love was a covert form of making war on culture in any form...

...Much of what Rieff says is--if not necessarily valid--stimulating and worth saying: his shock at the ignorance of students and his anger at their desertion by their teachers, and also his condemnation of abortion, his arguments for capital punishment, and his deflation of the pretentious claptrap of black militancy...

...Gurus sanctify...

...BOOKS THE VALUES OF SURVIVAL VICTOR FERKISS The Tyranny of Survival DANIEL CALLAHAN Macmillan, $6.95 Fellow Teachers PHILIP RIEFF Harper and Row, $6.95 Philip Rieff and Daniel Callahan are concerned with two distinct but related problems facing contemporary humanity: the breakdown of traditional cultural and moral values and the increasing ascendancy of technological norms in modern society...

...he claims to have none...

...Rieff's primary overt concern is with the role of the (university) teacher, and he sets himself resolutely against all attempts to make the university a center of social action or moral concern...

...Scratch an Israeli and find a Jew: scratch a Jew and find an Israeli...

...When one turns to Callahan's intellectual guide, University of Pennsylvania sociologist Philip Rieff, the inadequacy of negativism becomes even more evident...

...A major part of his book consists of an explication of the basic premises of Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents: that man is basically aggressive and is necessarily unhappy because his aggressiveness leads to an insurmountable conflict between the individual and civilization...

...Paul for more than his alleged antiSemitism), for "the human is a born criminal...

...We have entered upon an era in which 3 May 1974:218 "re-education" and affluence are making it possible for the masses to appreciate and share the vices of aristocrats...

...For Callahan, therefore, the problems raised by the need to evaluate and control technology are essentially psychological rather than social...

...For Rieff, "a concealing transfer of privileged knowledge is the unchangeable work of teachers...

...He is less hopeful than Callahan perhaps because he is more clear as to where, from the Freudian viewpoint, the real root of modern evil lies: in the nasty hopefulness that came into the world with the Incarnation, the ultimate basis of all utopianism...

...They seek to account for the existence of these problems and to deal with them according to the theories of Sigmund Freud--and accordingly fail...

...But ultimately we are left with nothing but rage and pride: "It is not in my gift to be positive...

...To praise the infantile is to praise criminality...

...Love comes after law" (clearly Rieff despises St...

...Callahan is at present too diffident about its possibilities, but the hope remains that in the future he will make his own valuable contribution to it...

...Rieff is apparently so stiffnecked as to be irrevocably opposed to such a project...

...His conclusions, and his approach to such related matters as homosexuality, abortion, and premariLal sex, are firmly founded in traditional Christian values...