Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR ENEMY In his "The Once-Born, the Twice-Born, the After-Born" (NL, April 1), Daniel Bell asks: "Today, intellectually, emotionally, who is the enemy that one can fight?" I cannot but...
...I cannot but wonder: Where has Bell been, where is he, whither is he going, what kind of blinders is he wearing, and does he really believe that the "young generation" asks that question and finds no answer to it...
...This accepted, we can also enforce the legal treaty rights of other nations and take cognizance of peaceful change to satisfy the equitable traditional claims of Israel and the claim, so far as equitable, of insurgent Arab nationalism...
...We can, indeed, validly argue that neither the United Nations nor the United States is a court of law...
...In 12th-century England, this work was done harshly and ruthlessly by Henry of' Anjou and his sheriffs...
...It seems to be open to grave doubt whether indeed the President thought Israel' "must quit Gaza for the sake of vindicating the moral principle that force can no longer be used as an instrument of national policy," except insofar as, in 1956, the President proclaimed the upholding, by power, of the rule of international law as a moral principle and a political objective...
...It is this insistence, as basic to the international structure, that President Eisenhower is rightly demanding...
...The theme is sufficiently indicated in the title of his best-known book, Moral Man and Immoral Society...
...For the moment, we must not expect full justice or even complete equity, but merely rigid insistence upon due process of law...
...Since normal channels for expression are denied many of us, we avail ourselves of the enormous sex materials found on the market—especially the nude and obscene pictures...
...I am only concerned with the repercussions of this kind of theme, which has too long been treated as a deep moral insight, upon the President's policy...
...and that the United Nations Assembly, being merely a forum of discussion among the abidingly unlike-minded, can only "recommend" — by concurrence of India's Krishna Menon...
...A high court of law, having power, does not announce from the bench that "we shall now choose, this world being tragic {teste Professor Butter-field) and sinful, the lesser evil...
...Only normal fulfilment can cure us—which is to reunite the Self with his Source (God), thus bringing our fugitive and vagrant desires that completion or fulfilment...
...NIEBUHR For many years now, Reinhold Niebuhr has expounded u theory of morality which is distinctive, although he bases himself on such a tortured and paradoxical writer as Pascal or (perhaps more exactly) upon a traditional trend of German Protestant thought, perhaps rather Lutheran than Evangelical...
...The defense of Christian civilization, I would suggest, should rather attach importance to life in this world, shaped by righteousness, I am not here concerned whether Dr...
...NL, March 25) points up a serious problem indeed...
...We have the responsibility of using our power for the security of the free nations of the world, and that responsibility is obscured if we simply turn our problems over to the United Nations, the Charter of which, incidentally, does not give the Assembly the powers which it is now using...
...It suffers a certain sense of mortification when the President fails to display the expected muscular appetite for power and shows signs of harking back to a worldly application, in the field of "civil dominion," of moral principles which Lutherans hold must be other-worldly...
...In the words of Genera] Bernhardi, "Christian morality is persona] and social, and in its nature cannot be political...
...Tending to hold that individual morality is a tense quest for « perfection unobtainable in this world, a quest of which Kierkegaard is the most neurotic expression, and that human nature is so utterly corrupt that little can be expected in the way of the realization of God's will morally on earth, this school of thought, one of moral dualism, is logically inclined to hand over the order of this world to the Devil, Minx or the White House...
...NiebuJir replies: Leaving aside Professor George Catlin's analysis of the roots of my thought, which are wholly inaccurate, I think his belief that the unstable majorities of the United Nations can be source of moral law and of growing international community is just as naive as that of the President...
...Two blacks do not make white" is only a naive remark, ignoring- the need to choose the lesser evil, if we do not possess the power in due course to repress both evils...
...Paul Brinkman Jr...
...The issue here is one of an emergent community, developing a sense of law, and of what the Great Powers axe determined to uphold and enforce...
...Washington, D. C. Stanley K. Hornbeck SEX Arthur Gesterreicher's "Are We Sex Addicts...
...Portland, Ore...
...The whole history of the civil law indicates that morality is much more than legal equity, and equity more subtle than formal law...
...The issue in Gaza is specifically one of law and legalism...
...The President's policy would seem far from "'naive moralism," to be marked by a single-minded resolution, calculated to solidify institutions and rally opinion...
...Pacta sunt servanda...
...This is all the more so in a luxury economy such as ours, where the former disciplines of the more austere agrarian existence have been relaxed...
...Niebuhr is not arguing, as if it were intellectually patent, for what is in fact a condemned proposition, to wit, that the agents of the state are in...
...Modern life imposes onerous frustrations upon us which we seek to escape or for which we try to find fulfilment...
...Since this affords at best only a palliation, we find « vicious circle started which sees these frustrations aggravated and, in turn, calling for more "dope...
...Montreal George Catlin Dr...
...some fashion exempt from the dictates of the rational moral conscience...
...that, for reasons which remain mysterious, the twice-repeated suggestion of Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser (doubtless a bad man in a court of morals) that interpretation of the 1888 Constantinople Convention should be brought before the World Court has not been taken up...
...Here is the crude framework of any established international moral order, so far as it may be safeguarded by law...
...and the opposite view to be rather a sophisticated but fundamentally apolitical anarchism—a phase of other-worldly perfectionism, overcompensating itself by appeals more Lutherano to secular force—than marked by any unusually profound insight into the structure of power...
Vol. 40 • April 1957 • No. 15
