SPAN: September 1976

A LEITER FROM mE PUBLISHER It's probably true that economics is "the dismal science," as everyone has been saying since Thomas Carlyle said it first in 1849. But there is simply no getting around the fact that world trade and economic development has never been so important as it is today. It will get more important as the world becomes more interdependent, and that's why SPAN has been devoting a lot of space to the recent UNCTAD IV conference in Nairobi.

Last month we published an abridgment of Dr. Henry Kissinger's address to the UNCTAD conference. In this issue SPAN takes a close look at what UNCTAD did-and didn't do.

We have two analyses of the Nairobi conference. The article on page 28 ("UNCTAD IV in Perspective") discusses the problems in the three main areas of discussion at the conferencecommodity prices, debt relief, technology transfer. It also points out that the conference did some useful work in other areas as well-such as calling on the countries of East Europe to reduce tariffs on Third World products, to increase imports from developing countries, and to step up economic and technical assistance to the Third World.

In the interview on page 45, Paul Boeker, leader of the U.S. delegation for most of the Nairobi conference, assesses UNCT AD's accomplishments from the American standpoint.

He is optimistic. He makes the point that the industrial countries are not irreconcilably against the Common Fund that the Third World proposed to finance commodity buffer stocks.

While they are willing to consider the possibility of establishing a Common Fund, they think there are other means of financing buffer stocks and these should be considered as well. Then there was the International Resources Bank, which was proposed by the U.S. The conference rejected it, and ij1any commentators cited this as another "failure" of UNCTAD. But Boeker believes that many of the nations that voted against the Bank -or chose to be absent when the vote was taken-"merely wanted to know a great deal more about the proposal. They want to consider it more thoroughly, and they want to have some input into it themselves. This is our wish as well."

Well, so was UNCTAD IV "a success"? Many Indians and Americal}s said it "failed." India's Financial Express called it "a success of sorts." Samachar News Agency said it was "neither a glowing success nor an exercise in futility." The New 'York Times walked a nice tightrope by calling it "a pyrrhic defeat-a defeat that may pave the way to future successes."

Some Indian and American analysts say it accomplished as much as it could under the circumstances. One writer in this category was N.S. Jagannathan, assistant editor of the Statesman. "It is true," Jagannathan wrote, "that no instant commitments have been made, but then it would have been unrealistic to expect any. International economic diplomacy, even more than political diplomacy, is the art of the possible." Jagannathan reminded us that "even under the best auspices, major reforms in international economic relations take anything up to a decade to get accepted in principle and even longer to become operational."

The important thing-which I would like to stress in this letter to our readers-is that the United States is deeply committed to economic justice for the developing world. Dr. Kissinger phrased it eloquently in his speech of September 22,1975 to the U.N. General Assembly: "We say to all peoples and governments: Let us fashion together a new world order.

Let its arrangements be just. Let the new nations help shape it and feel it is theirs. Let the old nations use their strengths and -J.W.G. skills for the benefit or. all mankind."

SPAN VOLUME

XVII

NUMBER

September

1976

9

It:' ,

The Search for Extraterrestrial

Life

by Henry T. Simmons

11 16 21 24 28

33

A Magazine That Tells Us Why We Do What We Do by Joluj Poppy ~ , f J, I ~ Sweet Potato Pie A short story by Eugenia Collier I f, t Electing a President by Stephen Hess What Do Americans Expect From a President?

by Alan L. Otten

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36

Castaneda's Journey to a Separate Reality

45

'A Realistic Program of North-South Collaboration'

by Claude Alvares -

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1

I

An interview with Paul Boeker

49 Front cover: A rose and a caterpillar on another planet symbolize the existence of extraterrestrial life (see story on pages 5-10). In the background is the small blue globe of the earth. Illustration by SPAN staff artist B. Roy Choudhury.

Back cover: The lobby of Atlanta's famous Hyatt Regency Hotel, designed by John Portman, has cafes, trees, sculptures and fountains. This hotel is one of the many attractions of Atlanta, capital of the "New South." See page 49.

ManagillJ'tEditor: Carmen Kagal. Assistant Managing Editor: S.R. Madhu. Editorial Stall': Mohammed Reyazuddin, Avinash Pasricha, Nirmal Sharma, Krishan Gabrani, Murari Saha, Rocque Fernandes. Art Director: Nand Katyal. Art Stall': Gopi Gajwani, B. Roy Choudhury, Kanti Roy, Suhas Nimbalkar.

Chiefof Production: Awtar S. Marwaha. Photographic Services: us IS Phoro' Lab. Published by the United States Information Service, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 110001, on behalf of the American Embassy, New Delhi. The opinions expressed in this magazine do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the United States Government. Printed by Arun Mehta at Vakil & Sons Ltd., Vakils House, Sprott Road, 18 Ballard Estate, Bombay 400 038.

Photographs: Inside front cover-Christopher Springmann. 4, 5-NASA. 8-courtesy SKP Industries. It-courtesy Psychology Today. 13, 14-Christopher Springmann. IS-Avinash Pasricha. 20-Jill Krementz. 3()-Y. Nagata, courtesy United Nations. 36, 41,44-Avinash Pasricha. 49-Edgar Cheatham, except bottom left by USIS.

Use of SPAN articles in other publications is encouraged, except when copyrighted. For permission, write to the Editor. Price of magazine: one years subscription (12 issues), 18 rupees; single copy. 2 rupees 50 paise. For change of address, send an old address from a recent SPAN envelope along with new address to A.K. Mitra, Circulation Manager, SPAN magazine, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 110001.

HENRY GRUNWALD In this Bicentennial Year, many Americans have expressed their love for their native land, . but few have captured the essence of American patriotism as well as the managing editor of 'Time' magazine in the following essay. Highly critical of his country's faults, Grunwald says: 'One loves America both for its virtues and its faults, which are deeply intertwined.'

Loving America is a very special task. No other country _ makes quite the same demands in being loved, nor presents quite the same difficulties.

In most other nations, patriotism is essentially the love of family, of tribe, of land, magnified. The songs and the poetry of patriotism are filled with scenery: with rivers and mountains, with cities longed for, with valleys lost, with castles conquered.

American patriotism has much less of this specific sense of place.

It is possible to be deeply moved by the endless American plains, and the settlements defiantly set down in the midst of this vastness, by the coast of Maine or the Rockies or the desert.

But that is not loving America. Loving America means loving what it stands for as a politicaJ and social vision. Although the great American epic is the conquest and taming of a continent, American patriotism is not concentrated on geography but on a historic event and an idea. The event is the creation of the United States as a fresh start, a different dispensation. The idea is freedom. Both notjons have been distorted or perverted at times -that happens with all patriotism. But even when it is misused, American patriotism remains ideological more than racial or ethnic.

When the French carved up Germany or the Germans carved up France, it was done for the greater glory of each nation, with firm belief in the innate superiority of their own people. Whenever Americans went to war, they may have been seized by jingoism to some extent, but more than anything else Americans believed they were fighting for ideas, for a system. It may have been naive to think that other countries were waiting to be given the blessings of democracy, free enterprise and individualism, but that is what Americans did believe.

The U.S. was not born in a tribal conflict, like so many other nations, but in a conflict over principles: Those principles were thought to be universal, which was part of the reason for the unprecedented policy of throwing the new country open to all comers. That greatly reinforced the abstract and ideological nature of American patriotism. The millions from other lands had different loves for different plots of earth, languages, traditions.

The unifying love had to be for America as an idea.

In part, this helps to explain the unusual stability of American institutions. In Europe it is possible to shift loyalties from king to republic, from democracy to dictatorship, and still love one's

country. In the U:S. loyalty must be to' the institutions themselves. At the same time this explains the extraordinary degree of American unease, self-criticism, dissatisfaction with leadership.

If Congress functions badly, if politicians are corrupt, if Presidents do not inspire, this is seen as a breakdown of the whole American enterprise.

We still perceive America as something unprecedented in p.istory, as an experiment, and as such something that must "work" in order to prove itself over and over again., Hence America demands that love be given not once and for all, but that it be constantly renewed and reaffirmed. That is why both American patriotism and American self-criticism can be so shrill. Attacks on America from within are' usually prompted by disappointed love. "My country, right or wrong" is not a very American slogan.

We Americans have a hard time accepting a situation in which our country is wrong, not because we are more arrogant than other people, but because our country's rightness is our soil, our home. One loves one's birthplace or one's parents because they are one's birthplace or one's parents, regardless of whether the place is especially attractive or the parents especially worthy.

One loves them because they exist. America demands to be loved not because it is, but for what it is-and not only for what it is, but for what it does. By its own insistence, to love the U.S. is also to judge it. .

Thus, amid the chorus of congratulations on this Bicentennial, America virtually demands that we face the question: Just why do we love America? Amid corruption and commercialism, violence and disorder, resentment and confusion, just what are the country's qualities that we cherish? ~

-

•..• -.

One loves America both for its virtues and its faults, which' are deeply intertwined.

Indeed, one loves America for the virtues of its faults.

One loves the almost obsessive American need to believe, the resistance to cynicism, even if that sometimes means oversimplification and moralizing. One loves the unique American restlessness, the refusal to settle for what is, even if that sometimes means a lack of contemplation and peace. One loves the fact that America sees itself as the shaper of its own destiny, both private and public. While psychology, sociology and determinist historical theories have become massively fashionable, there is still a strong strain of resistance to the notion that man is formed by environment, by outside powers, or that the nation is in the grip of immutable forces. This rejeotion of fate, this insistence tha~ every'e"

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ON LOVING AMERICA thing is possible, is surely the dominant American characteristic, and at the heart of its genius. Other nations cringe before" fate, or endure it nobly, or outlast it patiently. America insists on dominating, on bullying, fate. This is very invigorating and liberating, for "fate" is only too easily used as a justification for inaction, for maintaining an old order no matter how miserable.

In rejecting fate, the U.S. is the ultimate incarnation of Western, Faustian man. But that posture toward the universe also has immense dangers. There is no shifting of blame, no relief in the notion that "this is the way things are." We are reluctantly willing to accept as inevitable natural disasters, but little else. Indeed, even nature must be put in its place through technology, and even death is somehow considered an affront,. a failure of medicine, or of right living. Disease, poverty and other ancient afflictions simply are not accepted as part of the human condition. Perhaps rightly so-and yet the conviction that they can be banished completely is a tremendous burden because each setback, each delay, is seen as a personal or national failure. That is partly why we Americans are so impatient with the study of history-because history is a reminder of fate. We would rather learn to do than learn to know.

One must love this American view of learning as the tool by which man transforms himself. We Americans believe that everything can be learned, including, to a very large extent, to be what you are not. You can learn to be pretty if you are plain, charming if you are dull, thin if you are fat, youthful if you are aging, how to write though you are inarticulate, how to make money though you are not good with figurrs. There is something admirable about this, yet nagging questions remain: Where is the line between making the most of one's potential and reaching for the unattainable? Where is the line between education as a to()l and education as a kind of magic? The line is blurred, and that is why when education fails, disillusionment is so bitter.

One loves-with some misgivings-the deep American belief in human perfectibility and goodness. Yet an element of this belief is the fact that A,lllerica lacks an adequate sense of evil. In the Enlightenment tradition, evil is explained away as a curable flaw. But even in the puritan and evangelical tradition, the American sense of evil is curiously shallow and optimistic, more concerned with behavior (sex or drink, for example) than with the deeper states of sin. The devil can be banished, and evil can be fought; evil is seen almost as a mere "problem" to be solved.

There is little sense that evil is a constant presence and inex~ tricably mixed with good. That is why every new American generation seems to discover evil as if it had been invented only yesterday-and by the older generation. There is not much of the insight that man and society are permanently imperfect.

H~nce the shock and surprise when we find out that evil is being done by us or in our name. Hence, also, a kind ofinverted pride, a mirror image of boosterism; if one side of the American chorus proclaims that the country is the best, the greatest ever or anywhere, the other side asserts that it is the worst ever, the worst anywhere. Both attitudes are equally false and provincial.

The American self-image similarly hovers between idealism and materialism. Can one love the American attitude toward money? Can one love America in the throes of selling, a country wrapped in one endless, all-intrusive commercial? Can one love America in those ~ moments when the immeasurable is measured in the balance sheet, when the ultimate goal becomes the bottom line? .

The American spirit is deeply divided about money. In one sense the faith in money is pure: It need not, as it does in so many older societies, apologize for its existence. Money is what it is-good in-its own right, a sign of success, if perhaps no longer of divine' grace. Yet this view is at war with an older tradition from which, even in a country tliat slights history, the imagination is never quite free: Whether in the Bible or in fairy tales or in great works of fiction, money is helfl in contempt. The great callings are not trade or commerce but the state or the military or the church or scholarship. The great legendary virtues are not thrift-and its explosive extension, profit-but courage, kindness, faith.

This conflict, old and obvious, is being revived all over the globe today in a revolt against money-against capitalism and the consumer society. What is forgotten all too easily is that money was and is a tremendous liberating force, a great equalizer. It destroyed the old class structure and enabled anyone to rise; money made it possible for people without distinguished birth, without land and sometimes even without education, through enterprise or luck or both, to change their place in life.

All this would be little more than a familiar academic footnote if it were not for the fact that to Americans the liberating force of money is still a reality. The bitter complaint always has been that it liberates only a few. We Americans know better. The U.S. has not only created immense wealth, but has organized the redistribution of wealth on a scale far more impressive than anything brought about by later revolutions. In socialist soci-. eties people can move and improve their station through ability.

But, more typically, they advance through displaying political orthodoxy and learning how to maneuver the vast bureaucratic machine. These societies have their undoubted attractions. They have done away with many of the uncertainties and injustices of money societies. But they have substituted other, and arguably worse, uncertainties and injustices. The majority of the world may not see it that way, but the power of the American capitalist is more benign, and, above all, far more subject to control, than the power of the socialist bureaucrat.

Ultimately all American forces, including money, converge in the passion for freedom-and that is, above all things, what one loves about the U.S. No country carries the belief in freedom farther, the belief that the individual must be .free to make of himself what he can, that citizens must be free as far as humanly possible from government. There is about most Americans- an attitude toward authority which is immensely bracing and which Text continued on page 48

VIIING LANDS ON MARS! Legend has it that 50 years ago a celebrated newspaper publisher cabfed a famous astronomer of the time asking for a 500-word story on whether life exists on Mars. The astronomer responded: "Nobody knows," and repeated the sentence 250 times.

Man has come a long way since. In the past. few weeks in particular, a quantum leap' has been made in knowledge about Mars-thanks to Viking I, the unmanned American spacecraft that landed there on July 20, 1976.

Viking I soft-landed on a boulder-strewn plain called the Chryse Planitia, some 240 million miles from earth, at the scheduled time-1212 G.M.T. It immediately transmitted radio signals that reached scientists at Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Pasadena, California, within 20 minutes.

And in another 20 minutes, razor-sharp pictures of the Mars surface began appearing on JPL television screens via the Viking's orbiter spacecraft.

Complimenting space officials at JPL, President Ford said that the Mars landing represented "the realization of a dream that is many centuries old." He said it would "unlock secrets of the universe" that would improve life on earth. In New Delhi, Thomas Vrebalovich, the American Embassy's Counselor for Scientific Affairs who had worked for 27 years in the JPL, telephoned his congratulations to his former colleagues. "They were elated with joy at the success of the landing," he said.

Viking I was launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on August 20, 1975. (Its twin, Viking II, was launched on September 9, 1975, and will land on Mars, in all probability, in September 1976.)

The Viking is the most sophisticated object ever to be thrust into the sky. It is jammed with unbelievably complex and enormously expensive experimental equipment-40 temperature control devices, 22,000 transistors, 18,000 other electronic parts, to mention only a few of its components.

The goal of the two Viking missions is to expand man's knowledge of Mars, with special emphasis on the evidence of life. It is studying the atmosphere, the surface, the chemistry and the geology of Mars-all of which pose questions.

As Viking's lander and orbiter send a steady stream of data to earth,' a team of 780 scientists and engineers at the Pasadena JPL are looking for new discoveries every day. Said mission director A. Thomas

An artist's conception of the Viking landing. The lander (above left) is released by the spacecraft for a three-to-five-hour descent. It hurtles into the Martian atmosphere at a speed of about 10,000 mph, is slowed first by aerodynamic drag until the shell is discarded, then by parachute (center), finally by retrorockets that ensure a gentle landing.

Young: "I believe the unexpected is going countless planets orbiting sunlike stars in billions of galaxies throughout the unito be normal on this mission."

The first-ever weather report on Mars verse. Man will know at least that he is not a was delivered on July 22 by Dr. Seymour cosmic freak, that he is not alone."

Apart from the mind-boggling impliHess, a Florida meteorologist. In typical weatherman's fashion, he refused to commit cations of life on Mars, the Viking mission himself to a forecast for the next fe\Ydays. is significant for its potential earthly bene"It's cold up there," he said. "There were fits. To make the mission possible, U.S. light winds from the east in the late after- technicians came up with at least a hundred noon, changing to light winds from the technological advances. An instrument to identify organic chemicals in Martian soil southwest after midnight."

- A controversy of sorts developed at JPL is already being used in a Boston hospital over whether the Martian sky is light blue, to identify toxic substances far more quickpink or gray. Some were disappointed that ly than was previously possible. The techthe color isn't blue. Astronomer Carl Sagan niques required to develop the tiny parts of regards that as a "typical earth-chauvinist Viking's computers will advance the soresponse." He says people seem to want phisticated computer industry. Viking's rewards are many-and rich. They might all other planets to resemble the earth.

Viking's most exciting assignment, of indeed, as President Ford said, "unlock 0 course, is its three chemical experiments on the secrets of the universe."

Martian soil to detect signs of life.

If these tests prove positive they might Facing Page: The two ellipses on this constitute, to quote the Times of India, "one model of Mars show the originally of the greatest discoveries of all time." planned landing sites for Viking I, .

They would "at once extend man's under- Chryse A Prime, andfor Viking II, standing of the universe by several magni- Cydonia B Prime. As the terrain at tudes." And Time magazine commented: Chryse A Prime was too rugged, .Viking I "If any life, no matter how simple, has actually touched down in the middle evolved on a planet so different from earth, of the Chryse Planitia, at a point 22.4 then it almost certainly must have arisen on degrees north, 46.5 degrees west.

THE SEARCH FOR

EXTRATERRESTRIAL liFE More and more astronomers and other scientists believe that intelligent life may be widespread in the universe. One highly respected believer, Professor Carl Sagan of Cornell University, thinks there may be as many as a million 'technical civilizations' in our galaxy alone.

The article on the following pages examines the basis for such thinking and discusses the problems associated with detecting living creatures on other worlds-and communicating with them.

I

nthe high valleys of New Guinea there is an aboriginal culture whose people converse by means of runners and drum signals, completely unaware of a vast international radio and cable traffic over them, around them and through them.

Could this situation exist for the earth itself with respect to its home galaxy of 100 billion stars? Could there be a huge number of other technical civilizations in the universe, immeasurably more advanced than our own, exchanging over vast distances communications of which we are completely unaware?

The idea of a universe richly inhabited by alien life and intelligence has fascinated poets and philosophers since ancient times. It is a central theme of much of today's science fiction.

Until recently, the notion was completely speculative because it could not be examined by scientific methods. Now, however, it is becoming possible to lay the foundations for a rational study of the problem. In fact, scientific advances along a broad front during the past two decades have converged on the momentous likelihood that life is more probable than not where conditions are hospitable, that life may be widespread in the universe, and that there are sound possibilities that mankind may be able to communicate with other technical civilizations.

The chain of scientific reasoning which leads to these conclusions is long, tenuous and riddled with controversial uncertainties.

Many links cannot be verified. They represent only the best subjective estimates of probability that qualified scientists can provide.

Nevertheless, one major proponent of extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI), Professor Carl Sagan of Cornell University, has proposed that there may be as many as 1,000,000 technical civilizations extant in the galaxy at the present time, or one for every 100,000 stars. Somewhat less optimistic is Dr. Sebastian von Hoerner of the U.S. National Radio Astronomy Observatory, who suspects that only one in 3,000,000 stars may have a technical civilization, tr: about 35,000 in the entire galaxy.

Particularly important to the new sense of the universality of life have been major advances in our understanding of the molecular and biochemical makeup of living organisms, and the processes in which they might originate.

In 1924, the Soviet biochemist A.I. Oparin proposed that life on earth arose from solutions of simple organic substances which combined with increasing complexity into sugars, proteins and other components of life, and that these ultimately evolved into the most rudimentary microorganisms-one-cell organisms like yeasts-but, nevertheless, living creatures.

In 1953, Stanley Miller, an American graduate student working at the University of Chicago, designed an experiment to test the idea that life could generate through natural chemical processes.

He simulated the atmosphere of the primitive earth of some four billion years ago, which then consisted of hydrogen, water vapor (H20), ammonia (NH3), and methane (CH4) rather than the nitrogen-oxygen mixture of the present atmosphere, and he circulated this mixture of gases through an electrical discharge for several days. The electrical discharge simulated the lightning strokes of the earth's proto-atmosphere, providing the energy to drive chemical reactions. The experiment resembled a movie film of the processes believed to occur in the early history of the earth, but vastly speeded up, so that events occurred in hours which may have required thousands of years of actual time.

Miller found that the process produced an amazing variety of amino acids, the elements of protein, as well as aldehydes which lead to sugars and hydrogen cyanide (HCN), a critical starting material for the chemical synthesis of nucleic acids. It is the latter which carry the genetic blueprints for all terrestrial life.

Subsequent laboratory work with Miller's simple compounds and with the intermediate product, hydrogen cyanide, has demonstrated that it is possible to synthesize the 20 different amino acids comprising the proteins of life; the building blocks for the five different nucleic acids which genetically code all life on the earth; the sugars; and the vital molecule, adenosine triphosphate (ATP), which is the principal conveyor of energy within the cells of living organisms. It has also been possible to synthesize in the laboratory assemblies of amino acids which have properties similar to those of biological protein. Though it has not been possible to synthesize a living organism, or even a complete molecule of genetic nucleic acid, it is apparent that Oparin's notion of a natural origin for life rests on a much firmer foundation than when it was first proposed 50 years ago.

Similar contributions have come from studies of the comets and meteorites of the solar system, and from the study of the dark interstellar dust clouds scattered through the galaxy. Since 1968, for example, radio astronomers have discovered the characteristic emission lines of water (H20), hydrogen cyanide (HCN), formaldehyde (H2CO) and cyanoacetylene (HC3N) in dusty regions of the galaxy, like the Orion Nebula and Sagittarius, where new stars are believed to be forming. To date, a total of 26 interstellar molecules have been discovered, but these four are particularly significant because of their critical role in'the formation of biological materials, including amino acids.

Comets are infrequent visitors to the inner reaches of the solar system, so when Kohoutek swung around the sun at a distance of 21 million kilometers in December 1973 a major international observation effort was mounted. Several important cometary molecules were observed for the first time-water, hydrogen cyanide and methyl cyanide (CH3CN). Since the cyanides have also been found in the interstellar dust clouds, it is thought likely that the comets themselves have formed from interstellar dust and that they represent the most primitive material in the solar system.

Meteorites are also extremely ancient, dating back more than 4.5 billion years to the time when the proto-sun and the planets are believed to have condensed from the primordial solar nebula.

In 1969, a carbonaceous meteorite fell to earth near Murchison, Australia. An analysis of its hydrocarbon material by an American team at the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Ames Research Laboratory in 1970 disclosed five amino acids normally found in living cells on earth. But the scientists also found 11 other amino acids which have no functional role in living organisms, and they made the further discovery that the amino acids were almost equally divided between left-handed and right-handed ones. This is a characteristic of protein organisms in which the amino acid molecules build in either a left or right direction, much like the thread of a screw. Since all the amino acids of earth organisms are left-handed, this finding was strong evidence that the organic materials had formed in space by chemical rather than biological evolution, and that they were not the result of terrestrial contamination, in which case the amino acids would have all been left-handed.

Taken together, the work of the astronomers and the biochemists lays down a persuasive theory of a natural chemical evolution from simple to complex forms, and ultimately to complex molecules capable of metabolism and reproduction-the earliest form of life. Because of the violence and great heat which attended the accretion of the earth from the primordial nebula, it is doubtful that complex organic molecules of extraterrestrial origin could have survived to play any major role in the evolution of life on earth. What is important is the fact that the evolution of

chemical compounds into biologically significant molecules of increasing complexity is such a pervasive phenomenon in the universe, endlessly repeated where conditions are favorable.

Specialists in extraterrestrial in telligence seek to guard against anthropomorphic thinking about the nature of alien life. They conjecture about such possibilities as an insect culture which can connect itself externally into a single powerful brain, electrical organisms whose bodies are superconducting at room temperature, and even the possibility that life may occur at the level of fundamental nuclear particles, or that such particles may be "closed universes" in their own right. They suspect that life is not limited to the single hydrocarbon type we know on earth, but that it can arise from many alternate processes under conditions totally hostile to terrestrial life. Thus it would be a mistake to think that intelligent life forms would be dependent on oxygen, or on one particular narrow range of temperatures and atmospheric pressures in which liquid water is abundant.

Nevertheless, we have knowledge of only one life form, the hydrocarbon type we find on earth, so there is a powerful stimulus to consider the problem in the terms we know best. Hence the ETI scientists are interested in the existence of planetary systems of stable, long-lived stars since these are the most promising candidates for supporting life and possibly intelligence. In addition to providing the temperatures and pressures favorable for chemical reactions and the liquid water which hydrocarbon life requires, the stars provide the free energy to drive such processes as photosynthesis of carbonhydrates in plants.

If the earth is a reliable guide for life elsewhere, the stars must also have great cosmic lifetimes, on the order of 10 billion years, in order to allow sufficient time for biological evolution to take place. In the case of the earth, the chemical phase of evolution culminating in the first primitive life may have required only a few hundred million years, but another four billion years was necessary for life to evolve the enormous distance from singlecelled microorganisms to multi celled creatures, vertebrates, mammals and finally the first intelligent hominids who appeared in the savannahs of Africa about four million years ago.

As a relatively ordinary yellow dwarf of the G type, the sun fortunately has a total lifetime of about 10 billion years, so that another five billion years will elapse before it drifts off the main sequence of stars and expands into a red giant, destroying all life

on earth. Even more fortunate from the standpoint of the evolution of alien life and intelligence, almost 90 per cent of the stars in the immediate neighborhood of the solar system have equal or greater main sequence lifetimes, ranging up to 80 billion years for the smallest of the cool, dim M-type dwarf stars. Except for the smallest of the stars, whose radiation might be too feeble to drive chemical processes, there would seem to be ample time for intelligence to develop in the planetary systems of these stars.

The frequency with which planetary systems form along with stars is a central question in the calculations of the probability of extraterrestrial life and civilization. Until recently, the creation of planets, like life itself, was regarded as a rare if not unique event. For the first third of this century, the dominant view was the one advanced by the British astronomer, Sir James Jeansthat the planets of the solar system were formed from material drawn out of the sun during the close passage of another star.

Since space is so vast, such collisions would be extremely rare, even in the vast star clouds at the center of the galaxy. In fact, astronomers calculate that only about 10 such near-misses have occurred in the entire lO-billion-year history of the galaxy.

More recently, astrophysicists have accumulated evidence for a new version of the 18th-century nebular hypothesis proposed by Immanuel Kant and Marquis Pierre de Laplace. In this version, the sun and planets contract and condense from a comparatively cool cloud of interstellar gas and dust several light years in diameter. During the course of this condensation, the sun ends up with most of the mass of the solar system, and the planets embody most of the angular momentum (rotational motion) of the collapsing cloud. It is suspected that the formation of planets is a consequence of the transfer of angular momentum to the disk of gas and dust surrounding the collapsing proto-star.

If this view is correct, it might be expected that stars with very slow rotational rates like the sun (which has an equatorial spin of about two kilometers per second) have managed to transfer their angular momentum to a family of planets, while stars with fast spins of several hundred kilometers per second probably have no planets. Interestingly, spectroscopic studies of the stellar classes show that the largest, youngest and shortest lived stars have very high spin rates, but that these rates tail off with decreasing size of stars, and drop abruptly with stars of the solar type and smaller in the main sequence. If present theories are correct about the role of the planets in taking up the angular momentum of their stellar systems, then it is possible that the longest lived stars indeed are blessed with families of planets.

Because they shine only by reflected light from the stars which they orbit, and because of their close proximity to their brilliant primaries, it is not possible to observe telescopically the planets of even the nearest stars. However, indirect observations are possible. Careful studies of the proper motion of some of the nearby stars have disclosed suspicious wiggles suggesting the presence of dark companions, possibly planets. The best documented case is Barnard's Star, which, at a distance of six light years (60 trillion kilometers), is the fourth closest star to the solar system. A red dwarf of the M type, with only 15 per cent of the mass of the sun, it is so dim and small that it was not discovered until 1916. It appears that it is accompanied by at least one and possibly two or three dark companions the size of Jupiter or Saturn, and that it is the gravitational perturbation of these bodies which is producing the wiggles.

The growing conviction that planetary systems frequently occur among the smaller, longer lived stars, and that where conditions are favorable, a chemical evolution will occur to

produce a genetically coded, metabolizing, reproducing life form has led a number ofETI specialists to surmise, like Von Hoerner, that perhaps two per cent of all the stars in the galaxy-two billion stars-have planets suitable for life. But there are major uncertainties in the evolution from simple organisms to technical civilization, and this was the focus of the first international meeting on Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence (CETI) conducted at the Byurakan Astrophysical Observatory in Soviet Armenia in September 1971.

The CETI conference grappled with the problem of estimating the nature and frequency of intelligent life and technical civilization in the universe, and the most promising techniques and strategies for opening communications. One of the most troublesome areas the CETI scientists had to deal with was the extremely long period, perhaps four billion years, required to evolve from unicellular life to intelligence on our own planet. There was a general feeling that intelligence, once developed, would prove highly adaptive for any life form. In man's own case, the scientists felt, the appearance of civilization and later technology was more probable than not, following the mastery of fire and the development of symbolic language. But the tremendous span of time and the great number of separate evolutionary steps required to reach an intelligent life form left many of the CETI scientists hesitant to adopt Professor Sagan's "assumption of mediocrity," i.e. that the earth's experience is average and not unique, and to make strong generalizations about the likelihood of intelligence on other planets.

Another troublesome problem concerns the life span of technical civilizations themselves. We have seen ample evidence in our own time that while intelligence is extremely adaptive, and there- . fore has a high short-term survival value, it may not be stable over a cosmic span of time because of problems like overpopulation, exhaustion of resources, genetic degradation, self-destruction in suicidal wars, regimentation, stagnation and other threats to its existence. Von Hoerner has calculated that while intelligence may have arisen at one time or another on half of all the planets suitable for life, the life span for technical civilizations may be as short as 10,000 to 100,000 years. Taking the more optimistic figure, he derives an average separation of about 600 light years-6,000 trillion kilometers-between the civilized planets of the galaxy.

Estimates of the distance of other interstellar civilizations are crucial to the CETI problem because of the impact they have on the scale of any proposed search for signals, the strategies to be employed and the type of "conversation" which might be conducted. Based on Von Hoerner's estimate of the distance separating surviving interstellar civilizations, an alien ETI culture would have to transmit signals "in the blind" for at least 600 years before it could expect the wave front of its signals to reach another civilization. If such signals were detected on the earth, and an immediate effort was made to reply, another 600 years would have to elapse before the transmitting culture could become aware of our existence. In any case, from the earth's standpoint, the interstellar communication link would be a one-way, receive-only mode for at least 1,200 years before a response to our signal could be received.

The CETI participants considered the problem of direct contact with other civilizations by means of interstellar space flight, but generally conceded that such an effort would be several orders of magnitude more costly and difficult than the task of establishing communications. The problem here is Albert Einstein's Special Left: The enormous radio telescope at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia, probes the recesses of the universe. Its bowl-shaped antenna is 90 meters in diameter.

Theory of Relativity. According to this concept-which really has the status of hard law in present-day physics-no material object can attain, let alone exceed, the velocity of light (C), which is just under 300,000 kilometers per second. Worse yet, Special Relativity provides that the mass of any object, electron or spaceship, increases steeply as it approaches C, becoming infinite at C itself.

Since there is no conceivable force in our time-space continuum, not even the annihilation of matter and antimatter with 100 per cent efficiency,which can propel an infinite mass, it follows that C stands as an absolute speed limit and therefore a substantial barrier to interstellar flight.

A curious feature of Special Relativity is the fact that the passage of time slows down for objects moving at relativistic velocities. A spacecraft which could achieve 99.999 per cent of C could cover the two million light years of distance to the nearest galaxy, Andromeda, in 23 years of shiptime, but more than two million years would elapse in the outside universe during the course of the trip. This aspect of flight at velocities close to C has intrigued the imagination of science-fiction writers, as has the companion notion of interstellar flight at much slower velocities, with passengers and crew frozen into a deathlike sleep during journeys lasting thousands of years. While one cannot rule out exploration of the nearest stars with planetary systems, it seems likely that such travel would be limited initially to automatic probes like the U.S. and Soviet craft which have visited other planets of the solar system. If interstellar travel ever comes, it would probably come only after communication had been estab-

'Professor Carl Sagan worries that extremely advanced civilizations may not care to converse with the earth, any more than we care to converse with protozoa.' lished with another civilization.

One of the more nebulous questions in ETI deliberations concerns the scale of extraterrestrial civilization which may exist in the universe. One way of classifying possible civilizations is in terms of the power they control. The earth is a Type I civilization because it produces about six trillion watts of power. A Type II civilization would dispose of power equal to an average star like the sun-lOO trillion trillion watts. The oldest and most advanced civilizations, which are designated Type III, would have at their disposal the power output of an entire galaxy-lO trillion trillion trillion watts. If at all communicative, such advanced cultures-even in distant galaxies-might be easier to detect than nearby Type I civilizations in our own galaxy.

While Professor Sagan worries that extremely advanced civilizations may not care to converse with the earth, any more than we care to converse with protozoa, he believes that a search for Type II and Type III civilizations may offer better chances of receiving a signal, since the former can communicate from nearby galaxies and the latter across the known universe. More ominously, he suspects that the life span of low-powered Type I civilizations may be so short that they will not fall within the earth's communication horizon. If indeed there are such civilizations, they may have mastered interstellar flight in ways we cannot even dream, and we might detect the signals from "navigation buoys" which they have placed near dangerous objects like gravitationally collapsed "black holes," Professor Sagan suggests. Alternatively,

they may have devised means for extracting power from pulsating neutron stars like the one embedded in the Crab Nebula.

There are myriad suggestions for the techniques of interstellar communication covering virtually the whole of the electromagnetic spectrum from centimeter wavelength radio techniques to infrared and optical wavelengths utilizing lasers. All, of course, are limited to the velocity of light, thus imposing a very long time span for interstellar conversations. One intriguing proposal involves a hypothetical particle called the tachyon, which could travel faster than C. Tachyons have never been observed, however, and Special Relativity would require that such particles move backward in time. The notion of a tachyon telephone circuit raises such severe paradoxes in causation that most scientists and mathematicians regard the tachyon as fanciful.

ETI scientists generally regard microwave radio transmissions in the range of 1 to 60 GHz (Gigahertz, or one billion cycles per second) as the most promising to look for, inasmuch as the sky is quietest in this region of the spectrum. Some studies have already been made in the lower range of this frequency band. In 1960, Dr. Frank Drake of Cornell University conducted man's first deliberate search for ETI signals with a 27-meter steerable radiotelescope dish in the United States [see SPAN November 1972].

The examination involved only two solar-type stars, Epsilon

'Scientists believe that communication with another civilization could prove highly beneficial for our own if we learn how the other culture has been able to resist the self-destructive aspects of its intelligence and technology.'

Eridani at 10.8 light years, and Tau Ceti at 11.9 light years distance. The search was conducted on the frequency of 1.42 GHz, the famous 21-centimeter wavelength for neutral hydrogen in the universe which radio astronomers had discovered nine years earlier. This point in the radio band was selected on the hunch that any communicating civilization might decide to use that important frequency to flag the attention of other civilizations.

In 1968, radio astrollOmers re-examined those two sources as well as 10 others including the Andromeda galaxy at 21 and 30 centimeters, but also with negative results. Astronomers are currently looking at some 500 stars at distances up to 80 light years with a 100-meter dish antenna, but so far they have detected no artificial signal.

The ETI experts are not at all distressed that such searches have produced negative results. Taking Professor Sagan's optimistic view that there are one million technical civilizations extant in the galaxy, it would be necessary to survey 100,000 stars to have a reasonable chance of establishing contact, while other calculations suggest that 3,000,000 stars might have to be surveyed before the first intelligent signal could be found.

Such an effort would obviously require a major national or international commitment. A group of U.S. scientists has proposed Project Cyclops, an ambitious project costing at least $10 billion-half the cost of the U.S. Apollo lunar program-for erecting up to 1,000 steerable 100-meter dishes in an "orchard" of 20 square kilometers. Over a 30-year period, this vast arraycalled Cyclopolis-could survey 1,000,000 stars similar to the

sun at distances up to 1,000 light years.

What would be the impact on our own culture of communication with another civilization? Would we ever dare to send a reply? Some scientists suggest that after many centuries of interstellar communication we might lose our cultural identity and merge with the larger interstellar culture, just as Stone Age cultures on earth are destroyed by close contact with our own civilization. Others, like Dr. Albert R. Hibbs, are dubious about replying to ETI signals. He warns that even a benign ETI civilization might regard us as little more than domesticated animals, much as we regard that most intelligent of animals, the hog, which we treat with care and kindness and slaughter for protein. "We simply do not walk hand-in-hoof down the road of life in intellectual companionship with the hog," Hibbs observed, "and we would be very foolish to expect that any superspecies from another planet would treat us any better than that."

Most ETI enthusiasts pooh-pooh these fears. They argue that communication will be conducted at a most leisurely pace, that there is unlikely to be any direct contact with an ETI civilization, and most importantly, that the human race will be free to accept or reject the signals it receives. They do not rule out the possibility that a mischievous ETI might transmit a malign computer program to us, with disastrous consequences if we carried out its instructions-the theme of a science-fiction novel by the British cosmologist Fred Hoyle. But they insist that mankind will be able to analyze such "exports" to determine their purpose, and to exercise a free choice in accepting or rejecting them.

On the positive side, they believe that communication with another civilization could prove highly beneficial for our own, particularly if we can learn how the other culture has been able to resist the self-destructive aspects of its intelligence and technology, possibly prolonging the lifetime of our own civilization.

In this regard, the CETI conferees concluded: "If extraterrestrial civilizations are ever discovered, the. effects on human scientific and technological capabilities will be immense, and the discovery can positively influence the whole future of man. The practical and philosophical significance of a successful contact with an extraterrestrial civilization would be so enormous as to justify the expenditure of substantial efforts."

For all the enthusiasm of the ETI advocates, it is doubtful that governments wiII be willing to expend great effort on such a costly and uncertain undertaking in the near future. But new discoveries could alter this outlook. Similarly, if future space probes to Jupiter or Saturn and their moons discover strange life forms there, in no way resembling our own chemistry, the case for other alien life and ETI would be immeasurably strengthened.

Nevertheless, the task of searching out another intelligent civilization among the stars will be incomparably more difficult than locating a needle in a haystack. In that proverbial problem, we know what a needle looks like, and because it is made of steel, we know that we can simplify our problem if we use a magnet. In searching for another civilization, we do not know where to look, we do not know what tools we should use in our search, we are not sure what an ETI signal might look like or whether we can decipher it, or even whether it wiII benefit or threaten our own civilization. That said, however, the fact remains that communication with another intelligence would be a momentous achievement for the race of man and therefore not a venture to be dismissed lightly.

D Newsweek, is now a free-lance writer specializing in science and engineering suhjects.

About the Author: Henry T. Simmons, a former editor of

JOURNALISM

A MAGAZINE THAT TELLS US WHY WE DO }VHAT WE DO

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by JOHN POppy

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The answers are in Psychology Today, a phenomenally successful American monthly that popularizes psychological research and appeals to the old human desire to know about people and their motives.

Y/j.11J (; David Maxey was enjoying his problem.

Should he pull an assistant editor off the report on the behavior of elephant seals and assign her to make last-minute changes in a scholar's article about the character of a U.S. President?

At any of the other- national magazines where he has worked in the United States, Maxey would have known the answer before he even asked the question: Trust the readers to be more interested in revelations about the politician. But Psychology Today is not just any magazine. So there sat its editor, amused by the knowledge that his subscribers, more than a million of them, wanted as much to know about the seals as they did about a President. And he wasn't even sitting in an office.

He was in the middle of a conference being held on a wind-blown strip of California beach alongside the Pacific Ocean.

Maxey did not linger long on the sand. This 38-year-old graduate of Harvard Business School has spent his professional life as a journalist and can be as casual as any of the barefoot members of his staff, but he had 1]manuscripts to read and calls to make back in his office, a faded, slightly scruffy room used, obviously, by a man reluctant to spend money on things that do not show up on the printed page. A visitor could reach the place by flying to San Diego, in southern California, driving 24 kilometers north to the little beach town of Del Mar (population 4,475), and finding a beige, two-story building that looks as if it should contain a nest of dentists' offices. Before 1967, it did. From then until the summer of 1975, when Psychology Today acquired a new owner who moved its headquarters to IjNew York, it contained the nerve center of a publication unique among U.S. magazines.

Whether the move will affect the distinctive flavor of Psychology Today remains to be seen.

What is certain is that the determination of its staff to do hard work has contributed to a rare success in the magazine world. During a time when many U.S. magazines that were

once giants in their field, such as Look and Life, were struggling to survive (and failed), readership for Psychology Today shot up from an initial 100,000 in 1967 to more than one million in 1976. And what attracted them was hardly the common publishing fare of news, spice and public personalities. It was a formula that proved remarkably tuned to the current pulse of American society-articles by experts on the emotional and behavioral drives of human beings, backed up with solid statistics and sophisticated illustrations that tempted the mind as well as the eye. While other brandnew publications were finding success in a formula of specialization, particularly hobbies, sports and history, Psychology Today not only found the key to reader interest in the pristine, sometimes arcane world of human science but did the near impossible-made it meaningful to millions of people who were not, necessarily, professional scientists. In the process, it also confirmed a growing suspicion about Americans today: that they are more reflective than ever before, and are searching beneath the surface of appearances for a better understanding of themselves and their world.

As editor Maxey puts it: "Editors don't make magazines. Readers do."

Whoever makes them, the surprising growth of this magazine says something for good timing. Back in 1966, an ambitious 25year-old named Nicolas Charney arrived in southern California with an idea. Charney had just earned a doctorate in bio-psychology at the University of Chicago, and then followed his teacher, George Reynolds, out west to the University of California at San Diego.

Before they left Chicago, the two had found themselves talking about starting a magazine that would "take psychology public."

Charney sensed that psychology, as it was being taught in American universities, was producing concepts that could affect the lives of millions-if only somebody would translate it for them. Professors of psychology had become so defensive about their specialty's posi-

'Psychology Today's illustration has given the magazine a unique visual trademark and influenced other American magazines toward symbolic, archetypal images that are more stylized than they are illustrative or expository.' tion in the academic world as a "soft" science or even a pseudo-science that they cloaked their research reports in language far more technical and befuddling than necessary.

Charney felt there was a hole out there in the market place for a magazine on psychology, but he did not know how big it would be.

He did know that if he ever got his magazine started, it should be located where many educational, cultural and scientific activities intersected. A quick study of different parts of the United States showed him that the San Diego area had not only a branch of the huge University of California but also the Salk Institute, one of America's foremost medical research centers, and a cluster of industries (nuclear physics, electronics, aerospace) based on advanced technology.

In San Diego in the autumn of 1966, Charney met a graphics designer named Donald Wright. Although Charney's entire plan for the magazine consisted only of a crumpled piece of paper with "Psychology Today" inked across the top and a few scribbled notes on the back, the two men decided to act boldly.

Charney raised $40,000 from friends, family and a few investors; he sank it all into one mailing of 100,000 copies of a subscriptionsoliciting brochure designed by Wright that described what Psychology Today would be like.

The brochure drew a strong response and the needed seed money, and the first issue of Psychology Today appeared in May 1967.The issues that followed certainly did not look like a traditional psychology textbook: no gray pictures of rats in mazes, no babies crawling over visual-cliff setups or clamped into laboratory apparatus. Instead, Wright commissioned bright, symbolic paintings, photographs, even sculptures, to sum up the point of an article and to touch a reader's mind in ways that words could not. Artists forced editors to think in tangible images, often saving them from blundering into the unreality of purely verbal thought. An artist often got into an idea by a playful leap while editor and author moved toward it step by step.

Although Wright eventually moved on to other projects, Psychology Today's illustration continues in the direction he set for it, a direction that has given the magazine a unique visual trademark and influenced other American magazines toward symbolic, archetypal

images that are more stylized than they are illustrative or expository. The magazine's always provocative covers reach out boldly to grab a reader's attention. For an issue on human sexuality, Wright filled a brass bed with flowers. To headline a questionnaire on death, his successor as art director, Tom Gould, used a photograph of a yawning grave freshly dug in lush green grass with the address sticker arranged so it came up a tombstone for each subscriber. One issue featuring an article on "How Teachers Turn Play Into Work" showed a child blinded and muted by large gold stars rewarded for good behavior pasted over eyes and mouth.

"Since we were playing around with the landscape of the mind," Wright says in looking back at the beginnings, "I felt there were no holds barred in ways to visualize things.

You can't do that kind of interpretation in a magazine about politics, for instance. There it would be too heavy-handed. And when you're dealing with a kind of 'hard' information, people want to see what a candidate looks like, what a plane crash looked like. In a psychology magazine, readers accept stylization, probably because you're dealing, at best, with a kind of soft information. You get 10 psychologists together and they can't agree on anything, so the subject lends itself to a highly personal type of interpretation."

Some professional psychologists complained at first. They felt the magazine's pop-art approach was trivializing their life's work.

Some readers were amused, others infuriated.

Whichever, there is no denying that the covers and full-page pictures achieved their purpose: They got Psychology Today noticed. But the magazine also needed professional acceptance. To get it, the editors were extremely cautious about the makeup of the first few issues, making sure that they balanced each article about experimental work with one on a clinical approach, placing a piece about behavior near one about theory, covering all the required scholarly territory. Then, with encouragement from readers both inside and outside the profession of psychology, they realized they had the muscle to burst out of a tight academic environment. As the magazine caught on, circulation jumped to 250,000 within a couple of years, past 500,000 by 1971; and more than doubled again by 1975.Advertising revenues climbed accordingly.

Why such success? Well, for one thing, Charney's timing couldn't have been better.

Psychology Today, the editors believe, touched a nerve among U.S. readers buffeted by social turmoil and student unrest during the 1960s.

As they assessed the effects of the civil rights movement, the surge of participation in the politics of the John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson years, the growing domestic controversy over Vietnam, many Americans began to believe that they could hope to change the world only if they also worked at changing themselves. The avant-garde of the late 1960s comprised people who were just beginning to go on the "growth trips"-seeking self-expansion through self-understanding-that are commonplace in the United States today.

Psychology Today rode that phenomenon.

"Being at home in psychological literature has become a mark of the educated man or woman," the editors wrote in the introduction to the second edition of Readings in Psychology Today, one of the many books that keep emerging as the magazine recycles its materials into extra uses. "As the 18th century was the Age of Reason," the introduction continues, "ours is the Age of Conscious Action.

We might call it the age of consciousness, but thephenomenonruns beyond intellectual limits into the working world. Millions of people now have the power-and thus the necessityto make conscious decisions on matters we once left largely to accident, tradition, nature, habit, God or the unconscious self."

From the beginning, the practice has been to persuade researchers and professors to write about their own work, instead offollowing the more traditional practice of sending journalists to interview the researchers and interpret them to the reader. "Scientists form a priesthood," former editor T. George Harris has said, "and our function is to make their mysteries available to a larger body of people."

Psychology Today's best pieces are based on the idea that if you have enough information and you make it explicit enough, other people can act on it. Psychology Today also has always dealt with what Harris calls the About the Author: John Poppy is a well-known free-lance writer living in California. He worked as a senior editor of Look magazine from 1962 to 1970 and later as the managing editor of the Saturday Review of the Arts.

Howlbut'

=:m.mo::"meat and beans" of everyday life. It tells who dreams certain kinds of dreams, what triggers consumer resistance to certain kinds of advertising, why trained executives go sour, when a bright woman is likely to resist success, where embezzlement sometimes works to management's advantage, how stress often causes head colds, etc. In a tactic which the editor calls "refried beans," it then serves up the information to as many different audiences as it can find, adapting magazine articles for use in books, TV programs and other magazines.

Psychology Today does not limit itself to the United States. It has created the Association of Psychology Today Editors (APTE), a loose confederation with contacts in France, Italy, the Netherlands, Germany, Great Britain and Japan. The aim of the association is not to sell articles or to set up a licensing system to feed an American product to other countries, but to establish a network of colleagues around the world who can help the people at Psychology Today "overcome our own tendency to use the American university student as the model of universal man."

Most of the magazine is oriented to research. Its articles all say, in one way or another, that the author wants to tell you something about the way the universe is built.

"If you're going to do that," said assistant managing editor Paul Chance, "you have to present evidence. And it has to be firsthand."

What Psychology Today does differently from other magazines is that it does not ask its readers to believe anything just because some expert says it is so. Instead, it makes the expert share evidence with the reader.

One thing that pleases Chance and the other editors is that many letters to the editor argue with an author on the basis of evidence. "They say, 'I don't believe you because you failed to control this or that variable,''' Chance exults, "and I think that's terrific. It shows people evaluating evidence instead of just swallowing it because so and so is an expert."

Let Chance have the last word, then. "My feeling about the magazine is not that we are telling people things that are going to have an immediate impact on the way they live their lives. Oh, once in a while we do that; if they want to apply it, they can use something. But mostly what we are doing is showing them how to know something.

"There is no way of separating what you know from how you know it."

0 Left: A montage of Psychology Today artwork.

The magazine's graphics reach out boldly to grab the reader's attention. Opposite page: The magazine's staff pose for a group picture.

S EET POTATO ~PIE

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1

A short story by Eugenia Collier

From up here on the 14th floor, my brother Charley looks like an insect scurrying among other insects. A deep feeling of love surges through me. Despite the distance, he seems to feel it, for he turns and scans the upper windows, but failing to find me, continues on his way. I watch him moving quickly-gingerly, it seems to me-down Fifth Avenue and around the corner to his shabby taxicab. In a moment he will be heading back uptown.

I turn from the window and flop down on the bed, shoes and all. Perhaps because of what happened this afternoon or maybe just because I see Charley so seldom, my thoughts hover over him like hummingbirds. The cheerful, impersonal tidiness of this room is a world away from Charley's walkup flat in Harlem and a hundred worlds from the bare, noisy shanty where he and the rest of us spent what there was of childhood. I close my eyes, and side by side I see the Charley of my boyhood and the Charley ofthis afternoon, as clearly as if I were looking at a split TV screen. Another surge of love, seasoned with gratitude, wells up in me.

As far as I know, Charley never had any childhood at all. The oldest children of sharecroppers never do. Mama and Pa were shadowy figures whose voices I heard vaguely in the morning when sleep was shallow and whom I glimpsed as they left for the field before I was fully awake or as they trudged wearily into the house at night when my lids were irresistibly heavy.

They came into sharp focus only on special occasions.

One such occasion was the day when the crops were in and the sharecroppers were paid. In our cabin there was so much excitement in the air that even I, the "baby," responded to it. For weeks we had been running out of things that we could neither grow nor get on credit. On the evening Le/t: This imaginative illustration/or Eugenia Collier's story, "Sweet Potato Pie," is by artist Paul Davis, whose work has appeared on the covers 0/ such magazines as New York.

of that day we waited anxiously for our parents' return.

Then we would cluster around the rough wooden table-I on Lil's lap or clinging to Charley's neck, little Alberta nervously tugging her plait, Jamie crouched at Mama's elbow, like a panther about to spring, and all seven of us silent for once, waiting. Pa would place the money on the table-gently, for it was made from the sweat of their bodies and from their children's tears. Mama would count it out in little piles, her dark face stern and, I think now, beautiful.

Not with the hollow beauty of well-modeled features but with the strong radiance of one who has suffered and never yielded.

"This for store bill," she would mutter, making a little pile. "This for c'llection. This for piece o'gingham ... " and so on, stretching the money as tight over our collective needs as Jamie's outgrown pants were stretched over my bottom. "Well, that's the crop." She would look up at Prt at last. "It'll do." Pa's face would relax, and a general grin flitted from child to child. We would survive, at least for the present.

The other time when my parents were solid entities was at church. On Sundays we would don our threadbare Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes and tramp, along with neighbors similarly attired, to the Tabernacle Baptist Church, the frail edifice of bare boards held together by God knows what, which was all that my parents ever knew of security and future promise.

Being the youngest and therefore the most likely to err, I was plopped between my father and my mother on the long wooden bench. They sat huge and eternal like twin mountains at my sides. I remember my father's still, black profile silhouetted against the sunny window, looking back into dark recesses of time,. into some dim antiquity, like an ancient ceremonial mask. My mother's face, usually sternly set, changed with the varying nuances of her emotion, its planes shifting, shaped by the soft highlights of the

sanctuary, as she prog~essed from a subdued "amen" to a loud "Help me, Jesus" wrung from the depths of her gaunt frame.

My early memories of my parents are associated with special occasions. The contours of my everyday were shaped

by Lil and Charley, the oldest children, who rode herd on the rest of us while Pa and Mama toiled in fields not their own. Not until years later did I realize that Lil and Charley were little more than children themselves.

Lil had the loudest, screechiest voice in the county.

When she yelled, "Boy, you better git yourself in here!" you got yourself in there. It was Lil who caught and bathed us, Lil who fed us and sent us to school, Lil who punished us when we needed punishing and comforted us when we needed comforting. If her voice was loud, so was her laughter. When she laughed, everybody laughed. And when Lil sang everybody listened.

ICharley was taller than anybody in the world, including, I was certain, God. From his shoulders, where I spent considerable time in the earliest years, the world had a different perspective: I looked down at tops of heads rather than at the undersides of chins. As I grew older, Charley became more father than brother. Those days return in fragments of splintered memory: Charley's slender dark hands whittling a toy from a chunk of wood, his face thin and intense, brown as the loaves Lil baked when there was flour. Charley's quick fingers guiding a stick of charred kindling over a bit of scrap paper, making a wondrous picture take shape-Jamie's face or Alberta's rag doll or the spare figure of our bony brown dog. Charley's voice low and terrible in the dark, telling ghost stories 'so delightfully dreadful that later in the night the moan of the wind through the chinks in the wall sent us scurrying to the security of Charley's pallet, Charley's sleeping form.

Some memories are more than fragmentary. I can still feel the whap of the wet dish rag across my mouth. Somehow I developed a stutter, which Charley was determined to cure. Someone had told him that an effective cure was to slap the stutterer across the mouth with a sopping wet dish rag. Thereafter whenever I began, "Let's g-g-g-," whap! from nowhere would come the ubiquitous rag. Charley would always insist, "I don't want hurt you none, Buddy-" and whap again. I don't know when or why I stopped stuttering. But I stopped.

Already laid waste by poverty, we were easy prey for ignorance and superstition, which hunted us like hawks.

We sought education feverishly-and, for most of us, futilely, for the sum total of our combined energies was required for mere brute survival. Inevitably each child had to leave school and bear his share of the eternal burden.

Eventually the family's hopes for learning fastened on me, the youngest. I remember-I think I remember, for I could not have been more than five-one frigid day Pa, huddled on a rickety stool before the coal stove, took me on his knee and studied me gravely. I was a skinny little thing, they tell me, with large, solemn eyes.

"Well, boy," Pa said at 'last, "if you got to depend on your looks for what you get out'n this world, you just as well lay down right now." His hand was rough from the plow, but gentle as it touched my cheek. "Lucky for you, you got a mind. And that's something ain't everybody got.

You go to school, boy, get yourself some learning. Make

something out'n yourself. Ain't nothing you can't do if you got learning."

Charley was determined that I would break the chain of poverty, that I would "be somebody." As we worked our small vegetable garden in the sun or pulled a bucket of brackish water from the well, Charley would tell me, "You ain gon be no poor farmer, Buddy. You gon be a teacher or maybe a doctor or a lawyer. One thing, bad as you is, you ain gon be no preacher."

I loved school with a desperate passion, which became more intense when I began to realize what a monumental struggle it was for my parents and brothers and sisters to keep me there. The cramped, dingy classroom became a battleground where I was victorious. I stayed on top of my class. With glee lout-read, out-figured, and out-spelled the country boys who mock~d my poverty, calling me "the boy with eyes in back of his head" -the "eyes" being the perpetual holes in my hand-me-down pants.

As the years passed, the economic strain was eased enough to make it possible for me to go on to high school.

There were fewer mouths to feed, for one thing: Alberta went North to find work at 16; Jamie died at 12.

I finished high school at the head of my class. For Mama and Pa and each of my brothers and sisters, my success was a personal triumph. One by one they came to me the week before commencement bringing crumpled dollar bills and coins long hoarded, muttering, "Here, Buddy, put this on your gradiation clothes." My,graduation suit was the first suit that was all my own.

On graduation night our cabin (less crowded now) was a frantic collage of frayed nerves. I thought Charley would drive me mad.

"Buddy, you ain pressed out them pants right .... Can't you git a better shine on them shoes? ... Lord, you done messed up that tie!"

Overwhelmed by the combination of Charley's nerves and my own, I finally exploded. "Man, cut it out!" Abruptly he stopped tugging at my tie, and I was afraid I had hurt his feelings. "It's okay, Charley. Look, you're strangling me. The tie's okay."

Charley relaxed a little and gave a rather sheepish chuckle. "Sure, Buddy." He gave my shoulder a rough joggle. "But you gotta look good. You somebody."

My valedictory address was the usual idealistic, sentimental nonsense. I have forgotten what I said that night, but the sight of Mama and Pa and the rest is like a lithograph burned on my memory; Lil, her round face made beautiful by her proud smile; Pa, his head held high, eyes loving and fierce; Mama radiant. Years later when her shriveled hands were finally still, my mind kept coming back to her as she was now. I believe this moment was the apex of her entire life. All of them, even Alberta down from Baltimore-different now, but united with them in her pride.

And Charley, on the end of the row, still somehow the protector of them all. Charley, looking as if he were in the presence of something sacred.

As I made my way through the carefully rehearsed speech it was as if part of me were standing outside watching the whole thing-their proud, work-weary faces, myself wearing the suit that was their combined strength and love and hope: Lil with her lovely, low-pitched voice, Charley with the hands of an artist, Pa and Mama with God knows

what potential lost with their sweat in the fields. I realized in that moment that I wasn't necessarily the smartest-only the youngest.

And the luckiest. The war came along, and I exchanged three years of my life-including a fair amount of my blood and a great deal of pain-for the GI Bill [a governmentfunded plan for Veterans' education] and a college education. Strange how time can slip by like water flowing through your fingers. One by one the changes came-the old house empty at last, the rest of us scattered; for me, marriage, graduate school, kids, a professorship, and by now a thickening waistline and thinning hair. My mind spins off the years, and I am back to this afternoon and today's Charley-still long and lean, still gentle-eyed, still my greatest fan, and still determined to keep me on the ball.

I didn't tell Charley I would be at a professional meeting in New York and would surely visit; he and Bea would have spent days in fixing up, and I would have had to be company. No, I would drop in on them, take them by surprise before they had a chance to stiffen up. I was anxious to see them-it had been so long. Yesterday and this morning were taken up with meetings in the posh Fifth Avenue hotel-a place we could not have dreamed in our boyhood.

Late this afternoon I shook loose and headed for Harlem, . hoping that Charley still came home for a few hours before his evening run. Leaving the glare and glitter of downtown, I entered the subway which lurks like the dark, inscrutable id beneath the surface of the city. When I emerged, I was in Harlem.

Whenever I come to Harlem I feel somehow as if I were coming home-to some mythic ancestral home. The problems are real, the people are real-yet there is some mysterious epic quality about Harlem, as if all Black people began and ended there, as if each had left something of himself. As if in Harlem the very heart of Blackness pulsed its beautiful tortured rhythms. Joining the throngs of people that saunter Lenox Avenue late afternoons, I headed for Charley's apartment. Along the way I savored the panorama of Harlem-women with shopping bags trudging wearily home; little kids flitting saucily through the crowd; groups of adolescent boys striding boldly along-some boisterous, some ominously silent; tables of merchandise spread on the sidewalks, with hawkers singing their siren songs of irresistible bargains; a blaring microphone sending forth waves of words to draw passers-by into a restless bunch around a slender young man whose eyes have seen Truth; defeated men standing around on street corners or sitting on steps, heads down, hands idle; posters announcing Garvey Day; "Buy Black" stamped on pavements; store windows bright with things African; stores still boarded up, a livid scar from last year's rioting. There was a terrible tension in the air; I thought of how quickly dry timber becomes a-roaring fire from a single spark.

I mounted the steps of Charley's building-old and in need of paint, like all the rest-and pushed the button to his apartment. The graffiti on the dirty wall recorded the sexual fantasies of past visitors. Some of it was even a dialogue of sorts: Someone had scrawled, "Try Lola" and a telephone number, followed by a catalogue of Lola's virtues.

Someone else had written, "I tried Lola and she is a Dog." Charley's buzzer rang. I pushed open the door and mounted the urine-scented stairs.

"Well, do Jesus-it's Buddy!" roared Charley as I arrived on the third floor. "Bea! Bea! Come here, girl, it's Buddy!" And somehow \ I was simultaneously shaking Charley's hand, getting clapped on the back, and being buried in the fervor of Bea's gigantic hug. They swept me from the hall into their dim apartment.

"Lord, Buddy, what you doing here? Whyn't you tell me you was coming to New York?" His face was so lit up with pleasure that in spite of the inroads of time, he still looked like the Charley of years gone by, excited over a new litter of kittens.

"The place look a mess! Whyn't you let us know?" put in Bea, suddenly distressed.

"Looks fine to me, girl. And so do you!"

And she did. Bea is a fine-looking woman, plump and finn still, with rich brown skin and thick black hair.

"Mary, Lucy, look, Uncle Buddy's here!" Two neat little girls came shyly from the TV. Uncle Buddy was something of a celebrity in this house.

I hugged them heartily, much to their discomfort.

"Charley, where you getting all these pretty women?"

We all sat in the warm kitchen, where Bea was preparing dinner. It felt good there. Beautiful odors mingled in the air. Charley sprawled in a chair near mine, his long arms and legs akimbo. No longer shy, the tinier girl sat on my lap, while her sister darted here and there like a merry little water bug. Bea bustled about, managing to keep up with both the conversation and the cooking.

I told them about the conference I was attending and, knowing it would give them pleasure, I mentioned that I had addressed the group that morning. Charley's eyes glistened.

"You hear that, BeaT' he whispered. "Buddy done spoke in front of all them professors!"

"Sure I hear," Bea answered briskly, stirring something that was making an aromatic steam. "I bet he weren't even scared. I bet them professors learnt something, too."

We all chuckled. "Well anyway," I said, "I hope they did."

We talked about a hundred different things after thatBea's job in the school cafeteria, my Jess and the kids, our scattered family.

"Seem like we don't git together no more, not since Mama and Pa passed on," said Charley sadly. "I ain't even got a Christmas card from Alberta for three-four year now."

"Well, ain't no two a y'all in the same city. An' everybody scratchin to make ends meet," Bea replied. "Ain't nobody got time to git together."

"Yeah, that's the way it goes, I guess," I said.

"But it sure is good to see you, Buddy. Say, look, Lil told me bout the cash you sent the children last winter when Jake was out of work all that time. She sure preciated it."

"Lord, man, as close as you and Lil stuck to me when I was a kid, lowed her that and more. Say, Bea, did I ever tell you about the time-" and we swung into the usual reminiscences. ., They insisted that I stay for dinner. Persuading me was no hard job: fish fried golden, ham hocks and collard greens, corn bread-if I'd tried to leave, my feet wouldn't have taken me. It was good to sit there in Charley's kitchen, my coat and tie flung over a chair, surrounded by soul food and love.

"Say, Buddy, a couple months back I picked up a kid from your school."

"No stuff."

"I axed him did he know you. He say he was in your class last year."

"Did you get his name?"

"No, I didn't ax him that. Man, he told me you were the best teacher he had. He said you were one smart cat!"

"He told you that cause you're my brother."

"Your brother-I didn't tell him I was your brother.

I said you was a old friend of mine."

I put my fork down and leaned over. "What you tell him that for?"

Charley explained patiently as he had explained things when I was a child and had missed an obvious truth. "I didn't want your students to know your brother wasn't nothing but a cab driver. You somebody."

"You're a nut," 1 said gently. "You should've told that kid the truth." I wanted to say, I'm proud of you, you've got more on the ball than most people I know, I wouldn't have been anything at all except for you. But he would have been embarrassed. sweet potato Bea brought in the dessert-homemade pie! "Buddy, I must of knew you were coming! I just had a mind I wanted to make some sweet potato pie."

There's nothing in this world I like better than Bea's sweet potato pie! "Lord, girl, how you expect me to eat all that?"

The slice she put hef~e me was outrageously big-and moist and covered with a light golden crust-I ate it all.

"Bea, I'm gonna have to eat and run," I said at last.

Charley guffawed. "Much as you et, I don't see how you gonna walk) let alone run." He went out to get his cab from the garage several blocks away.

Bea was washing the tiny girl's face. "Wait a minute, Buddy, I'm gon give you the rest of that pie to take with you."

About the Author: Eugenia Collier is a gifted writer who only afew years ago began extending her talents from teaching to creative writing. After earning degrees from Howard and Columbia universities, she taught American literature at MorganState College, Baltimore, from 1955 to 1966. Since then, she has been on the faculty of Baltimore City College. Although she has been writing articles and book reviews for many years, it was not until 1969when her story "Marigolds" won the Gwendolyn Brooks Prize for Fiction-that she entered the ranks of serious creative writers.

She also writes poetry and edited Modern Black Poets: A Collection of Critical Essays.

She was co-editor of the book entitled Afro-American Writing: An Anthology of Prose & Poetry.

"Great!" I'd eaten all I could hold, but my spirit was still hungry for sweet potato pie.

Bea got out some waxed paper and wrapped up the rest of the pie. "That'll do you for a snack tonight." She slipped it into a brown paper bag.

I gave her a long good-by hug. "Bea, I love yon for a lot of things. Your cooking is one of them!" We had a last comfortable laugh together. I kissed the little girls and went outside to wait for Charley, holding the bag of pie reverently.

In a minute Charley's ancient cab limped to the curb.

I plopped into the seat next to him, and we h~aded downtown. Soon we were assailed by the garish lights of New York on a sultry spring night. We chatted as Charley skillfully managed the heavy traffic. I looked at his long hands on the wheel and wondered what they could have done with artists' brushes.

We stopped a bit down the street from my hotel. I invited him in, but he said he had to get on with his evening run. But as I opened the door to get out, he commanded in the old familiar voice, "Buddy, you wait!"

For a moment I thought my fly was open or something.

"What's wrong?"

"What's that you got there?"

I was bewildered. "That? You mean this bag? That's a piece of sweet potato pie Bea fixed for me."

"You ain't going through the lobby of no big hotel carrying no brown paper bag."

Bea "Man, you crazy! Of course I'm going-Look, my pie-" fixed it for me-That's Charley's eyes were miserable. "Folks in that hotel don't go through the lobby carrying no brown paper bags.

That's country. And you can't neither. You somebody, Buddy. You got to be right. Now, gimme that bag."

"I want that pie, Charley. I've got nothing to prove to anybody-" I couldn't believe it. But there was no point in arguing.

Foolish as it seemed to me, it was important to him.

"You got to look right, Buddy. Can't nobody look dignified carrying a brown paper bag."

So finally, thinking how tasty it would have been and how seldom I got a chance to eat anything that good, I handed over my bag of sweet potato pie. If it was that important to himI tried not to show my irritation. "Okay, man-take care now." I slammed the door harder than I had intended, walked rapidly to the hotel, and entered the brilliant crowded lobby.

"That Charley!" I thought. Walking slower now, I crossed the carpeted lobby toward the elevator, still thinking of my lost snack. I had to admit that of all the herd of people who jostled each other in the lobby, not one was carrying a brown paper bag. Or anything but expensive attache cases or slick packages from exclusive shops. I suppose we all operate according to the symbols that are meaningful to us, and to Charley a brown paper bag symbolizes the humble life he thought I had left. I was somebody.

I don't know what made me glance back, but I did. And suddenly the tears and laughter, toil and love of a lifetime burst around me like fireworks in a night sky.

For there, following a few steps behind, came Charley, proudly carrying a brown paper bag full of sweet potato pie. [] I

ELECTING AP SIDENT H

[A.) (C

(C;

1-~ -ff / G

Critics say U.S. Presidential campaigns are so long they bore the voters. The author rebuts this charge. He argues that a long campaign is needed to educate the voters on the men and the issues-and to test the stamina and character of the candidates.

If just one word could be used to describe the nine-month Presidential contest from the first state primary test in February in New Hampshire through national Election Day on November 2, the word would have to be "ordeal." By evolution rather than design, the American electorate has constructed an elaborate obstacle course for potential U.s. Presidents: tortuous, winding, fatiguing and cruel; requiring the building of staff, the delegation of responsibilities, the allocation of resources, the planning of strategy, the selection of policy positions, the making of instant decisions, the use of rhetoric, the ability to function under pressure, to take criticism and keep coming back, to time and coordinate events, and not to lose touch with the people somewhere along the way.

In late 1967, George Romney, then governor of Michigan and frontrunner for nomination as the Republican Party's Presidential candidate, told a Detroit television interviewer that he had experienced "the greatest brainwashing that anybody can get when you go over to Vietnam." Romney's public opinion poll rating immediately dropped, and he withdrew from the race before the first primary was held. In 1972, while campaigning in the New Hampshire primary, U.S. Senator Edmund Muskie, then frontrunner for nomination as the Democratic Party's candidate, broke down in uncontrollable tears that were captured by TV cameras when replying to a newspaper story criticizing his wife. Muskie's New Hampshire vote was disappointing and he later withdrew from contesting primaries. To say that Romney's "brainwashing" or Muskie's "tears" were the reasons for their failures would be misleading; yet

these events became the symbols of their weaknesses in the public mind, weaknesses that became apparent only as a result of the ordeal. The manner in which some Presidential candidates are eliminated from contention may border on the brutal, but running for public office is not an obligatory activity in U.S. society.

An American Presidential campaign is many things. First of all, and most basically, it is a selection of persons to lead the nation.

The problem of U.S. voters is that they must choose a President for the future; though they may make their judgment on the basis of the past, whoever they elect will have to serve for the next four years, years in which the most crucial decisions may well be about matters that are currently unknown. "It would be great if they handed you a check list of problems, and after you were elected you could go down the list bing-bing-bing and take care of all the problems," said Boston's Mayor Kevin White. "But that's not what happens. I had no way of knowing that two months after I took office as mayor of Boston [in 1967] the biggest problem I would face would be getting fuel oil into the city to keep the people warm. That's not the kind of thing you can anticipate. What you need in office is a man who can cope with situations as they arise, situations that no one even thought of."

So in place of a bing-bing-bing check list, Americans insist that their potential Presidents run an obstacle course. A candidate, such as U.S. Senator George McGovern in 1972, suddenly discovers that his Vice-Presidential running mate has a record of serious mental illness. The candidate must make a decision, quickly, in full public view. Will he retain the Vice-

Excerpted from the book The Presidential Campaign--The Leadership Selection Process After Watergate by Stephen Hess, published by the Brookings Institution. Copyridlt Š the Brookings Institution, Washington. D.C.

'The system must ultimately depend on the electorate's faith in words. The overlooked fact is that candidates prefer to keep their word, other things being equal.'

Presidential nominee or will he replace the person? And in watching the candidate in the act of making decisions, voters are given the opportunity to learn something about him, something that is useful in assessing how he might respond to sudden crises if he were in the White House.

Complaints have been heard in recent years, especially in 1972, that the Presidential selection process takes far too long.

The origins of this criticism become clearer when some recent history is recalled: Two of the last three elections, 1964 and 1972, were landslide victories. Campaigns of predictable outcome, lacking excitement, do seem longer. They also may seem longer because television more quickly sates whatever public appetite there is for political fare. And the refinement of public opinion surveys has made them more predictable. Campaigns, in fact, are not getting longer. It probably always has been true that the candidates for President begin in earnest immediately after the preceding midterm election for members to the U.S. Congress (that is, two years before the Presidential election time).

Two reasons often are given as to why Presidential campaigns should be shortened. First, the technology now exists to inform the electorate quickly, and second, the long campaign is said to bore the electorate, thereby lowering the voter turnout.

Yet, the lowest voter turnout of the modern era (52 per cent in 1948)came in an exciting and unpredictable four-way race for President and there are controversial explanations for another low turnout in 1972. On the other hand, no evidence shows that a low turnout is a product of boredom and a long campaign. Moreover, though television provides the means of informing voters quickly, all voters do not have their political interest awakened at the same time. Those who are least informed politically are also the least educated and poorest. An election system in a democratic society must allow for its "least informed members" to have the opportunity to catch up. It is, however, the "best informed" who most appear to have lost patience with the long process which results in the election of a President.

Viewed from the perspective of the

candidates, the long campaign also serves as an equalizer. When an incumbent is running, which has been two-thirds of the time in this century, rarely will the outparty candidate be as well known. A firstterm President is running for re-election every day he is in office; the challenger needs a campaign to make front-page headlines on a regular basis. He needs added time to transmit his ideas and his personality to the electorate and added time to build an organization. In short, the long campaign can benefit the underdog.

A short campaign would be easier to manipulate-candidates would have to put greater emphasis on televised campaigning; fewer people would have the opportunity to see the candidates in person; it would be more difficult to separate the "real" candidates from the creations of their ghost writers and public relations specialists.

Shortening the campaign, even if desirable, is far easier to propose than to accomplish. Moving the dates of the primary contests closer to the times of the Republican and Democratic nomination conventions or moving the conventions closer to Election Day, the suggestions most often put forth, might shorten the homestretch but not the track. The Presidency seekers still would begin their active quests when it best served their interests. (And recent experience is that the earlier a candidate gets started, the better his chances.) Probably the only effective way to shorten the campaign would be to abolish the fixed four-year term of the Presidency, replacing it with something along the lines of the British model in which the head of government has the right to call a new election at any time within a given period. Such a system would entail additional expenses, assuming that other con~ests were not brought into conformity; create problems of overheating the political system by increasing the number of elections; give a decided advantage to the incumbent, who would choose an election date that maximized his chances.

The result desired by opponents of the long campaign might be achieved, not by shortening the number of days, but by limiting the number or timing of candi-

dates' activities. This brings up a variant of the old question: Does a tree falling in the forest makes a noise if no one is around to hear it fall? Does a campaign exist if the candidates are prevented from advertising themselves? One proposal calls for a five-week limit on campaign advertising.

Rules of this sort could be challenged in the courts as violations of free speech.

But shortening the campaign is not desirable. It is exactly because the campaign is both long and arduous that it eventually penetrates into the field of vision of many Americans; the longer a candidate participates in the ordeal, the greater is the likelihood that his character and instincts will be perceived by the electorate. What Americans have constructed, mostly by accident, is a partial simulation of the Presidency. In the absence of cer-

tainty, this becomes a tool of considerable cal scientist Aaron Wildavsky wrote: "To utility. This simulation operates most ef- manifest their displeasure, people will take fectively when there are hotly contested the Democratic Party, which is in, and struggles, which is almost always the case throw it out, and take the Republican in the out-party or when an incumbent is Party, which is out, and put it in. This not seeking re-election. Occasionally, how- instinctive and convulsive changing of the ever, this will not happen, as in 1968 when guard need not be caused by a popular Richard Nixon had a relatively easy belief that the candidate or leaders of one nomination fight and then relied on divi- party are better than another. All that is siveness among the Democrats to carry necessary is widespread dissatisfaction and him to victory. Also, of course, the simula- a consequent desire to give a new team a tion is not a necessary factor in judging the chance." Wildavsky's prediction reflects Presidential qualities of an incumbent. the most elemental aspect of the U.S. President Nixon was criticized in 1972 for system. For in this regard an election is a failing to campaign, but it is doubtful blunt yet efficient instrument, with the rewhether the voters needed further evidence course for unacceptable policies being to of his capacity to perform the duties of "throw the rascals out." Most elections the office; in such instances, the value of are retrospective sanctionings, decided the campaign is as corrective. more on the basis of the voters' feelings of In anticipating the 1968 election, politi- what has been done to them in the past

than on their expectations of what will be done for them in the future. Thus, elections have a special appropriateness when an incumbent is running. But an incumbent's party is always running: Democratic candidate Adlai Stevenson in 1952 could no more successfully dissociate himself from Harry Truman's Administration, although he did not serve in it, than could Vice President Nixon run away from the Eisenhower Republican Administration record in 1960. Though there is a variety of ways in which politicians can be held accountable, from impeachment through legislative votes, elections provide the most regularized system of accountability.

Yet, a blunt instrument is not necessarily a just tool. A President is blamed (or tries to take credit) for everything that happens during his tenure, whether he is

'No reporter could long survive his editor's wrath after filing a story that began, "The candidate today in Toledo said exactly the same thing he said in Seattle yesterday .... " ,

rightly responsible or not. Still, there is a A President gets tired; it becomes harder certain raw logic for periodically giving "a for him to attract top-level executives to new team a chance" regardless of ideology government service; personality and ideoor even a record of past success. "I always logical conflicts develop within an administhought my mind would develop in a high tration; interest groups learn to oppose a position," U.S. Secretary of State Henry President more effectively; the mystique Kissinger said in 1972. "But fatigue be- wears off and people get bored; power comes a factor. The mind is always work- starts to drift away if a President cannot ing so hard that you learn little. Instead, or will not run for re-elec~ion. For such you tend to work with wha~ you learned reasons a Presidential administration rein previous years." There are other reasons sembles an hourglass-with the sand runwhy an administration loses effectiveness ning down. Elections correct this too.

In addition to being a method of choosas it ages. President Lyndon Johnson, that master of Congressional relations, ex- ing leaders for the nation, Presidential plained to an aide why he could expect campaigns are also a way of forcing the problems with Capitol Hill if he sought nation's leader and potential leader to and won a second term: "Congress always think of new ways of dealing with the gives a new man a little cooperation, a nation's problems.

In preparing to seek his party's Presilittle breathing room. I'd be the same old Johnson coming back to the well again, dential nomination in 1972, Edmund beggin' and pushin' 'em to give me a better Muskie wrote that a candidate "must acbill than last year. No. Congress and I are tually develop proposals, policies and prolike an old man and woman who've lived grams to deal with current issues, as far together for a hundred years. We know as one can anticipate. That is part of what each other's faults and what little good a campaign is all about." It is also the part there is in us. We're tired of each other." of the campaign that is most faulted.

Political analyst Theodore White's dismissal of "the reasonable discussion of issues" as "the dream of un blooded political scientists" has not stopped the criticism against the way candidates and parties spell out what they would do if elected.

It is charged that politicians ignore most issues and break their pledges on those they cannot ignore; that the candidates' speeches are exercises in oversimplification, overdramatization and (if made by the challengers) "overcatastrophization."

The 1932 Democratic platform (outlining the party's major policy positions) pledged a balanced federal budget, and the 1968 Republican platform opposed recognition of Communist China. Roosevelt unbalanced the budget, and Nixon set up a liaison office in Peking. "I do not see a reasonable prospect that I will recommend a guaranteed annual income," Nixon said in the 1968 campaign. Fifteen months later as President he recommended the Family Assistance Plan, a form of guaranteed income for the poor.

The assumption is that such conduct is

WHAT DO AMERICANS EXP U.S. Presidents and Presidential candidates, it has become a cliche to observe, are constantly being forced to balance themselves precariously between conflicting demands.

The common cliche, however, usually refers to opposing policy options: Whether to hold down spending to provide more jobs; whether to raise grain prices to help farmers or lower them to help consumers; whether to build airports near town to benefit travelers or build them farther out so that fewer homeowners will be bothered by the noise.

Equally difficult but less noted are the competing personality demands that the public puts on Presidents and Presidential aspirants. Yet at a time when voters seem increasingly to be picking their Presidents as much on character and disposition as on programs and promises, a candidate's ability to satisfy these contradictory requirements may be decisive in electoral outcomes.

The public wants a President to have the common touch but turn in an uncommon performance. It wants him to be strong but not grasping, energetic but not frenetic. It demands that he be a good politician without appearing too political. It wants him to be open and candid but not a blabbermouth. And so on. In personality and behavior, a President or would-be President must walk a line just as narrow and tricky as the lines he must walk on major policy decisions.

"We simultaneously expect two very different kinds of performance," observes Thomas Cronin, a Presidential scholar who has studied this paradox. "The poor guy can't win."

The country's reaction against Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon demonstrates that Americans don't want a President to become too powerful-to take too much authority to himself, to cut too many corners, to abuse the office, to ride roughshod over Congress. Yet the 'country certainly wants him to have ample power to cope with all emergencies, to be firmly in command of the sprawling bureaucracy, really to run things. In fact, Congress and the public constantly push at the President new authority to handle new problems.

One reason Presidents find it so hard to surrender power, political scientist James MacGregor Burns has argued, is because it was largely forced on them in the first place. "It was forced on them," he says, "by farmers, businessmen, working people who wanted government to act in a time of dire economic depression or military crisis. These claimant groups turned to the one institution that seemed able to act, and that stilI seems able to act."

Look at it from another angle. The nation definitely prefers a President who is "a man of the people," a rather ordinary person with whom it can comfortably identify. But the nation doesn't want this man to be too ordinary. They not only want extraordi-

wrong: that campaigns should be instruments of some precision and intellectual rigor and that candidates should keep their word. After all, the system must ultimately depend on the electorate's faith in words.

The overlooked fact is that candidates prefer to keep their word, other things being equal. There are a variety of ways to view Roosevelt's pledge to balance the budget without assuming that he tried to mislead the voters. (1) He thought of it as a long-range goal, which he tried to honor by appointing some fiscal conservatives to key posts, by cutting federal spending when he thought the time was right, and by continuing to pledge a balanced budget in the 1936 platform. (2) In weighing competing demands, he concluded that lowering unemployment deserved a higher priority than balancing the budget. (3) His thinking changed as he was influenced by different economists. Usually some such reasons determine why a President does not honor a pledge: He tries and fails; circumstances change; he learns something he did not know. Rarely does a politician gain, at least in the short run, from changing his mind. Even if one wishes to believe that a candidate's promises are not made in good faith, one must recognize that he is alert to the inherent problems of his acting otherwise. Thus, as a rule of thumb

and survival, any politician would rather keep his commitments.

But, above all, candidates seek to get elected. In accepting the 1860 Republican nomination, Abraham Lincoln asked his supporters to "kindly let me be silent."

Franklin Roosevelt, after opposing U.S. participation in the League of Nations in 1932, wrote a distressed supporter, "For heaven's sake have a little faith." Issues often are badly handled by candidates because they view winning office, not issue referenda, as the primary outcome of elections; because they contend for office through an adversary system that treats issues as a political football, the vehicle for scoring points; because they contend for office within a framework of two major parties-the Republicans and Democrats -with electoral incentives for blurring disagreements; and because they respond to an electorate that at times is neither knowledgeable about issues nor highly politicized.

Viewing policy formulation as a campaign function within this context, it is perhaps remarkable that issues playas large a part as they do or that voters are exposed to as much disagreement or as many precise policy commitments as they are. Though some questions (such as radical alternatives to capitalism) are not con-

sidered by the dominant parties, most major economic and social issues have been fought over at some time in some Presidential campaign. This is not to say that new policy initiatives are likely to come out of the campaign. This rarely happens, and those that have emerged generally have been modest. The issues involved, by and large, are those that have been long in the public arena. But besides focusing attention on existing areas of controversy, a campaign also can reflect areas of consensus. This often leads to complaints that voters are given little choice. Yet, these nonpolarized elections generally mirror popular agreement on the aims of society and an acceptable pace of change. In times of polarization, as in 1860, 1896 or the 1930s, the political process produces clear-cut alternatives.

The development of issues in a Presidential campaign often grows out of an intricate interaction between candidate and electorate. Despite the ability of candidates to make their appeals without stepping outside a television studio-and reach more people in the process-they persist in taking their case personally to the voters.

This is not what most observers expected to happen once TV became a dominant force in communications. Why candidates have not given up personal appearance

~CT FROM A PRESIDENT?bYALANL.OTIEN nary ability and uncommonly gifted leadership from him, but they also want this fellow commoner to be better than they themselves are-to be someone they can look up to and respect. They don't like him to be coarse, to misbehave or otherwise lower the dignity of the office.

Election results and opinion polls indicate that the voters also respond to a just, humane, decent person-but one who can also be tough and ruthless when necessary. Time and again, an Adlai Stevenson [1952 Democratic candidate] or a George McGovern [1972 Democratic candidate] is dismissed as "too nice" or "too decent" for the White House. The public seems to want a softhearted but hard-nosed President, and that's a hard role to cast.

Presidents are expected to be above politics in some respects and highly political in others. The nation, Cronin notes, doesn't want its leader to act from obvious political motives; he's not supposed to favor any particular group or party, but rather to be "President of all the people." Nor is he supposed to wheel and deal too openly, twist arms or browbeat.

Yet, every President must always be the complete politician, weighing not only which policies are best but which can be put across, negotiating with different groups, making essential bargains to get results. "The attempted divorce between the Presidency and politics," Cronin contends, "presupposes a signifi-

cantly different system than ours, which is glued together in such large measure by ambiguity, compromise and the extensive sharing of powers .... A President in a democracy has to act politically in regard to controversial issues if we are to have any semblance of government by the consent of the governed."

Certainly people look to the President to be diligent, hardworking, not too often on vacation. But they don't want him always dashing off in new directions either, whipping the nation into a frenzy over some sudden emergency, rushing in with more solutions than there are problems.

Leaders are supposed to set forth visions, to talk about ideals and goals, to exhibit "leadership" and force the electorate to confront unpleasant choices. Yet, people don't want these leaders to go too far in this direction, to lead them (except in time of unmistakable crisis) where it might be too uncomfortable.

A President is expected to communicate well and clearly; it's not just the press corps that tends to groan over pedestrian speeches or snicker at ungrammatical phrases. Yet, if he communicates too well, he may be written off as too glib. Adlai Stevenson's eloquence put off as many people as it charmed.

As Cronin says, it's strictly a no-win situation. But then, you can always fall back on another political cliche: No one makes the guy run for the job in the first place.

The Presidential campaign has a long history as entertainment: A newspaper editor recalled the 1840 Presidential campaign as 'a ceaseless torrent of music, still beginning, never ending.' campaigning, with its high cost in rela- newspapers, and it never is heard on the tion to the number of people reached, is an network news, except possibly for a brief interesting speculation. Certainly many of snippet to illustrate some theme. This is them must have been advised to do so. The because part of the definition of "news" answer may be no more complicated than is "new." No reporter could long survive that the sorts of persons who run for U.S. his editor's wrath after filing a story that President find that "rubbing shoulders began, "The candidate today in Toledo with the people" fills some special need. said exactly the same thing he said in As Muskie has said, "You get that im- Seattle yesterday and in Atlanta the day portant response directly from audiences. before." Yet this may quite accurately re... I read faces in the crowd. Sounds are flect the event. As the campaign proless significant, although silence is sig- gresses, the reporters are caught up in a nificant. But above all is a feeling in the system that forces them to report more and air." A Presidential candidate on the more marginal news (size of crowds, campaign trail is engaged in a process of hecklers, staff squabbles); the candidates at the urging of special pulse-taking, seeking the voters' tolerance respond-often level, saying the same things over and over interest groups-by issuing more and more again, gauging reactions, dropping ideas, statements on marginal issues. A volume adding others, sharpening lines until the published by Nixon's campaign committee traveling press corps is able to chant them in 1968 listed his views on 227 subjects in unison. An example of this exercise, divided into 43 categories. The result is a although not in a campaign contest, is re- sort of Gresham's Law: The peripheral counted by historian Arthur M. Schlesinger tends to push out what is central, and in discussing President Kennedy's tour of nothing gets very much attention, although a great deal of information is disthe western states in 1963: seminated. Americans might not have been He conscientiously pursued the conservation so surprised at President Nixon's first theme for several speeches. Then late on the second diplomatic overture to Peking in 1972 day, at Billings, Montana, he struck, almost by after years of no official contacts, if his accident, a new note. [Montana Senator] Mike Mansfield was present, and in his third sentence campaign speech of October 19, 1968Kennedy praised the Senate leader for his part in "We must ... anticipate eventual conversabringing about test ban ratification. To his surtions with the leaders of Communist prise, this allusion produced strong and sustained not been overwhelmed in applause. Heartened, he set forth his hope of les- China" -had the "information clog." Newspapers and sening the 'chance of a military collision between those two great nuclear powers which together TV networks should consider rotating have the power to kill 300 million people in the their reporters more often; at the point short space of a day.' The Billings response enthat they have memorized a candidate's couraged him to make the pursuit of peace inset speech, they are ready for another creasingly the theme of his trip. assignment. There is a certain irony in Kennedy went to talk to westerners this belief that voters would know more if about conservation, a subject that he they were not told about so many things: thought was .uppermost in their minds. But If a candidate was limited to, say, a halfhe discovered that they were more con- dozen topics, by Election Day the public cerned with peace. This was valuable in- might have a better idea of his positions formation for a President. on those issues he thought most important.

A candidate's set speech, though repeti- The further irony is that to some degree it tious and even banal, may provide the is the press representatives-asking quesmost useful substantive basis on which a tions on behalf of the citizenry-who voter can make his decision. For here, broaden the contents of a campaign bein the potential President's own words, is yond the maximum limits within which inwhat he thinks the campaign is all about, formation is useful for making a rational the issues that he thinks are most im- choice. But in the likely absence of any portant, the failures of the opposition that self-censorship, it is still more ironic that he thinks are most serious. Its full text the electorate's best interests are then rarely gets printed by even the leading served by excessively long (and thus

boring) campaigns during which so much is said and reported that each citizen eventually should absorb that which is most helpful in the act of casting a ballot for a Presidential candidate.

Although in some respects policy formulation in campaigns is handled better than anyone has the right to expectgiven the nature of the system-and in some respects it is handled worse than voters feel they deserve-given the seriousness of the decision they are asked to make-on one level the candidates' pledges are almost always honored, and their campaigns are highly predictive. This is the symbolic level. Some part of every campaign is conducted in symbols or code words, shorthand for social attitudes which cannot be easily translated into programmatic terms: "DON'T LET THEM TAKE IT AWAY" (Democrats, 1952); "CLEAN UP THE MESS IN WASillNGTON" (Republicans, 1952); "A CHOICE NOT AN ECHO" (Barry Goldwater, 1964); "LAW AND ORDER" (Nixon, 1968); "SEND THEM A MESSAGE" (George Wallace, 1972). Symbolic promises are easier to keep. The very act of election may be the fulfillment: "Send them a message" by electing me, says a candidate, and having elected him, voters have sent the message. But a President in distributing symbolic rewards is least serving as "President of all the peopIe"; for symbolic rewards, like patronage jobs, go to the faithful.

The relevance of the "no-choice" argument-that there is no real difference between candidates on issues-probably depends on where one positions oneself along the ideological spectrum; most Americans are bunched in the center, although it is a floating center and sometimes hard to locate. For those near the center, the campaign-on both programmatic and symbolic levels-functions to provide even modestly attentive voters with enough information on policy to find legitimate reasons to choose which of two candidates they would prefer to have in the White House for four years. It does not furnish an elevated level of discourse; it does not provide a carefully delineated topographical map of future public policy; and it may misdirect the voters if they are led to expect more th:tn a politician can reasonably

deliver in a system of balanced powers and at times of changeable circumstances.

An American Presidential campaign is also an occasion for national selfexamination.

During the Presidential election year, "The nation at once celebrates and mourns itself." The celebration takes the form of a reaffirmation of national worth. "Americans have long had a novel and overwhelming need to be reassured that they are a moral and good people," political analyst Michael Novak has written.

"American soldiers give chewing gum to little children. We need to think of ourselves as good, in a manner distinctly American." The Presidential campaign is part of the ritual for reasserting this sense of American goodness. Politicians proclaim "what is right with America."

Yet if Americans celebrate themselves in what many view as a national orgy of smugness, they also mourn themselves in what often approaches masochism. Possibly this is a form of catharsis by which campaigns serve the public good in providing the opportunity every fourth year to talk about all the awful things that have befallen the society, by getting the animosities out in the open, and by purging the body politic of some of its bile. This theory of restoration by rhetoric probably applies to a very small number. For the rest of the voters, after listening to predictions of the apocalypse, someone gets elected and the

country survives-perhaps because politicians are not as bad as other politicians say they are, perhaps because politics is not as important as politicians would have the public believe, perhaps because the public was not listening very attentively. perhaps because of a healthy skepticism of what politicians say. There is evidence to suggest that U.S. voters discount much of what they are told in campaigns.

However, there is a dark side to selfexamination. Campaigns reveal the fears of Americans-both in international relations and domestic affairs. Equally, the campaigns put the candidates on notice as to what the electorate most fears aboutthemwhether it be Kennedy's Catholicism or Eisenhower's military background. Their fears may be less uplifting than their hopes, but an understanding of them is important to the functioning of government.

In addition to all the aspects of a Presidential campaign discussed above, there is also the fact that a campaign is entertainment. This aspect of it has a long history: the torchlight parades with the marchers wearing oilskin capes to protect themselves from the drippings of the kerosene; the giant outdoor rallies; the dispensing of liquid stimulants. Whether on the frontier or in the city, the campaign was different from everyday life. It was colorful and tuneful. A newspaper editor recalled the 1840 Presidential campaign as "a ceaseless torrent of music, still beginning, never end-

"I think you'll find that these position papers on sensitive issues are decisive, forthright, inspiring, and subject to a wide variety of interpretations."

ing." The entertainment was functional; that is, it interested people in public affairs.

It provided a pleasant diversion. And it was free.

Television now gives the electorate more free entertainment than it can absorb.

Moreover, entertainment in a campaign is no longer functional. In the TV competition for attention, the politician is inherently disadvantaged. He has learned that he can pre-empt popular programs only at his own peril. He can deliver his message through spot commercials-they are unobtrusive-but they hardly raise the level of discussion, and they remind viewers that he has chosen a TV advertising technique that is used to sell detergents and other products. Perhaps, too, politics as entertainment is less appropriate in a great nation than in an emergent nation and less fitting for a 20th-century world leader than for a 19th-century parochial one.

Yet, the information media increasingly have chosen to treat the political process as entertainment. In contrast to the established routine of newspaper journalism (who, what, where, when, why, how), the principal need of television reporting, writes one media critic, "is for a clear, continuous narrative line sustained throughout the story-something with a beginning, a middle and an end that will create, maintain and if possible increase the viewer's interest (otherwise, he might switch to another channel)." It is possible. of course, that TV coverage and other reportage will restore the functional role of entertainment to the campaign. One would like to think so: Most Americans have never confused solemnity with seriousness. Still, the odds are overwhelming that in the long run politicians will never again be able to compete as free entertainment. Nor should they be expected to do so. Where once the political process was enhanced by being entertaining, now the attempt to entertain merely detracts. Though campaigns may be a bore, voters are more likely to be bored when they expect to be entertained and are not. They do not expect to be entertained by a vote in the U.S. Congress, a Supreme Court decision or an executive order. And they are not disappointed. 0 About the Author: Stephen Hess, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., is well qualified to write on the U.S. elections. Hess has worked with Presidential candidates on their campaigns, helping them write their platforms.

UNCTAD IV

IN PERSPECTIVE Did the recent Nairobi meeting of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development make any progress toward a new economic order?

The article on these pages suggests some answers.

Historians may well look upon 1976 as the year of the Great Economic Debate. Never has world economic reform been debated with such intensity by so many international agencies.

The "negotiations explosion," as U.N. Secretary General Kurt Waldheim described it, was set off last September at the Seventh Special Session of the General Assembly, where U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger proposed: "Let us together fashion a new world order."

The new order has ever since been animatedly discussed by rich and poor countries in a number of forums. One of the most significant of these was the UNCTAD IV [United Nations Conference on Trade and Development} session held in Nairobi in May. Third World nations had pinned high hopes on Nairobi, and prepared

hard for it. In February they adopted the "Manila Declaration," a forthright charter of demands.

UNCTAD IV opened on May 5. More than 3,000 delegates from 153 countries were present. U.N. Secretary General Kurt Waldheim said in a message to the Nairobi assemblage: "We cannot and must not miss the opportunity afforded by this conference."

The American delegation was led by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. On May 6, he delivered a lo,ooo-word address (abridged in the August 1976 SPAN) that responded to Third World concerns reflected in the Manila Declaration.

Dr. Kissinger's speech set the framework for the debate during the rest of the 27-day session. It focused on commodity prices,

debt relief and technology transfer-the three issues that the Third World regards as the most crucial in its quest for a new economic order.

Ever since the energy crisis erupted three years ago, the problem of commodity prices has often dominated the North-South debate.

The "North" has been able to meet its soaring oil-import bills by expanding export earnings from manufactured goods. The "South" (barring the oil producers) has not been so lucky. Most Third World countries depend for their exports on various primary commodities. The prices of these have been gyrating wildly. Third World countries therefore demand that commodity prices be stabilized at high levels, so that they can maximize export earnings and do a better job of planning for development.

Industrialized countries agree that the Third World's export earnings need to be stabilized; but opinions differ on the best way to go about it.

The Third World proposes the creation of a $6,000 million "Common Fund" to finance stockpiles (or buffer stocks) of a core of 10 raw materials-cocoa, copper, cotton, hard fibers, iron ore, jute, rubber, sugar, tea, tin. By buying and selling from these stockpiles, the Third World argues, consumers and producers would be able to keep prices within an agreed range, thus avoiding sharp rises and steep falls.

Developing nations pressed the Common Fund idea with vigor at Nairobi. But the U.S. and other industrialized nations opposed the plan to lump all commodities together. Different commodities present different kinds of problems, as Joseph Greenwald, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Economic Affairs, told an interviewer recently, "and it's very difficult to deal with them all on a broad over-all basis." Some commodities cannot be stockpiledbananas, for instance. Some others have ready substitutes, and high prices will drive consumers toward the substitutes. And still other commodities are concentrated more in industrialized countries than in the developing ones.

"It is simplistic," wrote N.S. Jagannathan in the Statesman, "to pose the commodity problem in terms of a bipolar conflict between the developed and the developing world. Not all developing countries are similarly placed and there are conflicts of interests.

This is evident from the negotiations under existing commodity pacts and for new ones. There are conflicts between old and new producers (of tea, for example); the latter wanting to expand their markets even at lower prices and the older ones wanting higher prices. This often leads to arguments over export quotas. Brazil wants an agreement on coffee but not on iron ore. Bolivia has reservations about prices fixed under the tin pact."

The U.S. had reservations too, about the "integrated" approach to commodities; what it wanted was separate agreements for each commodity, and a discussion of financing plans later.

Without agreements on individual commodities, the U.S. argued, the Common Fund would needlessly divert scarce development

capital from worthy projects. In the words of Paul Boeker, U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Finance and Development, the Common Fund "creates financing before agreement is reached on what is to be financed." It puts the cart before the horse. [See interview with Paul Boeker, page 45.]

The divergence of approach on the Common Fund was in large measure ideological. Industrialized countries would prefer commodity prices to be governed by market forces; the Common Fund, however, would have to be administered, by and large, by governments. With developing countries quite unyielding about the need for the Common Fund, it seemed as ifUNCTAD IV would crack up-"Iike a smashed eggshell," as the Times of India put it. But the crack was averted with a compromise resolution, which instructed UNCTAD Secretary General Gamani Corea to convene a conference before next March to discuss the Common Fund. The U.S., West Germany, Britain and Japan voted for the resolution after opposing the fund at the conference; but they read into the record their reservations. U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Charles Robinson described the resolution as a "comtructive compromise," but said that U.S. participation at the negotiating conference would hinge on the outcome of preparatory meetings.

Dr. P.c. Alexander, India's Foreign Trade Secretary, said in New Delhi after the Nairobi conference that the developed countries would ultimately have to accept the Common Fund. He was pleased that the compromise resolution on commodities noted the special problems of the neediest nations, and that it protected the interests of those Third World countries that are net importers of commodities.

The conference turned down by a margin of two votes a U.S. proposal for study of an International Resources Bank that would finance new investments in raw materials in developing nations.

[See box on page 32.] But the United States said the proposal would be reintroduced in other forums.

N.S. Jagannathan in the Statesman described the conference's refusal "even to discuss the American propos3.1 for a resources bank" as "unfortunate."

He felt that the proposal had "manyexploitative overtones." It seemed more concerned with ensuring steady supply of raw materials to the rich than with helping the poor. Yet, he added: "Not all developing countries are averse to private capital, and discussion would hwe helped clarification of these and other issues. Even as a tactic the refusal to discuss the idea was unfortunate.

How can anyone blame the developed countries for their reluctance to discuss the common fund for commodities when the discussion of another idea like the resources bank is prevented?"

DEBT RELIEF The Third World's debt-to industrialized countries, to agencies like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and to private banks-is approximately $145,000 million. Interest on this debt burden almost nullifies the impact of fresh aid flow.

At Nairobi, Third World countries demanded "generalized

The Nairobi conference 'took a very real step toward meaningful reform' and strengthened UN CTAD's role as an 'effective instrument of the U.N. system,' said Gamani Corea (right), UNCTAD Secretary General

debt relief"-a moratorium on debts to the poorest countries and a stretching-out of repayment schedules for all developing nations.

The United States agreed that debt accumulation had become a serious problem for the Third World. In his May 6 address, Secretary Kissinger said: "A major institutional effort must be made if these countries are to avoid severe cutbacks in their imports and consequent reductions in their economic growth."

Early this year the IMF, at America's instance, established a Trust Fund through profits from the sale of IMF gold. This fund is meant to help the poorest developing countries. The regular financing capacity of IMF has also been expanded by half. In addition, the U.S. is strengthening the resources of soft-loan agencies like the International Development Association (IDA).

The U.S. believes that measures such as these, which improve credit facilities for the Third World, and other measures to help expand Third World exports, would considerably obviate the need for debt relief. But it is willing to consider individual requests for such relief from the poorest developing countries.

At Nairobi, the U.S. cautioned the Third World against seeking universal debt relief, arguing that it would be counterproductive in the long run. It would undermine the credit-worthiness of developing countries and cut off potential aid flow from private sources. (In fact, some developing nations such as Brazil and Mexico were unenthusiastic about a debt moratorium for this reason.) Such a formula, Dr. Kissinger said, would also prevent "an appropriate focus on those in most urgent need." It would be unfair to "those nations which have taken strong policy measures to reduce their obligations."

The idea of a debt moratorium failed to win sufficient support at Nairobi. But the conference committed developed countries to respond promptly to individual requests, especially from the neediest countries.

"A central challenge of our time," said Dr. Kissinger in his May 6 address, "is to extend the benefits of technology to all countries." He proposed a three-point strategy for Third World technological strength-local development of technology, mechanisms to acquire technology from developed nations, utilization

of acquired technology.

The resolutions at Nairobi on technology transfer closely reflected Dr. Kissinger's proposals. They outlined measures to strengthen the technological capability of developing countries.

Specifically, they called for better research facilities, for training programs and for the establishment of local and regional centers for technology transfer.

The conference also directed an expert group to draft a code of conduct on technology transfer; urged revision of the international patent system; called for curbs on business practices that restrict technology transfer; and asked developed countries to encourage technology originating from Third World nations.

In sum, Nairobi's resolutions on technology went a long way toward meeting Third World needs. Times of India columnist Swaminathan Aiyar said: "It will not be surprising if in the next 10 years or so, countries which concentrate on technological improvement do much better than those which spend their time trying to push up commodity prices."

Commodities, debts and technology overshadowed other issues at Nairobi, but UNCTAD IV did useful work in some other areas as well.

• It urged greater tariff concessions for developing nations.

The Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) adopted by most industrialized nations is to be extended beyond 1980.

• It called for expansion of Third World exports of manufactured goods.

• It called on the socialist countries of East Europe to substantially step' up economic and technical assistance to the Third World, increase imports from developing countries and reduce tariffs on their products.

• It asked for international support for Third World efforts to boost economic cooperation among themselves.

• It recommended measures to strengthen UNCTAD. A~sessments of UNCTAD IV vary. Some have dismissed it as a flop. Financial Express described it as a "success of sorts," but believed that historians might regard it as "90 per cent semantics, 10 per cent dramatics." U.S. Deputy Secretary Charles Robinson said he was "highly gratified" with the session. Jamaica's delegate, H.S. Walker, described the resolution on commodities as "a pale shadow of the real need." India's Commerce Minister, Professor D.P, Chattopadhyaya, welcomed the GSP's extension. Perhaps India's Samachar news agency summed up Nairobi best: "Neither a glowing success nor an exercise in futility."

In an interview with SPAN correspondent John Harter in Nairobi, UNCTAD's Secretary General Gamani Corea said the Nairobi meeting had recorded successes and advances "on a very broad front."

"I think the highlights of UNCTAD IV were the positive advances made on commodities, the transfer of technology and the institutional decisions on the future role of UNCTAD," said Corea. He was also pleased with "good resolutions" dealing with the least developed countries, international trade, cooperation among Third World countries, trade with socialist countries.

On commodities, Corea said: "UNCTAD IV gave us a clear mandate to do two things-go on with negotiations on specific commodities; work toward negotiation of a Common Fund to finance buffer stocks." Dr. Corea was also pleased with the out" come on technology. Three important goals had been attained, he said: the setting up of regional and national technology-transfer centers; a strong mandate for the ongoing review of the industrial property system including the question of patent rights; and a "good formula" for moving toward a code of conduct on technology transfer. The proposed UNCTAD Advisory Service, he pointed out, would help step up technical assistance to developing countries.

Corea said that his one disappointment at Nairobi was with the resolution on the debt problems of developing nations. The conference had not supported a general rescheduling of Third World debts.

On the whole, however, the Nairobi conference "took a very real step forward toward meaningful reform," and was more significant than any of the three preceding UNCTAD meetings, Corea said. It had strengthened UNCTAD's capacity to serve "as an effective instrument of the United Nations system" for help to developing countries. In the past UNCTAD had stimulated other agencies to solve Third World problems. It might play an even more vital catalytic role in future. As for the next few months, the UNCTAD secretariat would be busy consulting with other international agencies and working on the Common Fund parleys.

Where does the North-South, rich-poor dialogue go from UNCTAD? For one thing, it is being pursued by the agency that picked up the initiative from the General Assembly's historic Seventh Special Session-the Commission on International

"I'd like you to meet Marty Thorndecker. He's an economist, but he's really very nice."

Economic Cooperation. CIEe's four commissions-on energy, raw materials, development, and finance-have been meeting every month to prepare for a ministerial-level meeting later this year. Each CIEC commission has 15 members, including 10 from the Third World.

U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Charles Robinson says: "The CIEC commissions can provide a constructive atmosphere for seeking practical solutions to problems discussed at UNCTAD IV." They provide "the kind of flexible forum within which countries can get together to look at the real problems objectively."

Robinson notes that the CIEC panel on raw materials will come to grips with a wide range of commodity problems discussed at UNCTAD. "We need to bring these issues into sharper focus," he say.;, "so that we know just what the international community can do in the interest of all and how we can do it."

How do UNCTAD and CIEC "mesh"? They complement each other, says Robinson, since each provides certain useful functions that enlarge the possibilities of the' other. The two agencies are working toward the same goal of a better economic order. They will continue to move forward "on separate but interrelated tracks."

Another authoritative view of CIEC's work is provided by Stephen Bosworth of the U.S. State Department, who is cochairman of CIEC's Energy Commission. He says these commissions have been designed "to facilitate work under way in other organizations, to further elaborate proposals which already may have been made, to receive new proposals, to look toward recommendations that will accelerate work in other forums."

The U.S. is satisfied with the work CIEe's four commissions have done so far, Bosworth says. He is particularly pleased with his commission's basic analysis of the energy situation, which focuses on the problems of the Third World.

The commissions will soon be taking up in depth many of the topics raised at Nairobi, including U.S. proposals for an International Resources Bank and an International Energy Institute, Bosworth says.

The North-South dialogue, in the opinion of Deputy Secretary Robinson, reflects a fundamental turn-around in the economic relationship between the U.S. and the Third World. "This process has become a basic element in U.S. foreign policy-and I am sure it will continue to evolve through other international organs as well as CIEC and UNCTAD in the coming months and years."

These "other organs" include such U.N. agencies as the World Food Council, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), the IMF and the World Bank. Further, a comprehensive reform of the United Nations economic system is likely: It has been proposed by a panel of experts that reported last year to the U.N. Secretary General. Eventually, an International Trade Organization may come into being. All this augurs well for world economic reform, for the new economic order that the Third World passionately espoused at Nairobi.

-S.R.M.

KISSINGER-SIMON 'ON UNClAD IV At the conclusion of the Nairobi conference on May 31, 1976, the U.S. Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, and the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, William Simon, issued the following statement.

The United States went to UNCTAD IV at Nairobi in a serious and cooperative spirit. In preparation for the conference, we conducted a thorough review of U.S. international economic policies in which all agencies of the Government participated. There was agreement on a series of proposals of special relevance to the developing countries, which we presented at UNCTAD. We were represented by the most senior delegation in the history of UNCTAD meetings, and, for the first time, the United States position was set forth in an opening statement by the Secretary of State. In that statement, the U.S. put forward its proposals to deal with the problems of the developing world, including proposals directly related to commodities, and at the same time indicated that there were certain proposals that we could not accept. Throughout the four-week meeting, the United States cooperated with other nations and important progress was made on a number of matters before the conference.

In our review of international commodity policies in preparation for the UNCTAD meeting, and otherwise, we have tried to find ways of meeting the concerns of the developing countries, within the framework of an efficient international market system.

As we have made clear at the U.N. conference, we are prepared to participate in a case-by-case examination of arrangements to improve the functioning of the international commodity markets through broad range of measures appropriate to specific commodities, but we have opposed mechanisms to fix prices or limit production by intergovernmental action.

One of the most significant of the U.S. proposals addressed the problem of increasing investment in mineral development.

For that reason, the United States, in an effort to meet the interests of the developing countries and the world economy at large, proposed an International Resources Bank (IRB) to facilitate the continued flow of essential capital, management and technology for the development of new resources in the LDCs [less developed countries].

As the conference progressed a senior interagency group in Washington reviewed all proposals before the conference with a view to accepting as many as possible of the suggestions being made by the LDCs and other countries consistent with our basic principles.

At the final plenary session an LDC resolution on commodities was adopted by consensus. The interagency group authorized reservations about parts of this resolution, which were read at

a

the conference. Nevertheless, we joined the consensus because we wanted -to contribute to the spirit of harmony in the closing sessions of the conference and because the resolution contained a number of elements of our own comprehensive approach outlined in the U.S. Secretary of State's address to the conference three weeks earlier. As our reservations indicate, we did not believe that all aspects of the LDC proposals were practical and feasible. How7 ,G'bG ever, we committed ourselves to the search for concrete, practical solutions to commodity problems that will be in the interests of both producers and consumers.

It is all the more regrettable, therefore, that the resolution proposing further study ofthe International Resources Bank was defeated by 2 votes with 31 votes in favor. Ninety countries at the last minute abstained or absented themselves.

A substantial number ofthe 33 votes against were the socialist countries, whose contribution to the development of the poorer countries of the world is negligible.

Forty-four countries cooperated in this effort by abstaining on the International Resources Bank and 46 absented themselvesalmost all of which were the developing countries. This does not augur well for the future of the dialogue of the worldwide developmenteffort. The United States, whose role is so vital, does not expect when it makes major efforts to cooperate, that its proposals will be subject to accidental majorities.

If the dialogue between the developing and developed countries, to which we attach great importance, is to succeed, suggestions put forward by the developed nations, such as the IRB at UNCTAD, must be treated on the merits and with serious consideration. The LDCs must not lend themselves to parliamentary manipulation by those states who contribute nothing to the development of the poor nations of the world.

We will be addressing the problems of resource development financing again in later meetings, including the preparatory conferences contemplated by the commodities resolution of UNCTAD IV. We will advance the IRB proposal again and we expect that it will be considered with the same respect and care which the U.S. will lend to the study of the proposals which the LDCs will table.

The United States went to Nairobi with a wide range of other proposals aimed at dealing constructively and pragmatically with the urgent problems of the developing world.

We are gratified that the conference embraced a number of these suggestions, dealing with resource and technology transfer and trade expansion. We will continue to elaborate these proposals-as well as the proposal for the resources bank-in appropriate forums, because they are right for the profound problems we are addressing.

FOR THE BICENTENNIAL!

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Throughout the United States the lowly fire hydrant is being inducted into the nation's 200th bIrthday celebrations. With bright pots of paint and an eye for caricature, city residents are turning fireplugs into soldiers, sailors, Indian chiefs, and figures from Revolutionary times. Much of the credit for the hydrantpainting craze goes to Ruth Von Karowsky (above) of South Bend, Indiana. An industrial designer, she hit upon the idea while working on a city planning project. ("I thought it would make a nice tie-in with the Bicentennial.") She put together several fireplug-painting kits and soon was besieged with letters and phone calls from people with a kindred '76 spirit. Eventually, painting plugs became artistic and patriotic outlets for thousands of Americans. What happens after the paint starts to chip and peel and fade? Nobody knows. For the present, at least, the hydrants are a gay curbside salute to America's 200th birthday.

In dozens of cities throughout the United States, hydrants painted as soldiers~ ~ )

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sailors and Revolutionary statesmen pay whimsical tribute to the Bicentennial.

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ANTHROPOLOGY

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TOAS 'Why should the world be The American anthropologist, Clifford Geertz, in his recent volume of scintillating essays, The Interpretation of Cultures, defined culture as an internally consistent system of meanings. He wrote: "Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, T take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretative one in search of meaning."

Another American anthropologist, Ruth Benedict, had earlier condensed the implications of such a view as Geertz's by concluding that all cultures should be considered, in principle, with equal value. Human history was not a drawn-out procession of peoples marching at different speeds and in distinct groups toward a common goal. It was to be seen as the experience of many discontinuous cultures, each in itself equally important as exemplifying the variability of the products of human inventiveness, each betraying a system of meanings irreducible to any other.

Yet, a year ago, the late Jacob Bronowski's The Ascent of Man could still be accepted without criticism even though in its pages Western man (and no longer man outside that culture) was seen as having reached the zenith of the evolutionary tree. Men in other cultures, with their achievements, seemed not more than stunted cabbages in the back gardens of the human world.

Sixteen years ago, the American management theorist, Peter Drucker, had prepared the ground for the current, wholehearted, chauvinist assumption of the ultimate superiori'ty of the Western view of man. In a littleknown book, The Landmarks of Tomorrow, he had gone so far as to urge his readers to face "the new reality of the collapse of the East, that is, of non-Western culture and civilization, to the point where no viable societies anywhere can be built except on Western foundations .... " Such prophecies did seem, in large part and at first glance, to be justified. Under the influence of science, technics had metamorphosed into technology, to produce a standard of living never before attained in human

NEDA'SJOURNEY EPARATE REALITY )nly as you say it is?' Don Juan asked the University of California student. history. Knowledge had become power, with the practice of a sure-fire method: the scientific method, a simple Archimedean point that had revolutionized man's outlook on the world.

For philosophers, on the other hand, such a thoroughgoing complacency about one way of thinking and doing, such a complete allegiance to a single epistemology and ontology, carried the seeds of its own dark prospect. Lewis Mumford, to name just one of the intellectual giants of our age, tried desperately to stem the current. In an article, which surprisingly can be found reprinted in Gandhi Marg magazine, he noted with alarm: "We now have a scientific priesthoodelite is the current word for it-which regards its own authority as supreme and really looks forward to the time when nobody will be able to differ with its findings without running the risk of being confined for psychiatric observation. " Philosophers from other cultures were more concerned with the implications that devotion to a one-dimensional epistemology or criterion of knowledge entailed: That all methodologies, and the philosophies that sanctioned them, that did not exploit or ignored the scientific frame of reference and method, were beside the point, unreliable and ideulogical; they were today to be properly studied as matters of "historical" interest, as the curious contents of a collection in the museum of mental history.

Thus did we get up one morning to find' that the system of meanings that constitute the core of science, that peculiarly define the civilization of the West, had taken over control of the world of the mind.

Clifford Geertz, famous for his studies of Java, once condensed the way the Javanese absolutize their understanding of their world.

"In Java," he wrote, "the people quite flatly say, .'To be human is to be Javanese.' Small children, boors, simpletons, the insane, the flagrantly immoral, are said to be ndurung djawa, 'not yet Javanese.' A 'normal' adult capable of acting in terms of the highly elaborate system of etiquette, possessed of the delicate esthetic perceptions associated

with music, dance, drama and textile design, responsive to the subtle promptings of the divine residing in the stillnesses of each individual's inward-turning consciousness, is sampun djawa, 'already Javanese,' that is, already human."

Other fields, said the Javanese, other grasshoppers.

But the anthropologist is also a grasshopper. And thereby hangs a tale. The anthropologist rarely questioned the premises of his own culture: The very encounter with an alien community, living quite creatively within the bounds of its own meaning system, should at least have cautioned him to reconsider his own "field" as merely one among many, all more or less fertile to the imagination of man.

The French anthropologist, Claude LeviStrauss, indeed, was one of few who recognized that "Western Thought," far from being a lonely peak of human development, is troubled by problems not found in other systems of thought. In fact, there is a very characteristic, self-deprecating, Straussian statement in Tristes Tropiques, which revealingly says: "For what, after all, have I learnt from the masters I have listened to, the philosophers I have read, the societies I have investigated and that very Science in which the West takes a pride? Simply a fragmentary lesson or two which, if laid end to end, would reconstitute the meditations of Buddha at the foot of his tree."

Levi-Strauss, of course, must be read with care. No doubt, he pushed for the relativization of all forms of thought; but he held back science from that leveling, endowing it, like many of his colleagues, with a neutral structure, containing positive knowledge that is independent of culture, of ideology and of prejudice.

I would be the first to acknowledge that our anthropologists were indeed courageous and heroic men. They often had to struggle to live in the communities they studied.

Laboriously did they catalogue genealogies, objects, myths and vocabularies. But at the beginning and end of it all, they allowed the fact of their grasshopperhood to slip into the

A NOTE ON CARLOS CASTANEDA In 1968 the University of California Press published Carlos Castaneda's master's thesis in anthropology, The Lessons of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge. It immediately became a bestseller. In the next six years, Castaneda published three other anthropological studies-A Separate Reality in 1971, Journey to Ixtlan (his Ph.D. thesis) in 1972, and Tales of Power in 1974. They were also bestsellers.

What accounts for the popularity of these books? One answer, of course, is that their author created a revolution in anthropology by becoming completely a part of his subject. He was studying the sorcery of the Yaqui Indians who live in the southwestern United States and northwestern Mexico. He took notes on his strange experiences with a Yaqui sorcerer named Don Juan, the main source of his research over a period of 14 years. During this time, Castaneda argued constantly with the sorcerer and defended the Western view of scientific reality as being the only «rational" view of the world, the only «right" view.

Throughout thefour books, however, the reader watches the anthropologist slowly Jose his belief in the established Western idea of reality and gradually become a part of the sorcerer's «world." By the third book, he is Don Juan's «apprentice." By the end of the last book, Tales of Power, Castaneda has become afull-fledged Yaqui Indian sorcerer.

Although not all anthropologists approve of Castaneda's unconventional methods, his professors and colleagues at the University of California believe he has done «pioneer work."

He has also been praised by anthropologist Michael Harner of New York's New School for Social Research, one of the world's authorities on shamanism and sorcery.

Little is known of Castaneda's private life.

A Peruvian by birth, he emigrated to the U.S. in 1951 and served in the American Army before enrolling in the University of California to study anthropology. He scrupulously avoids journalists and photographers.

'He looked at me with calm and collected eyes. And then he began to talk. He said that I was pimping for someone else. That I was not fighting my own battles but th~battles of some unknown people.' realms of their unconsciousness. If they documented, faithfully, the ways of life of the alien community, they did it within a framework of mind that saw the community as existing at a level far below the stage on which they themselves, as members of Western culture, stood and lived.

I

n the yea< 1960, a young aothropology graduate student of the University of California, Los Angeles, could not indeed have been expected to behave otherwise.

That year, Carlos Castaneda traveled to ~he American Southwest on a trip to collect mformation on medicinal plants used by the Indians in the area. In the waiting room of a bus depot in Arizona, he found himself introduced to an aged Yaqui Indian. He wrote: "'I understand you know a great deal about plants, sir,' I said to the old Indian in front of me. A friend of mine had just put us into contact and left the room, and we had introduced ourselves to each other. " 'Did your friend tell you that?' he asked casually. " 'Yes, he did.' " 'I pick plants, or rather, they let me pick them,' he said softly.

"I asked him in very formal Spanish if he would allow me to question him. I said, 'Would the gentleman (caballero) permit me to ask some questions?' "'Caballero,' which is derived from the word 'caballo,' horse, originally meant horseman or a nobleman on horseback. "'I'm a horseman without a horse,' he said with a big smile and then he added, 'I've told you that my name is Juan Matus.' " Castaneda describes Juan Matus, or Don Juan, as being of medium height; his hair, white and short, grew a bit over his ears, accentuating the roundness of his head. He was dark; the deep wrinkles on his face gave him the appearance of age, yet his body seemed to be strong and fit. "I watched him for a moment. He moved around with nimbleness that I would have thought impossible for an old man.

"We shook hands and remained quiet for some time. I broke the silence and told him about my enterprise. I told him that I was looking for any kind of information on plants,

of the sky like a bomb. In it, Castaneda confesses great error in his interpretation of what had taken place during those 11 years. He had been preoccupied with plants, due to an interest in elucidating a hypothesis of his own. Don Juan had evidently been concerned about more important matters. " 'Why did you make me take those power plants so many times?' I asked.

"He laughed and mumbled very softly, , 'Cause you're dumb.'

"I heard him the first time, but I wanted to make sure and pretended I had not understood. " 'I beg your pardon?' I asked. "'You know what I said,' he replied and stood up."

There is a brief introduction to Journey to Ixtlan, where all these misconceptions are set right by Castaneda himself. If! were asked my advice concerning which¡ book the reader might take up first to enter most profitably the stupendous world of Don Juan, my spontaneous choice would be volume three. Those who are conversant with the earlier volumes will obviously notice that the events described in lxtlan do not start from where they left off in 1970,but begin all over agaIn from 1960, since The detailed account of those first four they are based on notes Castaneda had left out years of apprenticeship fills the pages of of the earlier volumes, since he had thought Castaneda's first volume, The Teachings of them unimportant in his single-minded attenDon Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge. I tion to the skewed idea that Don Juan was recall picking it up from one of Bombay's busy all those years teaching him the powerful dusty sidewalk bookstores, that innocent it secrets of plants.

Tales of Power (1974), the fourth volume, seemed right then. A year earlier, I had been given a book called The Natural Mind, written which ends with Castaneda leaping off the

by Andrew Weil, a Harvard medical man, to edge of the mesa, as a full-fledged warrior, inreview for the Hindustan Times, and Weil had to the unknown, is as terrifying and terrific, as grand and alarming as the third; perhaps, quoted a very strange-sounding paragraph from Castaneda's book, to support a thesis more so. Castaneda's consummate ability to of his. That quote stuck in my memory and transcribe the events taking place and their own internal logic, albeit in Don Juan's own was the reason why I bought the book.

In 1965, Castaneda unilaterally decided to words, contributes to making the books great terminate the apprenticeship. Intellectually literary productions. battered and perceptually shaken, he returned to ordinary life in Los Angeles.

Three years later, in 1968, he returned to Mexico to present Don Juan with a copy of The Teachings, that had just appeared in print. Castaneda is not able to explain how the apprenticeship got under way again. The second volume contains the details of this are 'orne who, readiogthi" will extension of apprenticeship, and bears the Ye rather tame title, A Separate Reality: Further look askance at the idea of a sorcerer's explaConversations With Don Juan. The events re- nation of the world. I might add that Castanlated therein stop on the 18th of October, eda's attitude at the inception of the apprentices,hipwas not the best of all possible ones.

1970. "'Well ... are we equals?' Don Juan asked.

Castaneda's third volume, Journey to " 'Of course we're equals,' I said.

Ixtlan, which came out in 1972, dropped out

especially peyote. I talked compulsively for a long time, and although I was almost totally ignorant on the subject, I said I knew a great deal about peyote. I thought that if I boasted about my knowledge he would become interested in talking to me, even suggesting that it might be to his advantage to talk to me. I avoided his eyes and we finished by standing, the two of us, in dead silence.

"Then he nodded slowly and peered at me.

His eyes seemed to shine with a light of their own. I avoided his gaze. I felt embarrassed. I had the certainty that at that moment he knew I was talking nonsense. " 'Come to my house sometime,' he finally said. His bus had come. He said good-bye and left the station."

Castaneda went to see Don Juan in Mexico a few months later, "not so much as a student of anthropology interested in medicinal plants, but as a person with an inexplicable curiosity." In 1961, a year after their first meeting, Don Juan told him that he was a brujo. The Spanish word brujo can be rendered in English as sorcerer, medicine man or curer.

From that point on, Castaneda became Don Juan's apprentice.

"I was, naturally, being condescending. I felt very warm toward him even though at times I did not know what to do with him; yet I still held in the back of my mind, although I would never voice it, the belief that I, being a university student, a man of the sophisticated Western world, was superior to an Indian. " 'No,' he said calmly, 'we are not.' " 'Why, certainly we are,' I protested. " 'No,' he said in a soft voice. 'We are not equals. I am a hunter and a warrior, and you are a pimp.'

"My mouth fell open. I could not believe that Don Juan had actually said that. I dropped my notebook and stared at him dumbfoundedly and then, of course, I became furious.

"He looked at me with calm and collected eyes. I avoided his gaze. And then he began to talk. He enunciated his words clearly. They poured out smoothly and deadly. He said that I was pimping for someone else. That I was not fighting my own battles but the battles of some unknown people. That I did not want to learn about plants or about hunting or about anything. And that his world of precise acts and feelings was infinitely more effective than the blundering idiocy I called 'my life.' " In no way then will this review of Castaneda's four volumes attempt to present a case for Don Juan. He can stand for himself. On the contrary, the difficulty is precisely whether we can stand up to him ourselves. After just a few years with him, Castaneda could write that "the loopholes in my reason were so gigantic that either I had to repair them or I had to dispose of my reason altogether." For a culture like India's, that once produced a Shankara, that experience should not be entirely incomprehensible.

There are two distinct issues that bind the events described in Castaneda's four volumes, and the rest of this article will expand on them. One of them concerns the question of identifiable, differing meanings systems that different cultures operate on their own terms, and that have a notable internal consistency and coherence. My introduction has probably already familiarized the reader with the various aspects of this question.

The second issue, which I have not found occasion to mention, discuss or develop thus far, and which of the two is by far the more important, is surprisingly expressed very clearly in Walter Goldschmidt's introduction to the first volume, The Teachings.

Goldschmidt writes: "The central importance of entering into worlds other than our own-and hence of anthropology itself-lies in the fact that the experience leads us to understand that our own world is also a cultural construct. By experiencing other worlds, then, we see our own for what it is and are thereby enabled also to see fleetingly what the real world, the one between

our own cultural construct and those other worlds, must in fact be like."

We shall leave this idea for later, and return immediately to the first issue.

"For the American Indian," writes Castaneda, "perhaps for thousands of years, the vague phenomenon we call sorcery has been a serious bona fide practice, comparable to that of our science." The basic premise of sorcery, as Don Juan presented it, is that "the world of everyday life is not real, or out there, as we believe it is. For a sorcerer, reality, or the world we all know, is only a description; a description that is pounded into every child from the moment it is born.

"Everyone that comes into contact with a child is a teacher who incessantly describes the world to him, until the moment when the child is capable of perceiving the world as it is described. According to Don Juan, we have no memory of that portentous moment, simply because none of us could possibly have had any point of reference to compare it to anything else. From that moment on, however, the child is a member. He knows the description of the world; and his membership becomes full-fledged, I suppose, when he is capable of making all the proper perceptual interpretations that, by conforming to that description, validate it.

"For Don Juan, then, the reality of our day-to-day life consists of an endless flow of perceptual interpretations which we, the individuals who share a specific membership, have learned to make in common."

These perceptual interpretations, of course, are rarely, if ever, put to question. "In fact, the reality of the world we know is so taken for granted that the basic premise of sorcery, that our reality is merely one of many descriptions, could hardly be taken as a serious proposition."

To disintegrate that assumption, Don Juan had to first teach Castaneda "to stop the world," a phrase that quite appropriately renders the meaning "of certain states of awareness in which the reality of everyday life is altered because the flow of interpretation, which ordinarily runs uninterruptedly, has been stopped by a set of circumstances alien to that flow. The set of circumstances alien to my normal flow of interpretations was the sorcery description of the world. Don Juan's precondition for stopping the world was that one had to be convinced; in other words, one had to learn the new description in a total sense, for the purpose of pitting it against the old one, and in that way break the dogmatic certainty, which we all share, that the validity of our perceptions is not to be questioned.

"In summing up I can say that when I began the apprenticeship, there was another reality, that is to say, there was a sorcery description of the world, which I did not know.

"The termination of the apprenticeship

meant that I had learned a new description of the world in a convincing manner and thus I had become capable of eliciting a new perception of the world, which matched its new description. In other words, I had gained membership. "

It all seems so remarkably clear to Castaneda right now; that clarity, however, could come only after nearly 11 years of dogged questionings, doubts, helplessness to understand, and the periodic stunning impact of Don Juan's knuckles raining down on his head. What saved him during his numerous moments of shock, daze, dizziness or sheer incomprehension was his almost pathological addiction to writing down everything that was being said, described or experienced.

hy should the world be only as you say it is? Who gave you the authority to say soT Don Juan demanded. " 'There is no proof that the world is other, wise,' I said. " But a few bizarre and astounding events later, Castaneda is already uncertain, and, more querulous. " 'I always think that I'm being tricked,' I said. 'That's the crux of my problem.' " 'You're right. You are being tricked,' he retorted with a disarming smile. 'That cannot be your problem. The real crux of the matter is that you feel that I am deliberately lying to you, am I correct?' " 'Yes. There is something in myself that doesn't let me believe that what's taking place is real.' " 'You're right again. Nothing of what is taking place is real.' " 'What do you mean by that, Don Juan?' "'Things are real only after one has learned to agree on their realness. What took place this evening, for instance, cannot possibly be real to you, because no one could agree with you about it.' " 'Do you mean that you didn't see what happened?' " 'Of course, I did. But I don't count. I am the one who's lying to you, remember?' " A little further down: " 'You're afraid of me?' he asked. " 'Not of you, but of what you represent.' "'I represent the warrior's freedom. Are you afraid of that?' "'No. But I'm afraid of the awesomeness of your knowledge. There is no solace for me, no haven to go to.' " 'You're again confusing issues. Solace,

'The central importance of entering into worlds other than our own-and hence of anthropology itselflies in the fact that the experience leads us to understand that our own world is also a cultural construct.'

haven, fear, all of them are moods that you have learned without ever questioning their value. As one can see, the black magicians have already engaged all your allegiance.' "'Who are the black magicians, Don Juan?' " 'Our fellow men are the black magicians.

And since you are with them, you too are a black magician. Think for a moment. Can you deviate from the path that they've lined up for you? No. Your thoughts and your actions are fixed forever in their terms. That is slavery.

I, on the other hand, brought you freedom. Freedom is expensive, but the price is not impossible. So fear your captors, your masters. D'on"t waste your time and your power fearing me.' " I am reminded, strangely, at this moment of the half-Indian, half-English satirist, Aubrey Menen, who once reported what he thought was the core of our own Indian view of man. In the epilogue of his Rama Retold, he wrote: "The Indian mind was formed by skeptical thinkers who, 25 centuries ago, decided that the answer to the question (who are you?) was that you are originally something utterly different from anything you are called, or anything you do. However, everything you do is added to what you originally are. After a lifetime of doing, you are not yourself at all; you have lost yourself. That is, you have lost your soul; that is, you are damned."

And later: "If I wished at this moment to do one good deed that was quite my own-that had not been taught me by schoolmasters, or parents, or priests, or books, and which did not spring from my social conscience, what would that good deed be?"

Menen put the answer down as a paradox: "They said that the only thing you could do was to go off to some place where you could be quite alone, sit down and then do nothing at all."

the Argentinian poet Jorge Luis Borges: " 'Sorcerers say that we are inside a bubble.

It is a bubble into which we are placed at the moment of our birth. At first the bubble is open, but then it begins to close until it has sealed us in. That bubble is our perception.

We live inside that bubble all our lives. And what we witness on its round walls is our own reflection.' " The late American indologist, Heinrich Zimmer, had a beast fable in his Philosophies of India that very subtly made a similar point.

There are many such stories in the general literature that constitutes Indian philosophy, but this one concerns a tiger cub.

"Its mother had died in giving it birth.

Big with young, she had been prowling for many days without discovering prey, when she had come upon this herd of ranging wild goats. The tigress was ravenous at the time, and this fact may account for the violence of her spring; but in any case, the strain of the leap brought on the birth throes, and from sheer exhaustion she expired. Then the goats, who had scattered, returned to the grazing ground and found the little tiger whimpering at its mother's side. They adopted the little creature out of maternal compassion, suckled it together with their own offspring, and watched over it fondly. The cub grew and their care was rewarded; for the little fellow learned the language of the goats, adapted his voice to their gentle way of bleating, and displayed as much devotion as any kid of the flock. At first he experienced some difficulty when he tried to nibble thin blades of grass with his pointed teeth, but somehow he managed. The vegetarian diet kept him very slim and imparted to his temperament a remarkable meekness."

The story is not ended, we shall continue it later, but I think the point has already been made. There is a Greek myth, also, fabricated

by Plato, that casts a similar light: the myth of the cave.

The cave is an underground one, and in it are prisoners chained in such a way that they are only able to see the wall at the far end of the cave. Behind them, at the entrance to the cave, a fire burns. Between the fire and the prisoners stands a low wall. Men pass along this wall, carrying various objects. All that the prisoners can see on the wall at the Thange on' ideaofthewodd,'con¡ far end of the cave before them are their own tinued Don Juan, 'is the crux of sorcery. The shadows and those of the objects carried past. world is such and such or so and so, only If these prisoners have never seen anything because we talk to ourselves about its being else, how can they believe that these shadows such and such or so and so.' " are in any way different from the things that And in a comment, so reminiscent of cast them?

e have wandered a little; but the sorcerer's conviction that the world is not as we see it, should not seem so strange as it might at first; Indian philosophers of old have a simile for a similar instruction: We often mistake a rope for a snake. And the scientist is not really so different when he disregards the chains of common sense in favor of abstracted, mathematical laws.

"Consider," wrote Benjamin Lee Whorff, "how the world appears to any man, however wise and experienced in human life, who has never heard one word of what science has discovered about the cosmos. To him the earth is flat; the sun and moon are shining objects of small size that pop up daily above an eastern rim, move through the upper air, and sink below a western edge; obviously they spend the night somewhere underground. . . . 'Solar system' has no meaning to him, and the concept of a law of gravitation is quite unintelligible-nay, even nonsensical.

For him bodies fall not because of a law of gravitation, but rather 'because there is nothing to hold them up' -i.e. because he cannot imagine their doing anything else."

In this light, it is thoroughly inappropriate to call a man like Aristotle, for example, a "scientist." Aristotle's attention was, more than any other philosopher, directed toward the world as we perceive it through our common sense. For him, then, it seemed quite natural and empirical to state that heavy bodies fall quickly, light bodies less quickly, and very light bodies do not fall, but ascend.

Indeed, common sense tells us that a stone falls fast, a feather slowly, and flames ascend.

Disregarding common sense came naturally only after Galileo, who took upon himself the risk of describing the world as we do not perceive it in common sense. Galileo constructed laws whose form had no direct relation with reality and which could not be confirmed immediately by the Aristotelian appeal to direct experience. Yet, Galileo's laws had a mathematical simplicity that commended and urged their acceptance. In creating a mathematical theory of matter, he "refuted" common sense.

Against Aristotle, and against common experience, Galileo argued that all bodies fall with the same speed. For a proof, he constructed the hypothesis of the behavior of objects in a vacuum. He himself did not have

the technical apparatus necessary to create a vacuum at that time. Torricelli did that later, and proved Galileo right.

So it was with inertia. The law of inertia states that a body upon which no forces are acting maintains its condition of rest or moves with a constant speed in a linear direction.

Now, no one had seen this; for the normal fact is that there are always some forces influencing a body. Galileo's formulation thus contradicted the traditional notion of causality, and this, inspite of the fact that it (the new law) could not be proved in any phenomenon operating within the observations available to common sense.

Albert Einstein would proceed in a similar fashion centuries later, when he would attempt to mathematize what it would be like to ride on a beam of light.

Thus, as the sorcerer's description of the world differs from that of the Mexican in general, and that of an Indian rishi is distinctive from the one of the Indian involved in the world, the scientist inspects nature more¡ critically, and theoretically, than the layman.

The mathematization of the world picture represents nature at its purest, in a Torricellian vacuum, where the interfering elements of the common world are kept at a safe distance. The laboratory¡ and scientific description excoriate and exclude history.

The crucial difference among the three is, finally, a quantitative one. There are fewer and fewer sorcerers every decade. Indian philosophers, in order to belong to the "international community," have sold their souls to concern themselves with problems that occupy their English colleagues at Oxford. The scientific description of the world is the most overwhelming today simply because of the sheer numbers of people involved in reinforcing its acceptance. In other words, more and more people are trained, in institutions with social sanction, to work within this public agreement of what knowledge sbould be all about. It is probable that all nonscientific descriptions of the world will succumb to the scientific one. We will then have arrived at the monotonization of the world picture. I find the prospect terrifying.

For, tbere is no inherent reason wby tbe scientific description sbould be considered superior to otbers. It can never be tbat science works: Tbe otbers do too, within the context of their own assumptions of meaning. The pages of Castaneda's volumes are solid testimony not so much to theory, as to successful practice. At the level of meaning-systems, what decides allegiance is not betterness, but indoctrination, for there is no independent standard to which they could all be compared for eventual judgment.

There is an old Indian story, reported by Geertz, that subtly sets out this limitation.

An Englishman, having been told that the world rested on a platform that rested on the back of an elephant that rested in turn on the back of a turtle, asked, what did the turtle rest on? Another turtle, was the reply. And that turtle?

"Ah, Sahib, after that it is turtles all the way down."

It was another of those mornings: Castaneda setting out from his hotel to meet Don Juan at a pre-appointed place, this time at the corner of the ticket office of an airline. An uncertain element threatened to disturb the pattern. "I had the nagging suspicion that a friend, who had always wanted me to introduce him to Don Juan, knew that I was going to meet him and might be following lue."

Don Juan stood at a magazine stand, on the other side of the street. The friend was already by a corner behind Castaneda as he tried to cross the street. "He smiled sheepishly and waved his head, as if telling me that he had been incapable of controlling himself. I dashed across the street without giving him time to catch up with me."

Don Juan seemed to have realized what was happening. He pointed to a street by the side of the airline office and both hurried down it. The friend was already crossing the boulevard and would join them any minute.

"I felt annoyed and could not think of anything myself, short of punching my friend in the nose. I must have sighed or exhaled at that very moment, because the next thing I felt was a sudden loss of air due to a formidable shove that Don Juan had given me, which sent me whirling through the door of the airline office. Propelled by his tremendous push I practically flew into the room. Don Juan had caught me so unprepared that my body had not offered any resistance; my fright merged with the actual jolt of his thrust. I automatically put my arms in front of me to protect my face. The force of Don Juan's shove had been so great that saliva flew out of my mouth and I experienced a mild vertigo as I stumbled inside the room. I nearly lost my balance and had to make a supreme effort not to fall down. I twirled around a couple of times; it seemed that the speed of my movements made the scene blurry. I vaguely noticed a crowd of customers conducting

Don Juan's concept of 'stopping the world,' stopping the internal dialogue we carryon within ourselves, 'is similar to the higher exercises of yoga, where the mind is emptied of all words and objects.' their business. I felt extremely embarrassed.

I knew that everyone was looking at me as I reeled across the room. The idea that I was making a fool out of myself was more than discomforting. A series of thoughts flashed through my mind. I had the certainty that I was going to fall on my face. Or I would bump into a customer, perhaps an old lady, who would be injured by the impact. Or worse yet, the glass door at the other end would be closed and I would smash against it.

"In a dazed state I reached the door to the Paseo de la Reforma. It was open and I stepped out. My preoccupation of the moment was that I had to keep cool, turn to my right and walk on the boulevard toward downtown as if nothing had happened. I was sure that Don Juan would join me and that perhaps my friend might have kept on walking along the diagonal street.

"I opened my eyes, or rather I focused them on the area in front of me. I had a long moment of numbness before I fully realized what had happened. I was not on the Paseo de la Reforma, as I should have been, but in the Lagunilla market one and a half miles away.

"I looked around in order to orient myself. I realized that I was actually standing very close to where I had met Don Juan on my first day in Mexico City. Perhaps I was even on the same spot. The stands that sold old coins were five feet away. I made a supreme effort to take hold of myself. Obviously I had to be experiencing a hallucination. It could not possibly be any other way. I quickly turned to go back through the door into the office, but behind me there was only a row of stands with secondhand books and magazines. Don Juan was standing next to me, to my right. He had an enormous smile on his face. " 'Now, now, little Carlos,' he said. 'Don't lose your marbles.'

"The next morning, on Thursday, I asked a friend of mine to walk with me from the door of the office where Don Juan had pushed me to the Lagunilla market. We took the most direct route. It took us 35 minutes.

Once we arrived there, I tried to orient myself. I failed. I walked into a clothing store at the very corner of the wide avenue where we were standing. "'Pardon me,' I said to a young woman who was gently cleaning a hat with a duster.

'Where are the stands of coins and secondhand books?' " 'We don't have any,' she said in a nasty tone. "'But I saw them, somewhere in this market, yesterday.'

"'No kidding,' she said and walked behind the counter.

"I ran after her and pleaded with her to tell me where they were. She looked me up and down. "'You couldn't have seen them yesterday,' she said. 'Those stands, are assembled only on Sunday, right here along this wall. We don't have them the rest of the week.' "'Only on Sunday?' I repeated mechanically. "'Yes. Only on Sunday. That's the way.

The rest of the week they would interfere with the traffic.'

"She pointed to the wide avenue filled with cars."

Stupendous acts like the one I've just presented fairly litter the volumes of Castaneda. They are not the result of hallucinations or hallucinogens. What makes them come across with the force of authenticity is their meticulous description. For the reader, the description is astounding, unbelievable and bizarre; his first natural reaction is to insist that what is taking place must all be a construction of Castaneda's imagination.

"All you can do is witness," comments Don Juan. "You're in-the miserable position of an infant who cannot return to the mother's womb, but neither can he run around and act.

All an infant can do is witness and listen to the stupendous tales of action being told to him. You are at that precise point now. You cannot go back to the womb of your old world, but you cannot act with power either.

For you there is only witnessing acts of power and listening to tales, tales of power."

e have begun the second part of this article in wonder. Perhaps, it would be easier to elucidate the fact of incredibility or unbelieving, if I took the reader back to the story of the tiger cub and the myth of the cave.

In Zimmer's account of the fable of the cub, the herd is one day attacked by an old male tiger: The goats all scatter, but the cub remains where he stood, without fear. Confounded, surprised, then suddenly self-conscious, he utters a forlorn bleat, then plucks a thin leaf of grass, and chews it while the tiger stares, unbelieving.

"Suddenly, the mighty intruder demanded:

'What are you doing here among the goats?

What are you chewing there?' The funny little creature bleated. The old one became really terrifying. He roared, 'Why do you make this silly sound?' and before the other could respond, seized him roughly by the scruff and shook him, as though to knock him back into his senses. The jungle tiger then carried the frightened cub to a nearby pond, where he set him down, compelling him to look into the mirror surface, which was illuminated by the moon. 'Now look at those two faces. Are they not alike? You have the pot-face of a tiger; it is like mine. Why do you fancy yourself to be a goat? Why do you bleat? Why do you nibble grass?'

"The old tiger then forces the cub to eat raw meat, which the little fellow naturally finds disgusting. Then he tastes blood and a new strength spreads through his body. He smacks his lips and licks his jowls.

"He rose and opened his mouth with a mighty yawn, just as though he were waking from a night of sleep-a night that had held him long under its spell, for years and years.

He then lets out a tremendous roar. " 'Now do you know what you really are?' says the old tiger, and to complete the initiation of his young disciple into the secret lore of his own true nature, adds: "'Come, we shall go now for a hunt together in the jungle.' " The cub, now a tiger, is precluded for ever from going back to the goats; the goats cannot comprehend his transformation, to their own detriment. The same idea comes through in the myth of Plato's cave.

One of the prisoners is released from the chains and brought into the light, not immediately, since the light would be too strong for him and he would see nothing. But once accustomed to the light, he consid~rs himself fortunate to have got to know the sun and the true world and feels sorry for his former companions still imprisoned. If, however, he were now to go back into the cave, he would not see so well as those who had stayed there and the others would mock him for spoiling his sight by leaving the cave and they would resist any attempts by him to release them.

For Don Juan, all descriptions are the shadows of objects on the wall of the cave. " 'Think of this. The world doesn't yield to us directly, the description of the world stands in between. So, properly speaking, we are always one step removed and our experience of the world is always a recollection of the experience. We are perennially recollecting the instant that just happened, just passed. We recollect, recollect, recollect.' "

It follows then, that even the sorcerer's view, as it is one description of the world among others, carries the same limitations.

Don Juan goes on to vindicate Goldschmidt, without having read him: " 'I gave you enough of the sorcerer's view without letting you get hooked by it. I said that only if one pits two views against each other can one weasel between them to arrive at the real world. I meant that one can arrive at the totality of oneself only when one fully understands that the world is merely a view, regardless of whether that view belongs to an ordinary man or to a sorcerer.' " And in Journey to lxtlan: " 'What was the thing that stopped in me?' " 'What stopped inside you yesterday was what people have been telling you the world is like. You see, people tell us from the time we are born that the world is such and such and so and so, and naturally we have no choice but to see the world the way people have been telling us it is. " 'Yesterday the world became as sorcerers tell you it is,' he went on. 'In that world coyotes talk and so do deer, as I once told you, and so do rattlesnakes and trees and all other living beings. But what I want you to learn is seeing. Perhaps you know now that seeing happens only when one sneaks between the worlds, the world of ordinary people and the world of sorcerers. You are now smack in the middle point between the two. Yesterday you believed the coyote talked to you. Any sorcerer who doesn't see would believe the same, but one who sees knows that to believe that is to be pinned down in the realm of sorcerers. By the same token, not to believe that coyotes talk is to be pinned down in the realm of ordinary men. " 'Here is where I varied from the tradition. Mter a lifelong struggle I know that what matters is not to learn a new description but to arrive at the totality of oneself. One should get to the nagual without maligning the tonal, and above all, without injuring one's body. "'The twilight is the crack between the worlds. It is the door to the unknown.' "

Te

a<ewo<dshm, like the tota!;ty of oneself, the tonal and the nagual, that I would hesitate to reduce to the simpler notions that are forced on a writer intent on brief explanations. So I shall not transcribe th~m. Yet, so near are these conceptions, structurally, to the Indian view that I might risk a comparison. The tonal comes closest to the meaning of the Sanskrit word, namarupa, and the nagual's to arupa. Don Juan even attempts

to describe the nagual through a number of pages of what it is not: neti, neti, not this, not that. Everything that Castaneda names, falls immediately within the circle of the tonal: It is not the nagual, precisely because it can be named. The nagual exists outside that circle.

Placing God, follows Shankara. " 'Is the nagual the Supreme Being, the Almighty, God?' I asked. "'No. God is also on the table. Let's say that God is the tablecloth.'

"He made a joking gesture of pulling the tablecloth in order to stack it up with the rest of the items he had put in front of me. " 'But, are you saying that God does not exist?' " 'No. I didn't say that. All I said was that the nagual was not God, because God is an item of our personal tonal and of the tonal of the times. The tonal is, as I've already said, everything we think the world is composed of, including God, of course. God has no more importance other than being a part of the tonal of our time.' "'In my understanding, Don Juan, God is everything. Aren't we talking about the same thing?' "'No. God is only everything you can think of, therefore, properly speaking, he is only another item on the island. God cannot be witnessed at will, he can only be talked about. The nagual, on the other hand, is at the service of the warrior. It can be witnessed, but it cannot be talked about.' " There are a number of techniques that Castaneda is taught that enable him to ride on the waves of the nagual, some of which come again very close to our own Indian techniques. One of them is giving up personal history, the disestablishment of the ego, in our terms.

"Using the patience I had, I explained to him that these were very serious questions and that it was very important for my work to fill out the forms. I tried to make him understand the idea of a genealogy and personal history. "'I don't have any personal history,' he said after a long pause. 'One day I found out that personal history was no longer necessary for me, and, like drinking, I dropped it.' " 'How can one drop one's personal history?' I asked in an argumentative mood. " 'One must first have the desire to drop it,' he said. 'And then one must proceed harmoniously to chop it off, little by little.' " 'Why should anyone have such a desire?'

I exclaimed.

"I had a terribly strong attachment to my personal history. My family roots were deep.

I honestly felt that without them my life had no continuity or purpose.

"Not having personal history was indeed an appealing concept, at least on the intellectual level; it gave me, however, a sense of loneliness which I found threatening ....

" 'How can I know who I am, when I am all this?' he said, sweeping the surroundings with a gesture of-his head. " 'Why shouldn't people know me? What's wrong with that?' "'What's wrong is that once they know you, you are an affair taken for granted and from that moment on you won't be able to break the tie of their thoughts. I personally like the ultimate freedom of being unknown.

No one knows me with steadfast certainty, the way people know you, for instance.' " 'But that would be lying.' " 'I'm not concerned with lies or truths,' he said severely. 'Lies are lies only if you have personal history. " 'When one does not have personal history,' he explained, 'nothing that one says can be taken for a lie. Your trouble is that you have to explain everything to everybody, compulsively, and at the same time, you want to keep the freshness, the newness of what you do. Well, since you can't be excited after explaining everything you've done, you lie in order to keep on going.' " Don Juan demands that Castaneda act without hope of reward, something that comes through the Gita; Castaneda is also made to use psychotropic plants, in order to enable him to dismantle his normal modes of perception; later, the plants are dropped entirely, for whatever Castaneda must now achieve, should come through sheer will and intelligence; this too is in line with Patanjali's injunctions. Even stopping the world, the internal dialogue which we carryon within ourselves to reinforce the security of our world, is somewhat similar to the higher exercises of yoga, where the mind is emptied of all words and objects. When that happens, the ordinary world collapses.

However, let the reader be kind here, and not interpret these comparisons as identifying the two sorts of techniques, Mexican and Indian. Without that kindness, he might indeed be capable of foolishness. My task has merely been to exploit the concepts of our culture to make those of another intelligible; a structural comparison is useful for such a purpose.

Once the warrior has been engulfed by the nagual, notes Don Juan, he is free. The world becomes false; the people he will meet on his journey to Ixtlan will be false. Here, even my structural comparison breaks down and becomes inefficient and senseless. " 'The life of a warrior cannot possibly be cold and lonely and without feelings,' Don Genaro [a sorcerer friend of Don Juan) said, 'because it is based on his affection, his devotion, his dedication to his beloved. And who you may ask, is his beloved? I will show you.'

"Don Genaro stood up and walked slowly to a perfectly flat area right in front of us, 10 or 12 feet away. He made a strange gesture there. He moved his hands as if he were

which was not altogether miserable, but rather hot and dull and uncomfortable. They sweated and fussed a great deal. They didn't know where to go, or what to do. That afternoon left them only with the memory of petty annoyances and tedium, and then suddenly it was over; it was already night.'''

sweeping dust from his chest and stomach.

Then an odd thing happened. A flash of an almost imperceptible light went through him; it came from the ground and seemed to kindle his entire body. He did a sort of backward pirouette, a backward dive more properly speaking, and landed on his chest and arms.

His movement had been executed with such precision and skill that he seemed to be a weightless being, a wormlike creature that had turned on itself. When he was on the ground he performed a series of unearthly movements. He glided just a few inches above the ground, or rolled on it as if he were lying on ball bearings; or he swam on it describing circles and turning with the swiftness and agility of an eel swimming in the ocean.

"My eyes began to cross at one moment and then without any transition I was watching a ball of luminosity sliding back and forth on something that appeared to be the floor of an ice-skating rink with a thousand lights shining on it. The sight was sublime.

Then the ball of fire came to rest and stayed motionless.

"A voice shook me and dispelled my attention. Don Juan's voice was very clear. It

seemed to trigger something in me and I began to write. "'Gen:tro's love is the world,' he said.

'He was just now embracing this enormous earth but since he's so little all he can do is swim in it. But the earth knows that Genaro loves it and it bestows on him its care. That's why Genaro's life is filled to the brim and his state, wherever he'l! be, will be plentiful.

Genaro roams on the paths of his love and, wherever he is, he is complete.' " It was now the edge of day.

"The silence around us was frightening. I heard the distant barking of a lone dog. " 'Listen to that barking,' Don Juan went on. 'That barking is the saddest thing one can hear. It comes from a house in that valley toward the south. A man is shouting through his dog, since they are companion slaves for life, his sadness, his boredom. He's begging his death to come and release him from the dull and dreary chains of his life.' "'That barking, and the loneliness it creates, speaks of the feelings of men,' he went on. 'Men for whom an entire life was like one Sunday afternoon, an afternoon

Charles Citrine, the narrator in Saul Bellow's new novel, Humboldt's Gift, would thoroughly agree. I see him consulting his "boredom notes."

"In myself I could observe the following sources of boredom: "The lack of a personal connection with the external world. Earlier I noted that when I was riding through France in a train last spring I looked out of the window and thought that the veil of maya was wearing thin. And why was this? I wasn't seeing what was there but only what everyone sees under a common directive. By this is implied that our world view has used up nature. The rule of this view is that I, a subject, see the phenomena, the world of objects. They, however, are not necessarily in themselves objects as modern rationality defines objects.

For in spirit, says Steiner, a man can step out of himself and let things speak to him about themselves, to speak about what has meaning not for him alone but also for them. Thus the sun the moon the stars will speak to nonastronomers in spite of their ignorance of science. In fact it's high time that this happened. Ignorance of science should not keep one imprisoned in the lowest and weariest sector of being, prohibited from entering into independent relations with the creation as a whole. The educated speak of the disenchanted (a boring) world. But it is not the world, it is my own head that is disenchanted. The 0 world cannot be disenchanted."

About the Author: Claude Alvares did his graduate and postgraduate studies in philosophy and psychology at the University of Bombay andfor a year taught scientific method and Western philosophy at St. Xavier's College in Bombay. He is now a research fellow in the Department of Philosophy and Social Sciences at the Technological University in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, where he is working for a Ph.D. His doctoral dissertation will be on "The History of Technology in China,India and the West From 1500 to thePresent." Alvares has written articles and book reviews for the Times of India, Quest and Debonair.

SPAN felt it was necessary that the four books of Castaneda be reviewed from an Indian point of view because many critics in the U.S. have pointed out the similarity between the teachings of Don Juan and the wisdom of the Upanishadic rishis. As is evident from his article, reviewer Alvares brings to his task a vast erudition in Indian and Western philosophy, religion, anthropology and literature.

~REALISTIC PROGRAM OF NORTH-SOUTH COLLABORATION' Paul Boeker, leader of the U.S. delegation to the UNCTAD IV conference, was interviewed recently by SPAN's economic correspondent in Washington, John Harter. Boeker feels the conference had a 'relatively successful outcome' and produced 'some very real achievements.'

HARTER: How would you cQmpare the outcome of UNCT AD IV with the results of the three preceding UNCTAD conferences of 1964, 1968 and 1972?

BOEKER: The results of UNCTAD IV reflected a much broader political consensus than did the earlier meetings-it was able to produce a tangible and realistic program of North-South collaboration.

It .was also different from the earlier UNCTAD conferences in its heavy concentration in two specific areas: commodities and technology transfer.

It was the choice and the priority of the developing countries that basically determined the agenda at Nairobi, and I think this concentration on a narrower range of issues helped account for the very real achievements at the conference.

I think some of the difficultiesin reaching conclusions in UNCTAD conferences can be reduced by giving UNCT AD a more focused and better concentrated role, so that it does not merely try to duplicate work done in other organizations. The commodity and technology areas are appropriate for UNCTAD to focus on more intensely in the future, because it can make contributions here that do not fall within the mandate of other organizations.

covering liberalization of market access for commodity exports of developing countries, improved financing to support diversification and investments in the production of raw materials in developing countries, and very significant improvements in the compensatory financing mechanism of the International Monetary Fund to help stabilize export earnings of developing country commodity producers. We certainly have a more open attitude toward the negotiation of commodity agreements HARTER: You emphasize the commodity wherever these can be worked out in comarea-but how much movement has there petent forums.

Altogether, this is a very comprehensive been here, in practical terms? Has the U.S. position on commodities really evolved and forthcoming approach on the part of significantly? the United States to the commodity probBOEKER: Yes, I think the U.S. position lems of the developing countries. This on commodities has definitely evolved. evolution in the U.S. commodity policy About a year ago, Secretary of State has been motivated by a new over-all Kissinger enunciated a new tone and direc- approach to the economic problems of tion in U.S. commodity policy in a speech developing countries, reflecting our deterat Kansas City [see August 1975 SPAN]. mination to be responsive to their needs.

We now have a very forward-looking attitude toward international commodity nego- HARTER: Will there be further evolution tiations, and we favor a broad range of as (T result of the new UNCTAD resolution on commodities? actions to improve commodity trade-

BOEKER: Well, we hope the export earn-

ings of developing countries from their commodities will improve as a consequence of favorable developments in the interna-¡ tional economy over the coming years. I think the prospects for this are very. good, as economic recovery gains strength in all the major industrial country markets-both because the increased demand should bring significant increases in volume, and because this should also bring higher prices.

In addition, there should be a twofold contribution directly attributable to UNCTAD IV. First, the resolution on commodities set up an ambitious and full schedule of international commodity discussions to take place over the next two years-discussions in which consumers and producers of individual commodities are committed to see how far they can go in developing new and mutually beneficial arrangements, possibly including commodity agreements. That schedule of consultations will begin in September.

And second, the resolution set in proc;ess a means of giving international consideration to buffer stock financing mechanisms, including the uNCTAD proposal to establish a Common Fund for this purpose.

Apparently a dispute over the Common Fund was a principal sticking point at Nairobi. Could you explain what was involved here-and what is the present U.S. position on this?

BOEKER: There are two major points here.

First, the developing countries sought to reach firm agreement at the conference that new mechanisms to finance buffer stocks should be established immediately-in advance of any actual determination that actual buffer stocks should be established. .

Most of the industrial countries argued that this was not a logical sequence, and that the international community ought to go through a series of commodity discusHARTER:

sions first, to examine whether in fact new buffer stocks will be created, and if so, what financing problems would be involved.

At that point, countries could consider whether it would be necessary to establish a new financing mechanism to meet the financial requirements of new buffer stocks.

The second disagreement concerned the very strong view of the developing countries that the Common Fund they proposed was clearly the kind of mechanism that is needed to finance buffer stocks. Most of the. industrial countries, while wiIIing to consider the possibility of establishing such a Common Fund, took the position that there are other means of financing buffer stocks when it can be shown that these would be useful, either as part of individual commodity agreements, or through other means.

They believed that new financing mechanisms for this purpose should be open to consideration of various alternatives.

These two differences of view were resolved in the resolution which reflected agreement that consideration of new buffer stock financing mechanisms and the program of individual commodity consultations would take place simultaneously, and that priority would be given to the proposal to establish a Common Fund, without conceding at this stage the necessity to establish it, and without excluding consideration of alternatives as well.

HARTER: The resolution calls for a "negoAiation conference" to take place in the spring of 1977 to consider the Common Fund proposal-assuming a favorable outcome to preparatory meetings that will take place this fall. Bu~ do you think the individual commodity consultations will. bring about a sufficient clarification of the need for buffer stocks by that time?

BOEKER: We think not-and that was one of our basic difficulties with the sequence set up at the conference. But in a spirit of compromise, we agreed to go through these two processes in parallel. We think it will be very difficutt to give objective consideration to the objectives, financial dimensions, and feasibility of the Common Fund proposal pending an authentic determination of precisely what buffer stocks are needed and how large they need to be in some future year. But the resolution we agreed to represented the best bridge we could find across the very fundamental difference here between the positions of the developing and industrial countries.

For our part, we will go into this process of preparatory discussions on the Common

Fund with the best effort we can make, ready to reach whatever judgments we can on all of these questions.

HARTER: There seemed to be a lack of enthusiasm at Nairobifor the U.S. proposal to establish a new International Resources Bank. What was the problem, and what will happen to this proposal?

BOEKER: The proposal of Secretary Kissinger to establish an International Resources Bank received a very favorable reaction from all of the industrial countries, and from a number of developing countries.

The basic intent was to provide a new international institution with significant additional resources over and beyond what is now available for development assistance for the explicit purpose of facilitating the development of natural resource projects in developing countries.

The basic vehicle would be a very broad guarantee authority, with the objective of neutralizing noncommercial risks involved in such investments-which can sometime"s be very large and very risky. These risks in fact prejudice the present pattern of such investments against the developing countries and in favor of development of less abundant resources in industrial countries.

For example, some of the investment money now going into resource projects in the United States, Canada, South Africa, and other developed countries would yield greater returns if it went into the higher quality potential projects in some developing countries. But uncertainties and political risks sometimes deter such investment.

This could be countered-and the pattern of investment altered in favor of the developing countries-by such an institution as we have proposed.

Since we are convinced this proposal has considerable merit, we are pursuing it in other appropriate forums.

UNCT AD IV did not endorse the proposal for a number of reasons, including the apparent reluctance of some developing countries to take a position on its merits at that time. An overwhelming number of developing countries abstained or were absent when the vote to study the proposal was taken. I don't think these countries were opposed-they merely wanted to know a great deal more about the proposal.

They want to consider it more thoroughly, and they want to have some input into it themselves.

This is our wish as well. And, in fact, one reason we did not try to present a totally elaborated blueprint for such an

institution at Nairobi was our view that the basic concept should be filled out on the basis of further discussions between iudustrial and developing countries.

HARTER: Are you saying there is considerablejlexibility in the U.S. view regarding how the bank would be developed-its scope and method¡of operation, for example?

BOEKER: Yes, there is a great deal of flexibility in our view on all of these questions. Our basic concept is that a new vehicle is needed to facilitate the financing of large-scale resource development in the developing countries. We believe a large variety of arrangements is possible between governments, private investors, and other investors-on a direct or portfolio basis or otherwise.

In other words, we would like to see a very flexible instrument that would not be tied to .any particular mode of ownership or investment structure, but one that would stimulate broad forms of cooperation such as management contracts, technology transfer, or loans. We think it should not be limited to traditional forms of direct investment, and we think that within our broad concept there will be arrangements that the developing countries can and wiII support. We assume the developing countries will have a fundamental role in designing and¡ managing the institution.

HARTER: You anticipate that investments under the aegis of this bank might differ significantly from the past operations of multinational corporations, for example?

BOEKER: One of our presumptions in putting this proposal forward was that the classic form of heavy direct investment by foreign companies based in the developed countries-through a wholly-owned subsidiary in the developing countries benefiting from very extensive concession arrangements granted by host governments-is no longer fully compatible with the aspirations of the developing countries. These countries are now seeking capital, management, and technology on some other basis. But still the larger economic enterprises of the industrial countries have the resources that the developing countries need.

So we believe new structures and new modes of operation could be helpful-if they are both consistent with the new aspirations of the developing countries and sufficientlyattractive to the foreign interests to encourage them to provide the capital, the management, the technology, and the marketing skiIIs that must be mobilized to

develop the natural resources.

That would be the mission of the bank, and we believe once the developing countries examine this carefully, they will find that such a mission is very much in their own interest.

HARTER: You said that in addition to progress in the commodity area, the greatest success of UNCT AD IV lay in its accomplishments regarding technology transfer. What was accomplished here?

BOEKER: I think the UNCT AD IV reso-

lution on the strengthening of the technological capacity of developing countrieswhich incorporated some of the suggestions from Secretary Kissinger's May 6 statement-was a fundamental achievement. In this resolution, for the first time, ·the international community agreed to a very comprehensive approach to actions the developing countries can take, with the assistance of the industrial countries and private groups, to attract and use imported technology-and eventually to fabricate the kinds of technology that will be particularly suited to their needs.

There were also two other resolutions dealing with technology transfer: One should over time lead to improvements in the availability of patents and copyright~ to the developing countries; and the other set in process very active negotiations on the text of an international code to address

the requirements and bases for facilitating technological transfer. This code would be quite separate from other codes under consideration in the United Nations, OECD [Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development], and elsewhere that would apply more to the operations of multinational corporations.

HARTER: In addition to the successes you mentioned in the commodity and technology areas, could you identify some of the other accomplishments of UNCT AD IV? BOEKER: Although the most significant

results were achieved in those two areas, negotiating groups also developed consensus resolutions in the areas of developing country indebtedness, international trade policy, the problems of the least developed and poorest of the developing countries, the institutional role of UNCT AD itself, and the difficult field of cooperation between developing countries and the socialist countries of Eastern Europe.

HARTER: Now that UNCT AD IV is over, and we have all these resolutions, where do we go from here?

BOEKER: Well, to begin with, the four

new commissions on development, raw materials, finance, and energy will take these matters up to see what can be done to insure action along the lines envisaged in the UNCTAD resolutions. Other inter-

GNE

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national institutions will also be affectedthe World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, for example-each with a role to play in following up on the cooperative spirit and general direCtions pointed to at the Nairobi conference.

I think the Tokyo Round of trade negotiations under way under the aegis of GATT [the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade] in Geneva will also be encouraged to direct particular attention to the trade and development problems of the developing countries. And I think the relatively successful outcome of UNCTAD IV will have a generally favorable impact on the North-South dialogue in the United Nations and elsewhere.

The conference involved a difficult negotiating process, in part because of the diversity and complexity of the problems we dealt with and in part because of the diversity and complexity of UNCTAD as an organization. But the outcome was one of consensus, reflected in more than a dozen resolutions on major topics of interest to industrial and developing countries. There are significant constructive elements in all of these resolutions, and programs of work were initiated that will advance the process of development cooperation. That was the mission of the conference, and it was quite successful.

(See "UNCTAD IV in Perspective" on page 28 of this issue.)

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both dazzles and frightens people of other nations. Most Americans show a self-confidence which to others often appears to be mere swagger, but which is the characteristic of a country that never had either a formal aristocracy or a peasantry.

We tend to think of freedom as a positive and unalloyed good.

We speak of "enjoying" freedom. Yet we fail to understand that freedom is not only a blessing but a burden. It is sometimes dizzying to contemplate how much freedom we Americans have undertaken to bear.路 In politics, in government, in business but also in education and in our private lives, we place immense responsibility on the individual. It can be argued that we bear freedom for much of the rest of the world-not only in the sense of material and military support for the cause of freedom as the West understands it, but in the sense of experimenting with freedom in a kind of vast social laboratory.

Our experiments are not often appreciated by the rest of the world, nor are the.y necessarily comforting even to ourselves. We have broken or bent the traditional framework of ~ rules: in religion, in family, in sex, in every kind of behavior. Yet we are surprised when the result is both public and personal disorder. We have not grasped the cost accounting of freedom. The great source of our current baffiement is that we somehow expect a wildly free society to have the stability of a tradition-guided society. We somehow believe that we can simultaneously have, to the fullest, various kinds of freedom: freedom from discipline, but also freedom from crime; freedom from community constraints, but also freedom from smog; freedom from economic controls, but also freedom from the inevitable ups and downs of a largely unhampered economy.

Both American conservatives and liberals are embodiments of this paradox. Liberals are forever asking state intervention in the economy for the sake of social justice, while insisting on hands-off in the private area of morals. Conservatives take the opposite view. They demand self-determination in politics, but t\

suspect self-determination in morals. They demand laissez-faire in business, but hate laissez-faire in behavior. In theory, there is no contradiction between these positions. For freedom to be workable as a political and social sy~tem, strong inner controls, a powerful moral compass and sense of values, are needed. In practice,路 the contradiction is vast. The compass is increasingly hard to read, the values hard to find in a frantically open, mobile, fractioned society. Thus a troubling, paradoxical question: Does freedom destroy the inner disciplines that alone make freedom possible?

It is an ancient question, and the way America struggles with it-fitfully, painfully, earnestly, in millions of minds and thousands of communities-is deeply moving. It is the most important struggle going on in the U.S., and its outcome is far from assured. The people willing to undertake this struggle, or even capable of understanding it, are in a clear minority in today's world. Almost everywhere we see arising a new political feudalism that once again promises a fixed society, an order in which everyone is taken care of-the only price being the loss of freedom.

So one must love America, most of all and most deeply for its constant, difficult, confused, gallant and never finished struggle to路 make freedom possible.

One loves America for its accomplishments as well as for its unfinished business-and especially for its knowledge that its business is indeed unfinished. One should never love America uncritically, because it is not worthy of America to be accepted uncritically; the insistence on improving the U.S. is perhaps the deepest gift of love. One ultimately loves America not for what it is, or what it does, but for what it promises. True, we know that every national promise sooner or later fades and that fate cannot be forever dominated or Qutmaneuvered. But we must deeply believe, and we must prove, that after 200 years the American promise is still only in路 its beginning.

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TOURING AMERICA

Atlanta The birthplace of Coca Cola, Gone With the Wind and Martin Luther King, Atlanta is a city of more than half a million people. capital of the State of Georgia, and pacesetter for the "New South." There is still a lot of "0ld South" charm-gracious mansions and picturesque streets. But skyscrapers tower over modern plazas, factories turn out everything from pencils to chemicals to aircraft, and there is a cultural life-music, art, dance, drama-not rivaled by any southern city in the U.S. except New Orleans. Heart of the new Atlanta is the S200 million Peachtree Complex (right); its buildings include the dazzling Hyatt Regency Hotel designed by John Portman (see photo of lobby on back cover). And the spirit of new Atlanta, a community with an uncommon pride in itself, is summed up by a slogan coined by the city's leading newspaper: "Heaven is all right, but it's not Atlanta."

Top right: Modern sculpture adorns Atlanta's Peachtree Center complex, which includes a trade sholl' /IIart and a 2.000-seat theater. A 70-story hotel is coming up fast.

Right: Entertainers at Six Flags Over Georgia, a 276-acre amusement park. Above: A reporter interviews Atlanta artist Floyd Colman. Top: Martin Luther King's grave.