literacy and lineality to many oral and backward tribes. Even today the mere existence of a literate and industrial West appears quite naturally as dire aggression to nonliterate societies; just as the mere existence of the atom bomb appears as a state of universal aggression to industrial and mechanized societies. On the one hand, a new weapon or technology looms as a threat to all who lack it. On the other hand, when everybody has the same technological aids, there begins the competitive fury of the homogenized and the egalitarian pattern against which the strategy of social class and caste has often been used in the past. For caste and class are techniques of social slow-down that tend to create the stasis of tribal societies. Today we appear to be poised between two ages --one of detribalization and one of retribalization. Between the acting of a dreadful thing, And the first motion, all the interim is Like a Phantasma, or a hideous Dream: The genius and the mortal instruments Are then in council; and the state of man, Like to a little Kingdom, suffers then The nature of an insurrection. (Julius Caesar, Brutus II, i) If mechanical technology as extension of parts of the human body had exerted a fragmenting force, psychically and socially, this fact appears nowhere more vividly than in mechanical weaponry. With the extension of the central nervous system by electric technology, even weaponry makes more vivid the fact of the unity of the human family. The very inclusiveness of information as a weapon becomes a daily reminder that politics and history must be recast in the form of "the concretization of numan fraternity." This dilemma of weaponry appears very clearly to Leslie