The White Conscience: By Frank H. Tucker. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1968. 353 pp.

Frank H. Tucker, a specialist in Russian and Far Eastern History at Colorado College, has presented a valuable summary of the white man's rapacious imperialism, greedy capitalistic exploitation, and militant self-serving nationalism during the past four hundred years. The reader of this book will be struck by the ugliness of

actions committed by all the major white Western powers, acting almost in concert, against the victimized Africans, Asians, American Indians, and Jews. Although it is clear that Western people have denied or minimized the significance of any such thing as a collective sense of guilt, Tucker feels that vigorous efforts must be made to confront the West with its misdeeds in order to mobilize conscious awareness and conscience, and to check the spread of such dehumanizing aggressiveness before it captures the newly developing Asian and African people.

It is in the attempt to explain and explore the underlying causes of such collective hostility that the book is less rewarding. The psychology of Freud (by mentioning and giving examples of return of the repressed, compartmentalization of guilt, the narcissism of minor differences, for example) and of Jung (collective unconscious, collective guilt) are invoked to explain the fact that much of this evil was done in the name of God and goodness, to spread the Gospel, to save the infidel heathen, to spread and disseminate the blessings of modern science and technology. Moreover, the Protestant Reformation as well as the Marxist Socialist influences failed utterly to reverse or moderate this degrading and expansionist Messianism. We are left with the primarily Jungian view that modern man, ever since the scientific and industrial revolution, has been overcome by an extroverted or outer-oriented reality at the expense of an impoverishment of his inner reality. May heaven help us if we have only this bit of tired wisdom as protection.