The ’60s and ’70s were a time of great optimism, but by the 1980s, the “energy crisis”, the danger of monopolistic economies and life in the umbra of the threat of nuclear war were having marked effect on the global psyche. As the world slid into the darkness of uncertainty and pessimism, my ethos and philosophy on life, however, was still optimistic and based on high principles, from which I never waivered. Believing in a better future and still passionate enough to do it, I did what I could to encourage the same level of energy and optimism in others. Education is key and I took whatever opportunity I could to give people the knowledge they needed to improve their lives and that of others in a world that really did need saving. The Cold War subsided, the wall came down and the future was “open” again, and for more people, with affirmative action policies having ensured it. Rights for women were taking hold, Obama was elected and environmental awareness was gaining respectability. But the far-right backlash was lurking in the shadows and is now again regaining strength. The players may be different, but the game is the same. We’re now threatened by the same forces that were holding back all progress in the 1980s and the same is needed now as then to defeat it.

In February, 1988, I wrote to a friend of concerns I had as to emerging attitudes that threatened egalitarian ideals and independence of thought. I said I believed that all the more knowledge needed to be generated in order to enlighten the vacuum of ignorance which was becoming quickly filled with superstition. Split infinitive aside (I was being poetic), I still say the same, as emphatically, against the rise of ignorance and anti-science, again threatening the planet and humanity. Back then, it was an inane “US v USSR/USSR v US” mentality and environmental destruction that threatened the planet. Sinister warmongers, exploiting religious fundamentalism and superstition to drive end-of-days scenarios, had succeeded only in creating mass hysteria, a collective psyche living under a belief of inevitable nuclear destruction. The ideology of “Armageddon” in our time, as one President put it, had to be fought with knowledge and the undoing of religious extremism and superstition, so people could take control of the future and change it, instead of slavishly just allowing it to happen by believing there was no other way. Simultaneously, the very material, existential threat of environmental destruction was going unchecked, as climate and environmental science were under attack from both those with commercial and political interests in undermining it and those proliferating anti-science ideologies, claiming that scientists were just “educated barbarians”, who did nothing but make nuclear bombs. Factionalism between the sciences and the arts was creating a divide as ridiculous as material extension of the idea that anyone has either a “left” or “right” brain. Here’s some news – every individual has both a “left” and a “right” brain and, equally, society needs both for survival. The truly wonderful and sincere peace movement of the ’60s had given way to “normal”, curious people seeking meaning and purpose in life by delving into a variety of cults with conflicting doctrines, eagerly exploited by those with more sinister motives, not keen for these dives into alternative cultures to be too deep. Thus emerged pretentious, privileged “white person’s” cheap, dehumanising, superficial, stick-figure commercialisations of “Eastern” philosophies, all thrown under one roof in a western/non-western divide, as though all “non-western” people “look alike”. These movements, driven not by genuine interest in religion or philosophy, but more a quest for power than a quest for knowledge, led to inane absurdities, such as pretend “Buddhists” doing occult astrology or thinking it ok to kill “non-white” people, concepts antithetical to Buddhism and so much for embracement of “Asian” cultures. Supposed “nature-lovers” and “holistic-healers” were slaughtering rhinos and tigers, solely for their horns and teeth, as “medicine”, at once proving their “environmental” aim was a sham. Fraudsters claiming to have superior, supernatural powers were “bringing people together” with their dead father, mother, children or siblings, by convincing people that their relationship with them was stronger than theirs. Add “Christian” European occult charlatan, Nostradamus, to the supposedly “Eastern” mix and the result was a perfect storm of anti-science, pseudo-science and pseudo-philosophy driving the world to moral chaos and environmental destruction, suiting right-wing fundamentalist false Christians exploiting incarnation of “good and evil” as an ethical existential threat. Buddhism and Christianity in their truest form provide fine bases for ethics and I’m all for true “children of the forest”, if their aim really is just to be at one with nature. They can dance naked in the forest to their heart’s content as far as I’m concerned, as long as they’re not harming anyone. But that the interest of certain movements was superficial and more motivated by racism and interests other than recognition of unity of people is manifest in the current denigration of DEI policy as “wokeism”.

Science certainly is not the answer to everything and I’d rather break bread with a forest child or Bible basher with good principles than a scientist without ethics, who regards killing as a means to an end or plans to trap people into living under the dictates of robo-tech, which has as much relevance to science as word processing has to literature. But, with the world being railroaded toward destruction, it was important that other visions of the future were made known to combat the sensationalistic, end-of-days scenarios being forced into people’s perceptions and leading the march to inevitable doom, not as genuine foresight or scholarly interpretation of religious text, but as self-fulfilling prophecy, emanating from artificial, ill-motivated post-modernist nonsense, putting the horse well and truly before the cart, on a very wrong road. People needed the confidence to think for themselves, reason above the political propaganda being inculcated into them and question bad leadership as a basic democratic right. The dismantling of the Cold War brought great optimism and within less than a generation, the sense of inevitable doom that had over-shadowed the world for decades was only a memory in those who had been there at the time.

A few decades later, however, we now face the same dangers – extremist religious fundamentalism and superstition again driving world affairs with forever wars and the environment in more danger than ever as true knowledge is rendered invisible within a morass of unthinking and irresponsible ignorance. The deceitful hypocrisy of anti-science ideology became brazenly evident in leading “esoteric” magazines bearing far-right QAnon ads supporting Trump’s election, along with anti-climate science and anti-vaccine articles and dangerous nonsense under guise of “natural healing”.

As I also said back in the ’80s, it’s important to reserve subjective perceptions for aesthetics only and stick to knowledge for truth, given the fascist dangers inherent in that situation ever becoming the reverse. If one madman’s truth becomes the perception of all, aided by superstition, nationalistic jingoism and lack of reason, as has happened on a few notable occasions in history, if the social and economic order so allows it, the results can be catastrophic in a system supposedly set up to unite all to one purpose, which can all too easily be used to implement the purpose of one. Against a brief time of hope, here we are again, as everything that was good about western democracy and international humanitarian law is now being trampled by a powerful few. The current Trump administration is the realisation of the nightmare I warned of in the 1980s – arrogant American colonialism replacing the British and European colonialism of the past, with the same MO of commercial and military force, upheld by an undercurrent of “white” supremacism now driving the reversal of DEI policies and militaristic expansion, an inevitability of the imposition of “superior v inferior” cultural perspectives and belief in the right to dominate. The invasion of Iraq was an overture to the catastrophe right now being played out in the Middle East, as greed, cynically fuelled by those exploiting ignorance, religious fundamentalism, racism and fear, now again has a framework within which to do its worst. As self-appointed “defenders of Western civilisation” define and market “civilisation” as a realm of “righteous” violence, within which mass slaughter of innocents is embraced as a “higher virtue”, and false “Christians” do unto others worse than is done to them, true civilisation and virtue are lost, along with any credibility that the “West” can lead the word into the future. Unfortunately, the far-right tide has gained added momentum with the emergence of a new breed of science advocates, even more dangerously giving white-supremacist ideologies feigned respectability of science within, mostly political, nonsense no respectable publisher would touch. Circumventing genuine peer review, on their own platforms, they self-proclaim and aggrandise as ‘superior thinking’, pseudo-scientific anti-DEI/BLM rubbish that, in reality, is no more scientific than an average palm-reading or MAGA battle cry. Not only do they fail to genuinely educate the broader public with true knowledge, by giving science a bad name, they undo the work of real scientists attempting to genuinely educate the public on matters such as climate change, vaccines, and importantly, critical thinking skills. By loudly advocating against DEI policies, they merely ensure the appointment of anti-science quacks in right-wing governments and by inciting war-mongering violence, they merely confirm the public’s perception of science as being the domain of Frankensteinian stereotypes. With the prospect of a JFK-type leadership from the US, at this time, looking dim, the framework of injustice and humanity must be addressed “from the ground-up”, and as joint effort by good scientists and non-scientists alike.

Diversity and democratic input are needed for true unity, survival and progress. More heads are always better than one and diversity precludes destructive “us and them” and superior/inferior mentalities from taking hold in social and political frameworks. Combatting xenophobia, whether as fear, or unnatural elevation, of “the other”, is essential for our survival. But now, as before, we are again in danger of cutting off our futures at the brain stem as a minority of uneducated but well-facilitated fools, with free reign to enact their personal motives, control the fates of the majority and threaten survival of the planet itself. Now, as in the 1980s, there is a way out and we need to be doing everything we can to achieve it.

Uniting the world in a white-male-superiority-versus-everything-but divide is just that – a divide. It’s not unity. It’s not unity of all people. It’s a divide and conquer strategy, exploiting fear and ignorance, designed to serve only the infantile purpose of a very select few. Instead, embrace the spirit of diversity and envision a bright and optimistic future for all, as a people of all peoples, united not to implement the purpose of one, but to secure the future of all.