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 allow them 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.
As I said back then, I believed that all the more knowledge was 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, and I welcome and encourage all science believers to make full use of whatever opportunities, abilities and resources they have to do just that, especially against the rise of ignorance and anti-science, again threatening the planet and humanity. Back then, it was the Cold War 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 a variety of cults with conflicting doctrines and pretentious privileged white man’s “New Age” bastardisations of “Eastern” philosophies, all thrown under one roof in a western/non-western divide, as though all non-“western” people “look alike”. This had led to inane absurdities, such as pretend “Buddhists” doing occult astrology and thinking it ok to kill non-white people (so much for embracement of “Asian” cultures), concepts completely antithetical to Buddhism. Supposed “nature-lovers” and “holistic-healers” were slaughtering rhinos and tigers, solely for their horns and teeth, as “medicine”. Fraudsters claiming to have supernatural powers and more love for people than cold-hearted scientists, were “bringing people together” with their dead father, mother, children or siblings, on the basis 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. Buddhism and true Christianity are 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.
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 any scientist without ethics or who regards killing as a means to an end, 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. 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 – religious extremism 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 was brazenly evident in leading New Age magazines bearing far-right QAnon ads supporting Trump’s election, along with anti-climate science and anti-vax articles and dangerous nonsense under guise of “natural healing”. As I also said back then, 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. Diversity and democratic input is needed for true unity, survival and progress, more heads are always better than one, 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, whose comprehension of higher social constructs has as much relevance to leadership as word processing does to literature, 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 non-white male superiority 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 and 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.