Though the US is now directly involved in the conflicts of the Middle East the roots of the troubles lie deep in history, far pre-dating the US itself. Beyond doubt, though, the Far Right mindset and the neoliberal economy that America in general and Donald Trump in particular have brought to bear on the world’s affairs add fuel to the flames – and are threatening to kill us all. Fortunately, says Colin Tudge, there are alternative voices
Disconcertingly, every now and again Donald Trump says something I agree with. As in the following from an interview with the Advocate in 2000 when he was first thinking of running for president:
“One of the key problems today is that politics is such a disgrace, good people don’t go into government.”
And, of course, as he has done his best to demonstrate, bad people do.
Also, in his first inaugural speech as President in 2017 Trump said:
“What truly matters is not which party controls our government, but whether our government is controlled by the people.”
In this he seemed to be fulfilling the American dream of democracy, as envisaged by Abe Lincoln no less after the battle of Gettysburg in 1863:
“Government of the people, by the people, and for the people”
In his first inaugural address as President in 2017 Trump seemed to echo the wisdom of some real or imaginary indigenous American chief:
“And whether a child is born in the urban sprawl of Detroit or the windswept plains of Nebraska, they look up at the same night sky, they fill their heart with the same dreams, and they are infused with the breath of life by the same almighty Creator.
Indeed, he said:
“We are one nation – and their pain is our pain. Their dreams are our dreams; and their success will be our success. We share one heart, one home, and one glorious destiny.”
Wonderful stuff! Here truly is a man of vision, with beneficence that embraces all humanity. In particular, when he first accepted the Republican nomination for presidential candidate in July 2016, he said:
“As your president, I will do everything in my power to protect our LGBTQ citizens from the violence and oppression of a hateful foreign ideology.”
And he continued with the theme of oneness and of all-encompassing largesse in January 2025, in his inaugural speech for his second term as president:
“We will move with purpose and speed to bring back hope, prosperity, safety, and peace for citizens of every race, religion, colour, and creed.”
Thus he permitted himself to identify with one of America’s or indeed of the world’s greatest ever moralists and reformers:
“Today is Martin Luther King Day. And his honour — this will be a great honour. But in his honour, we will strive together to make his dream a reality. We will make his dream come true.”
But of course, with Trump, all is not what it may seem. He is among much else a master of mirage, the archetypal shape-shifter. So he can be good cop and bad cop all in one. One sentence in his 2017 inaugural speech illustrates the point precisely:
“We will seek friendship and goodwill with the nations of the world but – we do so with the understanding that it is the right of all nations to put their own interests first.”
With this in mind:
“Every decision on trade, on taxes, on immigration, on foreign affairs, will be made to benefit American workers and American families. We must protect our borders from the ravages of other countries making our products, stealing our companies, and destroying our jobs. Protection will lead to great prosperity and strength.”
In particular:
“All illegal entry will immediately be halted, and we will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came. We will reinstate my Remain in Mexico policy. And I will send troops to the southern border to repel the disastrous invasion of our country.”
By such means, he said:
“We Will Make America Strong Again. We Will Make America Wealthy Again. We Will Make America Proud Again. We Will Make America Safe Again. And, Yes, Together, We Will Make America Great Again. Thank you, God Bless You, And God Bless America.”
And in his inaugural speech in January 2025 when he assumed the presidency for the second time he continued where he left off:
“Our top priority will be to create a nation that is proud, prosperous, and free. America will soon be greater, stronger, and far more exceptional than ever before.”
For of course, beneath the high-flown and sometimes almost Christ-like sentiments, lies an archetypal representative of the Far Right. And the Far Right does not seek to embrace all humankind. Rather the opposite. The Far Right of whatever hue is tribal. It’s us and them.
Truly to realise the vision of Martin Luther King we need to move beyond politics, and certainly to move beyond political rhetoric that has very little to do with what is actually done. We need to shift the global Zeitgeist. Specifically (as I discussed in my blog “The Bedrock Principles of Morality”, May 8 2025) we need to cultivate a morality, a mindset, that is rooted in the well-nigh universal moral principles of compassion, humility, and a sense of oneness, and of values that are not merely material.
For as Karl Marx observed, societies are shaped to a critical extent by their economy, and the economic doctrine that now dominates the whole world is that of neoliberalism – of which America is its birthplace and its leading exponent. Neoliberalism is an extreme form of capitalism – capitalism purged of moral or ecological restraint: an all-out, global, preferably no-holds-barred (“deregulated”) competition for material wealth and power, conducted as ruthlessly as can be managed. It is of course subject to the law – but the global neoliberal to a large extent can choose whose laws to follow, and in all cases the law has become conditional, and indeed negotiable – and who has the power to enforce it? Competitiveness now is the principal virtue and, says Trump:
“I hate losers”
— which, alas, in a world dominated by the super-rich, means most of us.
In the neoliberal world might is right and truth is what the most powerful people say it is. So it is that neoliberalism is the natural economy of the Far Right, and Donald Trump is its global exemplar. There is no humility, no self-doubt. There is no sense of oneness – certainly no sense of oneness in the manner of Martin Luther King, with whom Trump had the temerity to identify. For as King said in a speech in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1967:
“If we are to have peace on earth, our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation; and this means we must develop a world perspective.”
Of course, unlike Trump, King meant what he said. Such sense of oneness as there is among the Far Right, and such compassion as there is, is reserved for what might properly be called the “tribe”. And the “tribe” in practice is what a recent, former president, George W Bush, worse than whom at the time it seemed impossible to get, called “my kind of people”; and for George W and Trump and their ilk, “my kind of people” are conservative, self-centred, sublimely self-righteous, and above all rich. And they play golf. If you belong to such a tribe, the world is at your feet. If not — beware! To be sure, when it’s convenient, the tribe may indeed include “citizens of every race, religion, colour, and creed”, for although Far Right tribes are very often racist, sexist, antisemitic and/or Islamophobic, that is not quite a condition of service. Tribal thinking has it though, to quote George W again, that “You are either with us or against us!” If you’re not of their kind or on their wavelength, either because you don’t want to be or because you are not rich enough, then as our very own home-grown Trump-style disciple-wannabe Nigel Farage has lately warned environmentalists, you had better pack your bags and make alternative arrangements pdq.
However: in reality, no such tribe has ever had the world entirely to itself. Always there are rival tribes, all competing as ruthlessly as it takes to become or remain top dog. All mistake their own venality for some noble, divinely inspired mission: MAGA; the resurrection of the USSR or indeed of Peter the Great; some sybaritic vision of Heaven; Zion. All mistake the buzzing of bees in their respective bonnets for voices from on high. Short of scorched earth and genocide none of the competing factions can ever win decisively, and so the world seems doomed to perpetual strife: between societies and – often even more fiercely –within societies.
But, besides being foul, perpetual strife is not affordable. The collateral damage is enormous (though there’s profit in reconstruction!) and while the conflicts rage all serious attempts to make the world a better place are put on hold. So it is that competitive tribalism, whether overtly Far Right or in some other guise, hastens the world’s descent into oblivion. Those who claim victory in the Earthly conflicts will inherit a landscape of rubble and of toxic seas and rivers and a raging climate, from which there can be no recovery; or not at least for creatures that are not halophiles and thermophiles or any other kind of extremophile. For all Trump’s fantasies, can Gaza, now – ever – realistically, be restored? The pain and the memory of if will never go away of course – but can the territory itself ever really be habitable again?
I have suggested many a time and oft that the Goal of humanity should be to create convivial societies, and personal fulfilment, within a flourishing biosphere. Then humanity and our fellow creatures might continue to occupy this Earth for millions of years to come, and very agreeably. The sunlit uplands indeed. Goodness knows what human beings might achieve in all that time, or how other species might evolve. But, very obviously, to achieve such a surely desirable future we need first of all to want it; and to bring it about we need cooperation, and amity, and trust; compassion, humility, oneness; the very qualities that are now so horribly flouted by our leaders, including, perversely, our elected leaders. So are we not headed for oblivion? Even if we do manage to side-step World War III, we will still be left with the mindset and the dysfunctional economy and the misguided technologies that have led us to the brink of it. Truly, as they say in Yorkshire, we need to think on; and fast.
In short, the present Zeitgeist and the people who are driving it are not only vile, not to say wicked, but also immeasurably stupid – mad in fact — since the destruction they wreak must engulf them too, which surely is not what they intended. Yet what’s on offer clearly has appeal for if it did not then Trump and Farage and all the rest of their kind could safely be left to rant in the golf club bar of their choice. As things are, the Far Right meme and its variants has become a pandemic of global proportions that is already threatening to prove more deadly than covid.
How did we let this happen?
And yet: Trump did not arrive on this planet uninvited from the planet Zog, backed by irresistible weaponry, and impose his malignant will upon us. He was elected. Apparently a majority of Americans in an apparently above-board election thought he was a good thing, or at least the best on offer. Farage might well be similarly rewarded. We may reasonably doubt whether Putin’s ostensible election was fair and honest but he and all the other moral monsters who run the world could surely not survive without the support of at least a fair proportion of the citizenry. It seems widely agreed that those who vote for such leaders do so in large part out of fear: sometimes fear of the leader himself (it is usually a him rather than a her) as in Putin’s Russia, but also, more usually, because they feel they need protection from some outside threat; someone perceived to be even nastier than their own leader. Many young men and women join the army or the police to defend their leader and the status quo, and finish up taking arms, or the pressure hose, against their own people. Some of the young defenders evidently feel that they are doing the right thing – that to do otherwise would be a kind of treachery. For many, in a militarised society, that’s the only secure way to make a living.
Or else, as is the case in the US and UK right now, people simply feel, with some justice, that the status quo and its leaders, commonly branded “the Establishment”, have let them down, and feel the need for what they think will be radical change. So they vote for people like Trump and Farage who promise change, even though, once you see past the rhetoric, you see that the change they offer is very similar to the status quo and is at least as bad and probably worse; another top-down government without the restraints of history. Also, of course, the people who rise to power are usually the ones who most crave power, both for its own sake and for the wealth and status that goes with it: and those who actively seek power for reasons that are largely and sometimes exclusively venal, are not the kind of people who ought to be in charge [as discussed in various blogs including: Why are governments so bad? (14 December 2023): Idiots and Gangsters(12 January 2023); and Do we need governments at all? (7 October 2022)].
But if people at large, given a free choice, actually choose people to lead them who don’t take the world’s problems seriously, and who don’t give a damn about anyone who isn’t of immediate use to them, and who say the most provocatively horrible things and think that truth is what they say it is, and trade in fantasy and lies, what hope is there?
Fortunately, there are alternative voices.
The game is not quite over
Not all statesmen and women in very high places are as self-centred or as selectively chauvinistic as Trump. In sharpest contrast to Trump’s sinister rhetoric is this quote from Jawaharlal (Pandit) Nehru (1889-1964) who Gandhi nominated as his successor (and served as India’s first ever prime minister from August 1947 when independence was declared, until his death in 1964). He was speaking soon after Independence:
“It is fitting that at this solemn moment we take the pledge of dedication to the service of India and her people and to the still larger cause of humanity”.
That’s the thing: “the still larger cause of humanity”. Twenty years later Martin Luther King, at the height of his career as a civil rights leader said something very similar in a speech in Atlanta, Georgia:
“If we are to have peace on earth, our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation; and this means we must develop a world perspective.”
To be sure it is dangerous in the modern world to say such things, or at least to live as if you meant them, and King from time to time was arrested for rattling cages and upsetting apple carts, or at least threatening to do so. This (or worse) has been the common fate of radical reformers. Nehru was imprisoned too, eight times between 1921 and 1945, for a total of nine years. Gandhi (1869-1948) went to prison many times between 1908 and 1942. In South Africa, Nelson Mandela (1918-2013) was imprisoned on Robben Island from 1964 to 1990, charged with insurrection and with sabotage. Mandela’s close friend and advisor Desmond Tutu (1931-2021), the first ever chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1995 was never imprisoned but he was arrested many times.
Gandhi and Nehru were politicians but King and Tutu were both clerics – King a Baptist minister, Tutu an Anglican archbishop; and in practice, these past several thousand years, clerics and other spiritual leaders have been humanity’s most consistent and influential shapers of morality. Those leaders and prophets have come from all the recognized religions and from various “indigenous belief systems” — and all, to varying degrees, have emphasized the bedrock moral principles of compassion, humility, and oneness. Thus, from Tutu:
“Compassion is not just feeling with someone, but seeking to change the situation. Frequently, people think compassion and love are merely sentimental. No! They are very demanding. If you are going to be compassionate, be prepared for action!”
And on a practical note:
“ … if we are concerned with peace and reconciliation … then however small the group, if it feels it has grievances and is excluded, then there is no chance of that group being able to accept whatever agreements are reached.”
In similar vein the present Dalai Lama (b 1935) said in a speech to students at the University of California at San Diego in 2017:
“Young people of the 21st century, bring on the revolution of compassion! These words are not a hollow slogan. They are not the naïve dream of an elderly Buddhist monk who is disconnected from reality. I am calling for the mother of all uprisings to begin. Many remarkable individuals have called for different kinds of revolution: technological, educational, ethical, spiritual. All are motivated by the urgent need to create a better world. But for me, the Revolution of Compassion is in the heart, the bedrock, the original source of inspiration for all the others.”
Or this from Rabbi Michael Lerner (b 1943), in Revolutionary Love (2019):
“We need a new bottom line that judges our institutions, our economy, our political lives, our legal system, our cultural institutions, and every aspect of our society as productive, efficient, or rational to the extent that they maximise our human capacities to be loving, generous, and caring toward each other and toward the Earth …”
Truly that feeling runs through all the world’s great spiritual traditions. But then, although they have all too often emphasized their differences, they all share the sense of transcendence and of the sacred, and all spring from the same moral roots. For the good of the world they should emphasise their own commonality which they sometimes do but all too often do not. Religions need not be and should never be exclusive. Exclusiveness is indeed a betrayal of their own essence. The point was put very beautifully in the 13th century by the Sufi prophet Ibn Arabi (1165-1240):
“My heart is a pasture for gazelles and a convent for Christian monks; a temple for idols and the pilgrim’s Ka’aba, the tables of the Torah and the book of the Qur’an. I follow the religion of Love. Whatever way Love’s camels take, that is my religion and my faith.”
Clearly, Trump, Putin, Netanyahu, Farage and so on and so on are following a camel of a very different kind.
So what’s to be done?
I feel it is highly presumptuous of me to pontificate – but in a democracy some measure of presumptuousness is de rigueur. Individuals in a democracy not only can but should stick their respective oars in. That’s what democracy is for. So here’s what I think:
First, given that many or most of the world’s great moral leaders have been clerics of various hues – in fact of all hues – I feel they should play a more direct and active role in politics. Those who have done so in recent memory include some of the leaders of the CND movement in the 1950s and beyond, such as the Catholic Bruce Kent and the Anglicans Canon Collins and John Papworth (who, true to the tradition was, imprisoned in Brixton in 1961 together with Bertrand Russell for campaigning for CND). David Jenkins, Bishop of Durham from 1974-84, campaigned vigorously not least on behalf of the miners. More recently, in May 2023, Rabbi Jeffrey Newman was arrested in central London for protesting on behalf of Extinction Rebellion. Those who defend such protests, said the then Home Secretary Suella Braverman, are “incredibly irresponsible and reckless”. [See my blog “Is it time to break the law?” (October 4 2023)] And so on and so on. ‘Twas ever thus.
Alas, though, of course, religious intervention in politics has not always been encouraging. Religions in exclusive, tribal mode are among humanity’s greatest threats, and the world’s various, ultra-authoritarian theocracies include some of the most unpleasant regimes of all. I am sure that the world needs religion, at least broadly defined, if we are ever to solve our problems. As Martin Luther King and many others have said we need to emphasize values that lie well beyond the values of political ideologies, and well beyond the rhetoric of free-market economists, and for this we really do need to reinstate the sense of transcendence and of the sacred. But if they are truly to be of benefit to humanity and to the natural world, the world’s religions need first to put their own houses in order. That seems to be a tall order.
Secondly, whatever the roles of clerics or of religion in general, I suggest that perhaps the most important moral and intellectual task for all humanity is to translate the bedrock principles of morality and ecology into practical economic theory and practice, so that those principles are actually applied to everyday life. Many have tried to do this, including Marx and — to be fair — Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, the principal founders of neoliberalism. They really did think that the “free” market could generate most wealth most quickly and that with more wealth we could solve the world’s problems (or at least that we couldn’t do anything really effective without more wealth). Margaret Thatcher echoed that thought.
Thirdly, it seems to me that the bedrock moral principles – compassion, humility, and especially oneness – must be extended beyond humanity, in the way that Nehru envisaged, so as to include all life on Earth. The attitude that still prevails –which sees the natural world as humanity’s personal cornucopia, an inexhaustible source of goodies that it is our right if not our duty to draw upon at will – is very obviously both horrible and suicidal. At least it is obvious to most people if not, evidently, to Trump and Farage and their like. The attempt to commodify nature and plug it in to the market economy is sometimes well meaning but surely can succeed only up to a point. Nothing can survive in a competitive market economy that is not profitable, or is not more profitable than some alternative, and it is hard to see how such a worldview can accommodate the subtleties of natural ecosystems. Neither is the standard concept of stewardship quite enough. It still implies us-and-them; humanity dispensing to the rest, on our terms. Only the sense of oneness will do – the sense that we are inexorably a part of the global ecosystem, and are immensely privileged to be so. James Lovelock’s concept of Gaia captures much of the point. And although we cannot survive in this world without impinging on the rest of nature to some extent, we need nonetheless to recognize that in the end, for all our science, wondrous though it has become, the natural world is beyond our ken, and to cultivate the feeling that nature is sacred. It’s a fine line we need to tread between our needto impinge upon our fellow creatures and the moral and ecological need to treat the natural world with respect and indeed with reverence. Very clearly, this is not the path we are treading. Worse: the people with the most influence in the world don’t realize the need to tread it. They are on a different track entirely.
Indeed – the fourth and final point – we are a million miles from where we need to be, and if we are to have any hope of saving the world from meltdown or at least from the kind of destruction we are now seeing in Gaza or Ukraine and soon may see in Iran, or in the wake of the ever more frequent drought and fires and floods, then we need to cultivate a new mindset [as I sought to outline in “A 21st Century Renaissance”, (April 2 2025)]. This for starters requires a new kind of education that spans the gamut of human wisdom from the deep metaphysical ideas in which, in the end, all science, religion, and the arts are rooted, to the practicalities of everyday life – of which the most important are food and cooking.
But all that, of course, is the raison d’etre and the purpose of this whole website.
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