“In a dark time, the eye begins to see”. (Theodore Roethke)
For more than 2 billion people, Christians of one tribe or another, Easter Sunday is the most consequential day in the year. And it was certainly that for me, a day of deep reflection in this very dark time.
This year, serendipitously, it was also International Golden Rule Day – “do unto others as you would have done unto you”. This Rule captures what is an important tenet in pretty much all faith systems, but one of its key texts can be found in early Christian teaching, as in Matthew 7.12: “so whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the law and the prophets”.
Don’t forget that bit about “the law”– this being just one of the many strictures of Christianity that both Donald Trump and US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth (above) have conveniently eliminated from their war-mongering heresy.
(And if you want to know more about the Golden Rule, then do please check out the website of Reboot the Future).
“In a dark time, the eye begins to see”.
But I have a problem: ‘seeing clearly’ has come to mean (for me personally) an ever-more explicit polarisation between good and evil – and I’m not at all sure that it’s possible to reconcile the timeless wisdom embodied in the Golden Rule with a world view based increasingly on stark moral absolutes.
Nothing new here, it has to be said – just another subscriber to the philosophy of Manichaeism, based on the teachings of the Iranian Prophet Mani (whose parents, according to Wikipedia, were Jewish) whose lifetime’s work was devoted to revealing the struggle between a good spiritual world of light and an evil material world of darkness.
In that regard, I was struck by a comment in a recent article by Simon Tisdall (one of the Guardian’s most astute columnists) pointing out: “the collapse of global rules-based order is not just an economic and geopolitical crisis, but a fundamental, universal crisis of morality”.
I will come back to that geopolitical crisis, but the crisis of morality is now manifesting more and more clearly in a ‘meta-schism’ in the world today – not just the usual ‘internal’ schisms (for instance, between Sunni and Shia Muslims, or between Protestants and Catholics, or Orthodox and Liberal Jews), but a much more profound schism affecting all faiths and religions: between those who have room in their worldview for others of different faiths; and those who do not, and whose increasingly extremist views celebrate misogyny (think Handmaid’s Tale), conflict and violence – in Hegseth’s recent words: “the overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy”.
It seems to me that Pope Leo XIV has been slowly feeling his way toward articulating the opposite of that worldview, affirming the qualities of justice, fairness and tolerance. And he’s explicitly rebutted much of Hegseth’s evangelical Christian nationalism with all its atrocious warmongering: “No one can use Jesus to justify war”….. “God does not listen to the prayers of those whose hands are full of blood”.
The word ‘schism’ usually has negative connotations. But it shouldn’t. And we all need to own this one, to shout it out. For instance, we need the new Archbishop of Canterbury to stop being such an equivocating scaredy cat (who already sounds a bit like Keir Starmer!) and explicitly condemn each and every notional ‘Christian’ seeking to weaponize faith to justify death and destruction. To condemn those who condone genocide, and to lean into this “fundamental, universal crisis of morality” as a seemingly unstoppable litany of war crimes multiplies around the world.
In other words, to call out Pete Hegseth as evil.
Just as we should be calling out Netanyahu, Ben Gvir and Smotrich as evil, as they pursue the extermination of all Palestinians as part of their Zionist ambitions to establish a Greater Israel.
Just as we should be calling out the former Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (and the worst of his proxies in Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis) for their extreme Islamic fundamentalism, denying the right of Israel to exist.
Just as we should be calling out Patriarch Kirill’s unholy weaponizing of Orthodox Christianity, lending uncompromising support to Putin’s warmongering dreams of a Greater Russia.
If the prophet Mani’s teaching means anything, they are all evil.
So much for the spiritual aspects of this crisis. By comparison, the geopolitics of it is also something we can now see much more clearly. And no less polarised; the moral equivalent of good and evil can be found in today’s straight up, to-the-death struggle between the fossil fuel incumbency (led by the USA, Russia, Saudi Arabia and all the rest of those corrupt petrostates), and the post-carbon energy system of renewables, storage, efficiency, smart grids and so on.
As ever, the wonderful Bill McKibben put his finger on this in his blog yesterday:
“We tend to think about energy in hard terms – kilowatts, dollars – but in the end, our visceral sense of the path forward is what matters most, because attitude informs decision without us even quite realising it. And the world between our ears has now changed, decisively, in the direction of renewable power from sun and wind. Suddenly, the stuff we want from energy comes more easily, more dependably and more affordably from the sun and the wind. This is happening, all of a sudden, everywhere, and with everything. Donald Trump has managed to break the two-century-old grip of fossil fuels on the human imagination”.
This is so much more than a ‘clean energy transition’. So much more than dozens of New Green Deals. So much more than various inflections points on all those graphs put out by different energy analysts. This is a revolution, and we can now see it clearly for what it is. Completely binary: no grey areas. Exiting the world of fossil fuels just as fast as we possibly can.
That won’t happen without one hell of a fight. That incumbency is made up of real people, with consciences and moral obligations of their own. So shouldn’t we be calling out all those senior executives and Board Members of all those oil and gas companies, and all those investing in or insuring those companies, as evil? Not just greedy, short-termist and ill-advised — but evil?
Knowing what we now know about the near-inevitability of climate breakdown — and what they certainly all know about climate breakdown — I think we should. In a “fundamental crisis of morality”, we still have to call it out.
The Golden Rule withers in the corrupted realm of fossil fuels. But will now prosper beautifully in the alternative energy world unfolding in front of our eyes.
