Concluding the series. Read Part One here and Part Two here
Compassion and reconciliation
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. Exclusivity 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 against nuclear weapons). 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?” (4 October 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. 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 it 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 need to 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.
Cultivating a new mindset
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, 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 – simple things such as food and cooking.
But all that, of course, is exactly my raison d’etre and what gets me out of bed every morning.
This article first appeared in Colin Tudge’s The Great Re-Think.
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