In May 1938, at East Ham Town Hall, the cradle of the British Labour Movement, Frank Buchman proposed moral renewal as the solution to economic inequality: ‘Suppose everybody cared enough, everybody shared enough, wouldn’t everybody have enough? There is enough in the world for everyone’s need, but not enough for everyone’s greed.’
Buchman may not have invented the latter maxim, and it has had a long afterlife, often attributed to Mahatma Gandhi because it encapsulates his philosophy of simplicity, equity, and the ethical and sustainable use of resources. It speaks especially strongly to contemporary awareness of the deep injustices caused by the ‘Great Acceleration’.
Buchman and Gandhi could only have been beginning to anticipate this massive and completely unprecedented surge of human activity starting in the second half of the twentieth century. As well as depleting the world’s resources, it is having devastating consequences for some of the world’s poorest.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres quoted the phrase at the launch of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ‘Lifestyles for the Environment Initiative’ in October 2022, saying that it ‘perfectly captures the situation we face now’, where ‘greed is prevailing over need’. For the planet to continue ‘to support each and every one of us’, we must ‘alter our economies and our lifestyles so we are able to share Earth’s resources fairly and take only what we need’.
This idea that the ecological crises are the consequences of ‘greed’ echoes Gus Speth, the founder of the World Resources Institute, who said that the ‘top environmental problems are selfishness, greed, and apathy, and to deal with those we need a cultural and spiritual transformation’. For Guterres, ‘lifestyles’ and ‘economies’ must both be changed as part of such a transformation and are both equally necessary to tackle, perhaps as a subtle corrective to the emphasis of Modi’s initiative, which was shifting the focus away from economic policies and onto individual consumer choices.
For Buchman, the two went together: he believed that personal moral change, the rejection of greed in favour of honesty and unselfishness, would become contagious and almost automatically translate into political and economic change. As he said in his 1938 speech, ‘When men change, nations change. […] We all want to get, but with such changed leaders we might all want to give. We might find in this new spirit an answer to the problems which are paralysing economic recovery.’
Buchman and Gandhi were both aware that in the wake of the Great Depression, the tendency to idolise wealth and material progress at the expense of moral values was growing. In 1930 John Maynard Keynes had speculated that the day when everyone would be rich might not be too far away and suggested that when the time comes, it would be possible to ‘once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful’.
But in the meantime, he wrote, for ‘at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to everyone that fair is foul and foul is fair, for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight.’
Keynes’ approach has done a lot to give us the world we know today, and Buchman and Gandhi gave an early warning of the dangers of such a philosophy. As Kate Raworth explains in the 2017 book Doughnut Economics, economics—which had in previous centuries been theorised as the art of ensuring that the needs of all were met—was coming to be seen as a self-contained system and an end in itself. This created a ‘vacuum of goals and values, leaving an unguarded nest at the heart of the economic project’, which would be filled by the fantasy of unlimited economic growth.
Buchman’s confidence in the power of ripples of individual change to permeate and transform social structures may seem naïve in our present context, where attempting to be a responsible citizen and consumer often seems to make little difference in the face of an entrenched economic system that traps us in consumerism to enable the wealthy to keep amassing more wealth.
Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolent resistance, satyagraha or ‘clinging to truth’, gives a clearer picture of how individual action can translate into institutional change, but also the radical and ascetic commitment that it entails, involving the spiritual practice of non-possessiveness (sharing and abstaining from coveting wealth or possessions) along with economic boycotts. This approach has been used in environmental demonstrations such as the Chipko movement against deforestation with at least partial success, showing that legislative change can follow grassroots action.
In the 86 years since Buchman made his address at East Ham Town Hall, the world’s population has quadrupled and human activity has revved up across the globe. The plants, water, and fuel that sustain our life on this planet have been put under increasing strain from the disruption of climates and depletion of ecosystems, to the point that the earth’s systems are teetering on the brink of collapse.
If the maxim that ‘there is enough for everyone’s need’ is still to hold true today and economies are to remain within Raworth’s ‘doughnut’ (meeting everyone’s needs while staying within the earth’s planetary boundaries) then we will need drastically to reimagine what a society and an economic system that rejects ‘greed’ might look like, both personally and collectively.
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