Excerpt From: "Enough is Plenty"
by Anne Ryan
Excerpt: Chapter One
This chapter reflects further on enough as a philosophy, accessible
to all, which can dramatically and permanently alter how we
understand and live in the modern world. Enough can help us to
think in ways that are useful for our time about what is good for
human and planetary flourishing, how should we live as
individuals and with other people and communities, and what
constitutes progress for the human race. And the nature of enough
is such that it opens up liberating and exciting responses to those
questions, without being dogmatic.
Enough does not inspire news headlines. Excessive behavior
makes the news and sometimes stories of misery do too. For the
most part, however, we deny suffering and misery and put them
from our thoughts. We don’t dwell on how the world could be rearranged
so that everyone could have sufficiency. We tend to
concentrate on excess in others: their spending, their behavior, or
their drug habits. And many of us like to carefully tread excessive
paths ourselves.
Courage is generally associated with dramatic or traumatic
events; we forget that the ordinary also requires courage. We are
not in the habit of exploring or valuing sufficiency – it lacks
drama, it is too quiet or everyday. A life of enough is not usually
thought to be successful. Many concede that enough is virtuous,
but few see it as attractive. It does not draw attention to itself or
to people who follow its path. We tend to view enough as a way
of life devoid of challenge, engagement, adventure or
achievement. This leads many to dismiss it as a philosophy for
losers, for those who cannot “make it”, who cannot read the
markets and participate productively and successfully with
12
Enough is Plenty
Enough is plenty:Layout 1 10/03/2009 13:06 Page 12
everybody else. I have conducted public workshops about
enough, and participants have told me that if they embrace the
concept, they fear being seen as penny-pinching, lacking in
ambition, anti-money, dull, even mad or irresponsible.
In the modern world, we tend to equate happiness with
success, and in turn we define success as material possessions
and external achievement. We emphasize constant activity and
visible, measurable wealth over experience and reflection. We
lack sensitivity to the inherent elegance and beauty of restraint
and limits. However, many languages have proverbs or sayings
that reflect the insight that enough is as good as a feast. In Irish,
for example, the same phrase – go leor – means “enough” and
“plenty”. Enough is about optimum, having exactly the right
amount and using it gracefully. It is about being economical with
what we have, without waste of resources or effort, but without
being stingy either. But this knowledge is becoming increasingly
obscured.
Generational differences affect how people understand
enough. For those generations brought up in the early part of the
twentieth century, enough was a way of life. They tried to instill a
sense of enough into their own children. Unfortunately, many of
those children, now middle-aged, rejected enough, seeing it as
stingy and associating it with depressed times of rationing and
scrimping. And many in their teens and twenties, children of
those middle-aged, say that their parents’ rejection of enough has
caused the waste and ecological destruction that is now so
apparent.
Whatever our generational experiences, whatever way of life
– enough or excess – our parents modeled, we all, including
children, have the capacity for enough. It is part of human nature.
We may have to work at developing the capacity, but we all
know enough when we see or feel it. All of us have had some
experience of enough – when we had everything we needed at a
particular moment. Then, we have known contentment, which is
REFLECTING ON ENOUGH
13
Enough is plenty:Layout 1 10/03/2009 13:06 Page 13
another underrated aspect of human experience in modern times.
To appreciate and cultivate contentment is to be open to the value
of enough.
Many individuals and families are currently bucking the
current trend towards accumulation and quantity, and are living
rewarding lives based on the principle of enough. Some are
choosing to do this in community with others, in thousands of
eco-villages all over the world.1 Large numbers of people are
unobtrusively living according to a philosophy of enough,
regardless of whether the world or their national economy is
booming or in recession. In towns, suburbs and in rural areas,
people are quietly getting the most out of life, cultivating joie de
vivre without the trappings the advertisers tell us are essential for
success and happiness.2
Enough does have a presence and a vocabulary amidst the
modern emphasis on growth no matter what. Even so, it is a
whispered presence: media, education and public debate ignore
our collective wisdom concerning human potential for achieving
well being by means of restraint and observation of limits. TV
soaps don’t celebrate enough and there are very few novels about
it.3 It is difficult to think of anybody who ever became a celebrity
by embracing the concept of enough, although Satish Kumar,
editor of Resurgence, a magazine that promotes the philosophy of
enough,4 was a castaway on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs.
Mahatma Gandhi was famous for a time, for promoting the idea
of enough as a basis for developing the Indian economy.
Embracing enough does not mean that we never experience
excess again. There are so many facets to our lives, we probably
won’t ever be excessive or sufficient in all of them. So it would be
a pity to understand excess and sufficiency as having nothing to
say to each other. We appreciate enough with a special clarity,
when we have experienced excess. Excess is sometimes appropriate,
although not in the long term. Someone who embraces the
harmony of enough for the most part of their life will not close off
14
Enough is Plenty
Enough is plenty:Layout 1 10/03/2009 13:06 Page 14
the possibility of excess at certain times and places. Similarly, if
we have lacked something such as time or money, we appreciate
with great relish having a sufficient amount of it. The trick is for
us to know when to stop, so that we do not exceed the optimum
point of whatever it is we are doing.
Ideas concerning the beauty of enough are not alien or
distasteful, although embracing them fully is not a well
developed option either because they are so countercultural.5
Many of us recognize the value of enough, yet we receive strong
messages to keep growing. In the contradiction between two
different messages there lies the potential for wisdom. Striving
for enough in the midst of a world of more is a way to cope with
the demands of the modern world. It can help us to balance the
different roles we hold and the worlds we inhabit, and to make
sound decisions and choices.
Enough and ecology
The words “ecology” and “economics” have the same root; “eco”
means “home” or “household”. Enough takes economics back
into the scale of the household, makes it focus on the needs of the
systems that sustain us, insists that economics recognize that
everything is connected in the wider household of being.6
Enough treats markets, money, trade, science, technology, competition
and profit – all the elements of modern growth economies
– as good, creative activities in themselves, which can be
harnessed for the good of people and the planet if they are kept
within moral and ecological boundaries. It distinguishes vibrant
economic activity from unregulated economic growth.
Ecology differs from environmentalism, which is a modern
way of trying to manage and limit the destructive effects of
growth-related activities on the natural world. Ecology is a way
of looking at the big picture, including the whole person and the
place of humans in the systems of the earth. We need to know
more about our home planet, in order to overcome the ways that
REFLECTING ON ENOUGH
15
Enough is plenty:Layout 1 10/03/2009 13:06 Page 15
the modern world separates us off from eco-systems and from
diversity. An ecological outlook encourages a sense of belonging,
which in turn helps us to create meaning: a meaning that is
lacking for many in the cultures that grow up in tandem with
growth economies.7
Scientific insights into the natural world have made the
marvels of healthy ecological systems available to us. They do not
waste; they are economical in the original sense of the word; they
elegantly and spontaneously observe limits.8 They are, in other
words, truly sustainable. We could take our cues from these
organic systems and encourage human, social and economic
systems modeled on them.
We should not idealize nature; it can just as easily be co-opted
for fascist ends at it can for justice. Everyone wants their ideas to
be seen as “natural”; it is a very powerful concept, because it
suggests that what is natural is right and unstoppable; it provides
a moral justification of sorts. For instance, nature can be
employed to suggest that there is a natural hierarchical order of
relationships in human society, among different races or ethnic
groups, or between the sexes. Proponents of unrestrained global
markets and growth economies say that such systems are a
natural progression for humans and that there is no alternative to
them, even if they sometimes have considerable downsides.
We can use insights from the study of nature as a way to
examine the kinds of systems that support life. We know that
healthy ecosystems are rich in diversity and that they can provide
more for their “inhabitants” – human, plant or animal – than
impoverished systems, even if both kinds of system have the
same nutrient resources to start with. For example, an ecologically
run garden has a closed nutrient cycle; nothing leaves it in
the form of waste; it uses everything it produces to provide
nourishment for the soil and the plants. We also know that
healthy systems accommodate growth, but of a cyclical rather
than an unlimited kind. Nature favors cycles because they come
16
Enough is Plenty
Enough is plenty:Layout 1 10/03/2009 13:06 Page 16
to an organic end after a suitable period of growth.9 They do not
go on growing because in nature, that is a cancer.
Humans today need to consciously self-regulate. Other
species and systems, which have not developed cultures that
devalue limits, know spontaneously when enough is enough;
humans have to choose it. For economic development to be
beneficial, it has to conform to very strict ecological and moral
limits. Of course, we will never reach perfect agreement on the
question of what the limits should be. But rather than try to set
absolute rules for them, the important thing is that we start and
maintain a widespread conversation about limits. The full
potential of enough cannot be seen from where we currently
stand in growth-oriented countries; it can only be imagined. Its
potential becomes clear only as we travel along its path and put
it into practice.
It would also be marvelous if “developing” countries
consciously fostered the idea of enough as they seek progress for
their economies and societies, rather than copying the type of
over-development that has happened in affluent countries. It
would be a disaster if such over-development were the only
definition of progress available. The way of enough explores how
economic activities can be the servant of humans and of the
planet, because inherent in enough – along with the principle of
sufficiency – are the principles of sharing and fairness – the
maximum benefit from what is available from the earth going to
the greatest numbers of people.
Enough and aesthetics
To appreciate enough, we need an aesthetic sense that recognizes
the elegance of sufficiency. Enough has a beauty that is
completely appropriate for our time. What if the cutting edge
came to mean, rather than the ever-expanding of boundaries, the
art of walking that edge between less and more, sometimes
balancing, sometimes slipping? It would be beautiful and
REFLECTING ON ENOUGH
17
Enough is plenty:Layout 1 10/03/2009 13:06 Page 17
challenging at the same time.10 Wealth could consist in achieving
balance and wholeness, including humor, fun, laughter and
creativity.
It is difficult to embrace enough and its recognition of limits if
we consider them to be about mediocrity or deprivation. The
notion of limits has taken on negative meanings within our
modern way of seeing the world. Enough can put us back in touch
with the parts of ourselves that understand the beauty of scale
and sufficiency, the parts that empathize with the rest of creation.
The arts – the record in music, painting, writing or dancing of
what we have found beautiful or meaningful –11work with a
notion of limits also. The artist has to prevent the work from
exceeding itself, from becoming unwieldy or going on for too
long. Otherwise the finished product becomes meaningless.
Enough and Morality
Cultural and personal appreciations of the beauty of enough are
also the start of a moral practice. A conversation about morality –
the principles and values that underpin our actions – is essential
for a different kind of long-term public culture that does not rest
on the idea that we are fundamentally economic beings. The
terms “ethics” and “morality” are often used interchangeably; in
this book, I distinguish between them, by thinking of “ethics” as
the behaviors that result from moral values.12 Morality, like
ecology, examines how all things can flourish in relation to each
other. Both are concerned with connection and the effect that
different parts of any system have on each other.
A moral quest asks us to consider things we would often
rather ignore. It asks us to reflect on the place that each one of us
has in this world, the extent of the damage that humans have
done in the world and the responsibility that each one of us has
for creating a just world: what, in short, are our obligations to
other people and to the earth itself? We often don’t do enough of
this, so enough requires that we do more of what we neglect right
18
Enough is Plenty
Enough is plenty:Layout 1 10/03/2009 13:06 Page 18
now. And it requires more than asking what is wrong; it involves
going on to ask, how we can behave in ways that are right.
Morality and ethics require that we examine the consequences of
our beliefs and actions in areas beyond ourselves and our
immediate environment, and in the long term.
A lack of moral development is distinct from a breakdown in
organized religion. Institutional religions have traditionally held
a monopoly on moral pronouncements, and indeed have tended
to emphasize the guilt and shame aspects of our private lives.
Progressive religious leaders are thankfully recognizing the need
to broaden moral understanding, and that is to be welcomed. But
we must not leave morality to religions – it is something we all
need to concern ourselves with, whether we take a religious view
of the world or not. Morality can be thought of as another way of
naming politics, since politics too is concerned with human and
planetary well being.13
World economics needs to be subjected to moral and
ecological scrutiny. There is a moral dilemma involved in the
way that economics, narrowly understood, has taken away our
capacity to live good lives. We produce and consume to “keep
the economy going” but in the process, we also destroy many of
the less tangible features of life that support and sustain us.
“Maximum individual choice” is the big mantra within growth
economics: we are promised enormous numbers of choices,
which are supposed to make us happy. We often talk about
equality as if it means having the right to shop on an equal
footing with other people. But many of the choices available are
meaningless and cause unwanted and unnecessary complexity in
our lives; they are not actually available to all and they often
come at a price of ecological destruction and social injustice.
Enough recasts choice as moral decisions that strive for the
common good. That means taking into account all other humans,
community systems, the earth, and ourselves as individuals or
small family groups. This may mean setting limits on certain
REFLECTING ON ENOUGH
19
Enough is plenty:Layout 1 10/03/2009 13:06 Page 19
kinds of expansion and accumulation, because they themselves
limit the choices for others. Taking a moral stance forces us to
enquire into what is really going on in the world around us, not
just in our own private or family sphere. So the moral dimension
of enough is also concerned with justice and fairness.
Enough and Spirituality
Spirituality involves full and constant attention to and awareness
of what is happening, even if this is painful. Full attention is
spiritual in a sense that has nothing to do with institutional
religion. If we truly pay attention to the present, then we cannot
ignore what is going on around us, the social and environmental
realities that we are part of. And if we stop denying and ignoring,
then we will not be prepared to live with some of the things we
see.14
A part of spirituality is about gaining peace of mind, and to
this end, many contemporary interpretations of spirituality
would have us simply acknowledge and accept what we see. But
only to acknowledge the world’s wrongs is more likely to bring
despair, when we realize the extent of the wrongs. The only way
to find peace is to resist what is wrong and attempt to do right.15
The public side of the spiritual path – attention to social and
economic systems – cannot be ignored in favor of the personal.
Spiritual searching today must be infused with a political flavor
if it is to be relevant to the contemporary scene.
Many of us are already searching for peace of mind in the
private realm with activities like yoga, tai chi, reiki, meditation,
psychotherapy and poetry. Unfortunately, many spiritual activities,
as taught or practiced in the west, emphasize the pleasant
and the personal and do not refer to a social or cultural search, or
offer a sense of the bigger picture. It is not enough to embrace
spirituality, if it is only to escape one’s own pain. For example, a
spiritual celebration of nature, uplifting and healing as it is, is not
complete if it ignores the ways that nature is being violated by
20
Enough is Plenty
Enough is plenty:Layout 1 10/03/2009 13:06 Page 20
economic growth, and if the spirituality does not try to defend
nature. Spirituality can all too easily become the pursuit of the
pleasant, a sort of tranquillizer. It can be used as an excuse for
ignoring or denying what is going on in the world.16 However,
ecology teaches us that one part of a system cannot be truly
healthy if other parts are in trouble.
Morality and spirituality appropriate to our times bridge the
gap between public and private. They are political matters,
because both are relevant to the world around us and to our
inner lives. An ecological outlook enables us to look at context,
that is, the bigger picture or web, in which our private lives are
lived. The search for enough enables us to broaden our horizons
and critique the systems that set the scene for our lives. It brings
together resistance to what is wrong in the public domain as well
as in the personal; it helps us to see the need for life-giving
systems and gives us a desire to work towards them. Spirituality,
like morality and ecology, is a recognizing of deeper levels
within ourselves and between ourselves and the world.17 All
three are concerned with an awareness that everything in the
world relates to everything else.
We cannot know all the aspects of enough without actually
doing it. It is a way of being in the world, not a simple set of rules
for living. It is like a path whose end point we cannot see before
we start out. This is part of its spiritual dimension: although we
can understand it cognitively in minutes, it can take a lifetime of
practice to come to truly know it. But the more we walk on the
road or practice the philosophy, the more we become aware of
the nuances and value of the practice. So enough can be a slow
realization along the way, and it can entail dramatic insights or
transformations. It can also take the form of new knowledge that
nobody has yet envisaged. There are difficult sides to any
spiritual way, such as doubt, fear, failure, uncertainty and
struggle. These are to be accepted for what we can learn from
them; pushing them aside is another form of denial.
REFLECTING ON ENOUGH
21
Enough is plenty:Layout 1 10/03/2009 13:06 Page 21
Enough has a good history; it is rooted in past generations and
has been valued and practiced by several great wisdom traditions,
including religions, especially those traditions that have an
ecological outlook, and which view humans as part of the great
natural systems. Buddhism, Taoism, Jainism, Hinduism,
Christianity, and the Ancient Greeks – to name just some traditions
— have for thousands of years promoted the virtues of
moderation.
Although enough does not rely on religious doctrine, it is not
rigidly secular either; its spiritual and ecological dimensions take
it beyond any view of life and the world that values only material
things, or the strictly rational. Spirituality is about who we are
when all inessential trappings are stripped away; it also concerns
the most important connections we have in the world.
Making progress
Enough is not about trying to retrieve a supposedly better past.
While it is in contrast with the dominant materialist-expansionist
mentality of our times, it is not about going back. Enough is a
living concept, in the sense that it looks to how we can make the
future positive and actually construct progress, while drawing on
insights and understanding that have served well in the past. But
it is based on the premise that we cannot undo what we have
done. The present world in which enough could be valuable is
quite different from other times when enough was valued, such as
the medieval era. To-day many forces separate us from our innate
sense of belonging to the world, and from our understanding of
limits. We have wrought terrible ecological and social destruction
but, perhaps paradoxically, the destruction we have caused is the
very thing that makes our re-invigoration possible. In some ways,
the earth itself, troubled by the damage we have caused, is
forcing us to look anew and recognize the need to re-evaluate
economic growth.18
Humans today differ from previous generations who recog-
22
Enough is Plenty
Enough is plenty:Layout 1 10/03/2009 13:06 Page 22
nized the value of enough. We have developed and evolved; we
have marvelous scientific insights and knowledge, which help us
understand many aspects of the intuitive knowledge of earlier
times; we have also come through a mechanistic era. We are now
at a higher turn of the spiral than earlier societies and worldviews
that valued enough.19 Like pre-modern peoples, we
recognize connection; unlike them, we understand that we are
part of an open system that is unfolding, not determined, and in
which we can participate.20
Some of the issues of our times are completely new and very
complex. But we have a number of new “tools” at our disposal.
We have a truly global civilization for the first time in human
history; we can see for ourselves that events in one place on earth
affect other parts of the earth. We understand that citizenship is
not confined to humans in nation-states, but that we are all
citizens of the globe, and, moreover, that we share citizenship
with all the living systems of the planet. We have well developed
notions of rights and fairness. Enough for our times is about who
we are and what we are capable of at this time. In responding to
the questions raised by enough, we can create new stories about
what it means to be human, and what true progress and
advancement might mean for us. In the process, we acquire new
understandings of self, others and the world.
What enough is not
Hypercapitalism is the latest, turbo-charged stage of capitalist
culture and economics and it is the dominant framework for
global economic growth today. But enough, although it is about
critiquing and resisting what is wrong, is not a rant against
capitalism, nor is it an argument for a more humane capitalism,
or for socialism or communism. To be fair, the philosophies
underpinning communism and socialism (generally regarded as
a route to communism) have more in common with enough,
because they are based on the idea of equality and sharing of
REFLECTING ON ENOUGH
23
Enough is plenty:Layout 1 10/03/2009 13:06 Page 23
resources. But the communist and socialist regimes we have
known (including China to-day) depend and depended on
economic growth and exploitation of the earth, just as much as
capitalist ones do.
Capitalism, socialism and communism are economic forms
that belong within a modernist worldview. One of the characteristics
of modernity is that it tries to quantify everything. So it
values only the kinds of wealth that can be counted, such as
possessions or money. All three approaches continue to put
economic growth centre-stage, because growth has quantifiable
indicators like Gross Domestic Product (GDP), that is, increases
in traded goods and services. They ignore the more qualitative
aspects of wealth, such as human health and well-being, healthy
earth systems and thriving community systems. In their best
forms socialist or communist manifestos put morality concerning
human beings centre-stage, but they are rarely strong on ecology
and human dependence on ecosystems.
If we get stuck in arguing about communism or capitalism, or
about the differences in approach that exist within capitalism
today, we are prevented from finding better ways to live. We
need ways of thinking and behaving that are outside a mindset of
unregulated growth and therefore outside modernity itself.
Within a postmodern worldview of enough, all the arguments
concerning hypercapitalism, centralized socialist economies, or a
more humane and welfare-based capitalism are part of an
outdated modernist model. Those arguments rely on the notion
that any kind of growth is good. While certain kinds of growth
have brought some benefits, past results are no guide to future
performance. In its unregulated forms growth has now become a
weapon of mass destruction. Enough is neither capitalist nor
communist, but sane, humane, local with a global awareness,
durable, flexible, creative and participative.
Enough, while it is moral, is not about moralizing. To moralize
is to over-simplify, to see things in black and white terms, and to
24
Enough is Plenty
Enough is plenty:Layout 1 10/03/2009 13:06 Page 24
preach to others about what they should do. Moralizers (secular
and religious) are often fundamentalists who crave certainty and
want to establish fixed rules by which everyone must live.
Enough insists that we stick with questions and principles, which
push us into a higher level of thinking about meaning and
purpose. Living with the uncertainty provoked by questions can
be very hard to do in contemporary modern culture, which likes
us to rely on factual information. But reliance on “just the facts”
precludes the kind of discernment that we need in order to
promote justice and well-being.
Enough can allow us to create new social forms that nourish
human and planetary well-being. It is not, however, a form of
knowledge that will act like a magic wand to solve all problems.
It is not about certainty or prediction; it is not a moral theory in
the sense of a closed set of ideas and rules for practice. It is more
a principle, which revolves around a question (what if we put
human and planetary well being at the centre of all our decisionmaking?)
and a considered response.
Cope, critique, resist and create
There is a sense of urgency about all that needs to be done, but it
is impossible to have an overnight revolution and make things
instantly different. We have to cope or survive in the present as
well as critiquing and resisting what is wrong. And all the time
we have to keep an eye to the future and what we could create.21
We need spiritual and intellectual courage for these activities, as
well as persistence and patience, in uncertain circumstances over
a prolonged period. To simultaneously engage in coping,
critiquing, resisting and creating may seem impossible, because
they involve contradictory actions of involvement and transcendence,
continuity and change.22
But attending always to these four “ingredients” ensures that
the means and the ends are complementary; such attention
works on the principle that how we act is as important as what
REFLECTING ON ENOUGH
25
Enough is plenty:Layout 1 10/03/2009 13:06 Page 25
our goals are. There is no real separation between means and
ends; means are ends. Each theme or ingredient affects our
personal and social lives at the same time. They are attitudes or
ways of thinking that can simultaneously permeate all we do. The
personal and the social cannot be cut off from each other. The
path of enough is integrative; it promotes progressive personal
change and progressive social change as mutually constitutive of
each other and focuses equally on both.23
For social activists, publicly concerned with morality, ecology
and global justice, there is a need to sustain the tension of having
a vision, yet living in a world that is so wrong.24 We need
ecological and moral sensitivity; but one of the penalties of such
sensitivity is that one must be the doctor who sees the marks of
death in a community that believes itself well and does not want
to be told otherwise.25 Even if you are already critical of growth
economics and actively engaged in social movements to construct
different ways to live, you may find that your personal life is
stressful because it is busy and harried. A personal practice of
enough can help you maintain and renew your energy for the
public struggle.
For those who use enough solely as a means to cope with
stressful lifestyles, there is a need to broaden horizons and
understand that we also need different systems in place, which
will facilitate vibrant, ecologically and socially sound economic
activity. Ideally, we would have top-down initiatives for systemchange
so that several interdependent factors could change all at
once. Individuals cannot bring about these kinds of system
changes but we can create a political climate where they will be
welcomed and legislated for (see Chapters 4, 5 and 6). People and
the culture we create can also bring about significant social
change.
Enough is about possibility, which is different from prediction.
The future is not knowable and predictable, despite the claims of
futurists.26 But possibility remains open to us because when large
26
Enough is Plenty
Enough is plenty:Layout 1 10/03/2009 13:06 Page 26
numbers of people, working and communicating with each
other, develop in their daily lives new ways of formulating
problems and responses to those problems, then social change
takes place and it can influence decision-making at high levels.
The vision of unregulated growth has until recently been very
coherent and convincing: greater spending power for everyone,
money trickling down from the top where it is generated. I have
even heard it said that we need continued growth, in order to
create the money to deal with the harmful effects of growth.
The vision of growth has gone sour; it has turned out to be a
suicidal practice rather than an intelligent one. A better world is
possible only if greater numbers of people ask hard questions
such as how much is too much, who decides, who wins and loses
in the process?27 Ecologists, philosophers, educators, business
leaders, politicized religious leaders, scientists and ordinary
citizens need to come together to promote enough and new
visions surrounding it. Global warming is one chance to do this
and the recent financial crisis is another. Both, of course, are
connected to each other and it would be a shame if the crisis of
global warming were ignored in the effort to stimulate the kinds
of unregulated growth that have caused many of the global
warming problems in the first place. Solutions based purely on
technology or piecemeal interventions are not the answer; we
must repair a sense of morality in the world if we are to truly rise
above these crises.
Enough is neither cynical nor utopian, but hopeful. It is based
on our potential for good; it is simple but not simplistic,28 a
principled way of understanding and being. We can think about
the future in a hopeful way, grounded in the belief that humans
can live up to their potential for good and for moral action. The
problems facing us are very serious, but if we look only at the
extremely hard realities and avoid the language of possibility,
then the realities seem just too much, and we slip into cynicism,
denial or despair. We need to lay claim to the notion that human
REFLECTING ON ENOUGH
27
Enough is plenty:Layout 1 10/03/2009 13:06 Page 27
beings have the capacity to intervene in, influence and shape the
forces that structure our lives.
You may think that I make very big claims for enough and
related ecological and moral ways of looking at the world. Of
course, there is no perfect worldview; anything taken to an
extreme will show its shadow side or become dogma. But a
reflexive attitude can prevent the way of enough from becoming
rigid. This means sticking with the questions and not flinching
from the challenges inherent in them. Enough is a key concept for
the 21st century.
Biography:
Anne B. Ryan is currently a university lecturer in adult and community education in Ireland. She has been researching and writing about the philosophy of enough for many years and regularly conducts workshops and seminars on sustainable living, positive futures and balanced living.
Available from all good bookshops in the high street or online or from NBN (National Book Network)
Tel: 1 800 462 6420 Fax: 1 800 338 4550
Email:custserv@nbnbooks.com
15200 NBN Way, Blue Ridge Summit, PA 17214 USA
Book details $24.95 ISBN 978-1-84694-239-6
Add Comment