What the World Needs Now

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We remember Gandhi as an opponent of colonialism and a campaigner for social justice. But he also pioneered everything from environmentalism to fair trade. Sixty years after his death, there is still much that Gandhi can teach us.

Adapated from an article in Ode Magazine - January/February 2008

In the early 1890’s, Mahatma Gandhi worked as a lawyer in South Africa. One day, while travelling in a first-class train compartment on business, he was ordered to move to third class, which was designated for non-whites. Gandhi refused, producing his valid first-class ticket as evidence of his right to stay.

At the next stop, he was thrown off the train. This experience transformed the shy, apolitical young lawyer into the bold, fearless activist whose campaign for equality and human rights was brought to an end by an assassin’s bullet 60 years ago.

Gandhi was undoubtedly one of the great political and spiritual figures of the 20th century. But who thinks much about him today? To many, he seems like a quaint figure from the bad old days when colonialism, racism and discrimination ruled. Hasn’t Gandhi’s message of justice, tolerance and non-violent change gone mainstream? And haven’t all those battles from last century been fought and won? Think again.

In Myanmar, pro-democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi is battling a brutal dictatorship through non-violent protest. In Zimbabwe, opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai is doing the same. Like Gandhi, microcredit pioneer Muhammad Yunus is promoting local economies throughout the developing world. In Kenya, environmental activist Wangari Maathai is preaching Gandhi’s gospel of ecological stewardship. And in the West, everyone from Al Gore to Angelina Jolie is embracing Gandhi’s call for conservation and sustainability. Each of these individuals - and many more like them, both famous and obscure, all around the word - is following Gandhi’s example.

Confronted with injustice, they refuse to accept it - then proceed to transform the situation through positive change. As Gandhi’s life and teachings show, he still has a lot to say to us today.

But the essential idea - people coming together to shed their fear and despair in the company of their neighbours, to work against concentrated power with the force of hope, to put their bodies on the line if only by marching for a few days - is as powerful as it ever was.

But that’s not the only, or perhaps even the main, thing that Gandhi offers a world now driving itself off the edge of a cliff. We tend to forget what he considered the core of his work: re-imagining economic life so it makes human sense.

In his day, the great symbol was the spinning wheel, and the bolt of khadi cloth replacing the suit of clothes imported from the mills of Manchester. In our time, the symbolic equivalent is probably locally grown organic produce, where local food starts to replace the far-flung products of industrial agriculture. That has important environmental benefits - instead of ordering takeout from some thousands of kilometres away, which is essentially what our food system forces us to do now, it is being provided from the guy down the road. Supporting local economies and benefiting both the community and the environment.

Our economic lives underpin our sense of who we are - that was one of Gandhi’s great insights. Change those daily habits a little and you can change our habits of mind a lot. We are in enormous environmental trouble because we’ve spent decades trying to meet non-material needs (for status, for affection, for respect, for camaraderie, for security) with material means.

And so we’ve built ever-bigger houses and driven ever-bigger cars and taken ever-longer holidays and eaten ever-more and ever-finer food. And by every measure we can find, it hasn’t made us any happier. Rather the reverse. A study in the US found that people’s satisfaction with their lives peaked in 1956, and our ever-rising standard of living has done nothing to slow our steady decline in happiness.

We need scientists and policy-makers and engineers to help us out of the trouble in which we find ourselves - global warming is the biggest mistake humans have ever made, and it will require many kinds of minds to fix it.

But Gandhi was our scientist of the human spirit, our engineer of political courage. The other advice from the 20th century seems stale now: central planning, endless economic expansion. We’ve hardly started to explore the possibilities that spring from Gandhi’s example. We better get going.

We must become the change we want to see in the world.
Ghandi