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Wealth and Immorality

There is a famous phrase from the Bible that is often quoted but almost never quoted accurately. Most have heard it said that money is the root of all evil, but what is actually said in 1 Timothy 6:10 is that “love of money is the root of all evil.” This is an important distinction, and it is a distinction that is vital to the argument Gandhi makes in his 1916 speech “Economic and Moral Progress.” In that speech, Gandhi argues that economic progress does not correlate to real progress. In fact, he finds the exact opposite: that it is actually immorality that increases in proportion to wealth. It is important to understand that wealth does not mean money. Money on its own has no inherent moral quality; it is just a tool. The love of money, on the other hand, and the retention and accumulation of it into vast stores of wealth is what brings with it all the evil. This is Gandhi’s central claim, and in this claim he is right.

The idea that economic progress and moral progress go together is built on flawed logic. Gandhi addresses this flawed logic when he says that people take a “sudden jump” from the idea that it is a moral imperative that the thirty million poor people in India who can’t afford to eat more than once a day are given the means to survive, leaping to the false conclusion that “what is true of thirty millions is true of the universe” (562). People make this kind of leap often. Vitamins serve as a good example of this kind of thinking and why it is wrong. Vitamins by definition are nutrients that bodies need a small amount of but cannot make on their own, so they have to come from outside sources such as food or sunlight. Shortly after vitamins were first identified about a hundred years ago, some people got the idea that if vitamins were good in small amounts, then they must be great in large amounts. This is not true, of course. It is just like calories, or water, or blood, or any number of things. Too many calories will make a person obese, too much water will damage cells, and certainly nobody would suggest that pumping gallons of extra blood into one’s veins would make them stronger. The body needs vitamins in small amounts, so small amounts are what is best, yet the idea that taking huge amounts of them will make one immune to illness still persists. The same is true of economic and moral progress. Just because it is good for people to have enough money to survive does not mean that it is great for people to have huge amounts of money.

In fact, wealth works against the good of everybody having enough, especially capitalistic wealth. Wealth under capitalism in particular meets Gandhi’s definition of economic progress as “material advancement without limit” (562). In order to generate profits and accumulate wealth, markets must be constantly expanding, finding new demand and consuming ever greater resources. The price of labor has to be driven down. The poor have to be exploited. Unchecked, the capitalist pursuit of wealth tends toward monopoly, as a few at the top accumulate more and more and in turn everybody else finds themselves with less and less. Government has to step in to create systems that provide the bare minimum for the masses. Therefore, this basic good at the heart of the flawed argument for wealth is actually made impossible by wealth without direct contrary action.

The truth is, wealthy nations recognize the immorality of wealth when they hypocritically say that developing nations should not exploit people, resources, and the environment the way they did on the path to economic progress. Such immoral acts are tied to the development of wealth, at least as it has always been done so far. Gandhi says this too when he describes the smog and the crush of empty people in Great Britain as a result of the wonderful advancements of the Industrial Revolution. Gandhi even points out that those countries seeking the economic progress of the West for themselves but expecting not to commit the same immoral acts are “foredoomed to failure” (565). The wealth of the most developed countries was built on exploiting people and the planet, and so far evidence says the two go hand in hand, just as Gandhi says.

Money is just a tool, but wealth is inherently selfish. It only exists when someone accumulates a lot and doesn’t let it go. Economic progress therefore means some profit at the expense of the rest. Gandhi is right when he says that economic progress and moral progress work in opposition to one another. One has to make a choice. Either focus on material accumulation without limit, or focus on doing good for living and breathing people.

Work Cited

Austin, Michael. Reading the world: ideas that matter. 3rd ed. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 2015. Print.