In Donna Summer’s and Barbra Streisand’s 1979 hit duet, ‘No more tears’, the refrain ‘Enough is Enough’ articulates the cry of the wounded party in a damaging relationship on the verge of a break-up. Severance is inevitable: the strains have been too great. The phrase’s tautological simplicity seeks to place its message beyond challenge. That which has been endured for so long has reached ‘tipping point’, and one is impelled to act not by choice but necessity, calling time only on the intolerable.
It is a phrase that has become increasingly popular as a slogan within our angry, atomised political culture, being recruited for various single-issue campaigns, pursuing all manner of ends. A promiscuously used part of the popular lexicon, ‘enough is enough’ has recently been deployed in relation to, among other causes, Facebook’s ability to control what is done with its users’ data1; the continued claims of anti-Semitism within the British Labour party2; the need to ‘stand up’ to Russia following the alleged poisoning in Salisbury, UK3; and Donald Trump’s determination to engage in a trade war with China.4 The phrase has recently had particular traction in debates concerning gun control and, relatedly, police brutality towards ethnic minorities in the USA. When the Democrats sat down on the floor of Congress to protest over the lack of gun control legislation, ‘Enough is enough’ was their slogan, as it was again when students protested to state lawmakers and Donald Trump about the February 2018 school shooting in Florida.5 When Jennifer Wolfe wrote on the Huffington Post to decry systemically racist police violence, she echoed others in the Black Lives Matter movement in saying ‘enough is enough’.6
In an age of Sanders, Corbyn, Syriza, Trump, Brexit, not to mention the more extreme and violent decimation of the self-proclaimed centre ground in other parts of the world such as the Middle East, we appear to be living in an age whose increasingly default posture has become precisely ‘enough is enough’. But how does the phrase function materially in the current political climate? In relation to gun control and racialised police brutality in the States, it would appear that the bland tautological strength of the statement is posed in direct proportion to the sheer intractability of its opposition. One suspects, after all, that there is no ‘sufficiency’ of black lives that can be lost for the conservative gun lobby for them to renounce the dubious freedom to own dangerous weapons and carry them in public. How many times would one have to say ‘enough is enough’ for the message to get through to those to whom it is directed? How much vocalised anger would be sufficient?
The quantity, volume and shrillness with which the slogan is screamed suggest, perhaps, on some level, that we know it does not mean what it says. The potency of any moral appeal is grounded in its receptibility, after all, and receptibility depends upon positionality, ideology and culture. In a world of multiple and clashing positionalities, ideologies and cultures, the rhetorical weapon that ‘enough is enough’ could embody is blunted, because what ‘enough’ constitutes itself remains in contest. Maybe, then, we say ‘enough is enough’ not really to signal that a tipping point has been reached but as a verbal substitute for change—when we have come to the ‘end of our tether’ but there is still no sign of amelioration at hand. ‘Enough is enough’ might then be a compensation for a lack, perceived or real, of material power. As such, the mantra might be said to work not so much as a rallying call but a prophylactic, its repetition drowning out the complex dialogue that is required for global society to move towards a position where the structural transformations to the political and economic sphere necessary for it to be able to correct some of the seemingly intractable situations it currently faces might be possible.
Of all the intractable situations the ‘enough is enough’ mantra is standardly invoked to mount a challenge to—or distract from—the twinned issues of global inequality and climate change are the most pressing and complex. In the discourses that surround these issues, the mantra of ‘enough is enough’, moreover, is loaded with substantially more weight than it bears in some of the other contexts in which it is used, given that the causes of social justice and sustainability are specially invested in concepts of ‘enough’ and ‘sufficiency’. One way, indeed, of putting in simple terms the challenge raised within policy circles that mediate these two causes might be thus: ‘how do we ensure citizens globally all have a good enough standard of living in the present whilst also ensuring that we have done enough to secure the sustainability of the planetary environment?’ From the perspective of affluence in the Global North, it is clear that we are currently not doing ‘enough’ from either a justice or an environmental perspective, let alone both. As Anders Hayden argued in When Green Growth is not Enough (2014), the policy frameworks currently in play by governments worldwide are insufficiently radical to prevent ecological catastrophe from occurring, thereby exacerbating further political tensions caused by preexisting economic inequality. No matter how much we say ‘enough is enough’ with regard to the twin project for an environmentally and socially ‘just enough’, the actual construction of the kind of ‘sufficiency economy’ requisite to achieve such a project looks excessively utopian and unreachable at present.
Bearing in mind the peculiar topical energies and tensions at work in the role of ‘enough rhetoric’ in current debates about global social justice and sustainability, this book attempts to shed new light on ‘sufficiency’, by exploring the idea in a range of contexts, historical and disciplinary. In exploring ‘enough’, this book addresses a concept that plays a major but under-theorised role in presentist policy discourse but whose historical trajectory and cultural-linguistic contours have as yet failed to be properly appreciated.
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While ‘enough’ is often brandished in a manner that claims to be transparently obvious, it is never neutral or universal and often bears complex political inflections. When we start to think about the way it is deployed, in specific cultural situations and in particular historical moments, certain tensions, contradictions and even opacities within ‘sufficiency’ and ‘enough’ emerge. Consider the problem of ‘enough food’, so important to the project of securing a just and sustainable planet, implicated as it is in questions about population, industrial agriculture and the growing pressures on the use of land in ‘the Anthropocene’. Do we mean enough food to survive, enough to feel full, enough to maintain an active lifestyle, enough meat to show respect for guests at banquets, or, even, enough to cultivate specific identities, for example, the protein-hungry muscular toned body types fashionable among bodybuilders? Enough food appears to be a qualitative judgement as much as a quantitative indicator, bounded by cultural norms as well as a plethora of concerns about whether diets are ‘balanced’ and whether food is ‘healthy’. Contestations over the genetic modification of food or the idea of food pills suggest that merely having ‘enough’ food is not the same as having enough of the right kind of food. Indeed, such claims have been used by free marketeers to argue that (rich people’s) environmental concerns limit the use of technology to deliver sufficient food to the starving (Driessen 2003). Having one’s ‘daily bread’, as Ethan Shagan reminds us, does not imply a singular vision of ‘enough’. Bread may be one of the most universal foodstuffs, yet the idea of what a satisfactory portion might constitute varies across cultures and has undergone significant transitions in different historical periods. However insistent the slogan, ‘enough’ simply isn’t an unchanging, universal horizon, to judge whatever is the amount in hand by. One idea or use of sufficiency is not equal to another, as they rely on codes, assumptions and ideologies, which need to be analysed and made visible.
This book offers a distinctive way of thinking through the problems that ‘enough’ raises, offering a few different case studies of the complexities at work in the term in various particular times or scenarios, which are presented to stimulate critical thought about ‘sufficiency’ more broadly. Rather than trying to fix the concept or rein in its ideological or political multiplicity, we wish to demonstrate the slippages always already present in deployments of enough. As Kathryn Allan notes in her chapter, enough is ‘highly polysemous’, being used both as a term with qualification (just enough) and a term that indicates a degree of over-emphasis (‘enough already’, or the Italian, ‘Basta!’). While accounts of ‘having enough’ (but not too little or too much) are used politically to craft policy discourse from alcohol consumption to austerity economics, increasing numbers of citizens have also ‘had enough’ of such governmental invocations and stand ready to contest what ‘enough’ means. The idea of enough might be crafted to draw a line or classification beyond which would be too much, but ...