The Seven Social Sins
The price of civilization is not paid in currency but in conscience.
“The history of the world is the record of the weakness, frailty, and death of public opinion.”
— Samuel Butler, c. 1902
On October 22, 1925 — exactly one hundred years ago today — Mohandas Gandhi published Frederick Lewis Donaldson’s Seven Social Sins in his weekly newspaper Young India.1
In an address earlier that year as Canon of Westminster Abbey, Donaldson laid out a list of what he called seven “social evils” (sometimes referred to as the Seven Blunders of the World) in a fairly straightforward fashion:
Wealth without work.
Pleasure without conscience.
Knowledge without character.
Commerce without morality.
Science without humanity.
Religion without sacrifice.
Politics without principle.
[See below for a graphic version of the list.]
The list reads today like a ledger of our own time’s accounts receivable, the unpaid debts of a civilization grown comfortable in the habits of consumption and forgetful of the costs.
Gandhi seized on Donaldson’s sentiments from England, demonstrating their universality as he unleashed them within the crucible of colonial India. It was a diagnosis of modernity itself, a litany of corruptions that flourish whenever appetite outruns restraint and ambition takes leave of conscience.
1. Wealth without Work
Consider first the alchemy by which money breeds money, untethered from callus or craft. The robber barons of Gandhi’s day, like ours, knew that the trick of empire was to privatize the profit and socialize the risk.
Cryptocurrency exchanges collapse, venture capitalists siphon billions, and in the rubble remain the smallholders — the teachers, retirees, the ordinary hopefuls — who mistook the pyramid for a ladder. It is valuation, not value, that commands the gilded throne.
2. Pleasure without Conscience
The natural heir to wealth unearned. The bread and circuses of the Roman coliseum are reincarnated in the modern feed, spectacles consumed without reflection, indulgences bought at the cost of attention, compassion, or the planet itself.
The TikTok scroll, infinite and hypnotic, is the opiate of the present hour. What conscience is exercised in the endless streaming of war reimagined as entertainment, or in the algorithmic diet of outrage, memes, and distraction?
The dopamine economies of Big Tech manufacture craving as their core product, with conscience outsourced to the terms of service that no one reads. We indulge without asking who, in some distant warehouse, pays the price for our convenience with twelve-hour shifts and shredded ligaments.
When knowledge is stripped of character, it is no longer a lamp but a weapon.
3. Knowledge without Character
We see the university president apologizing for plagiarism while charging tuition equal to a mortgage. And the technocrat whose algorithm discriminates while its author pleads neutrality.
Knowledge, once thought a lamp to light the path, becomes in this form a torch in the hands of arsonists. When knowledge is stripped of character, it is no longer a lamp but a weapon.
Artificial intelligence promises to deliver an oracle for every question but declines responsibility for the moral substance of the answers. In the absence of character, intelligence becomes cleverness — the handmaiden of manipulation, disinformation, and profit.
4. Commerce without Morality
The marketplace today is global, frictionless, and largely invisible. A cheap t-shirt is stitched in Bangladesh, shipped across the Pacific, and sold to the American consumer for less than the price of lunch.
Commerce without morality hides the true cost of its goods behind glossy marketing and next-day shipping. Consider the carbon footprint of our convenience, the laborers in cobalt mines digging with their bare hands to power the batteries of our green future. The morality is spoken of in corporate mission statements but rarely accounted for in the balance sheet.
Capitalism in its present incarnation too often confuses price with worth, and profit with progress.
5. Science without Humanity
From the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima to the algorithm that profiles and predicts, our machines evolve more rapidly than our ethics. We split the atom without mending the heart; we engineer the genome without resolving the inequities into which the child is born.
The multibillionaire class speaks with wonder and reverence of colonizing Mars, yet in the same breath shrug at the homeless encampments outside their gleaming headquarters.
Knowledge accelerates, while wisdom lags.
6. Religion without Sacrifice
Expecting their congregations to confuse opulence with piety, the prosperity gospel preachers fly on a private jets2 or live in mansions3 purchased with the tithes of their flocks. Politicians quote Scripture while voting against bread for the poor.
Religion without sacrifice is performance: the ritualized nationalism of stadium prayers, the televangelist selling salvation as a subscription service.
Where once faith demanded humility and service, it now serves as a talisman for tribal identity, a marker of who belongs and who does not.
7. Politics without Principle
The sin most familiar, the one that requires no historian’s gloss. In the present republic, politics are reduced to spectacle, governed by poll-tested phrases, 15-second attack ads, and trolling memes.
Principles are negotiable, provided they can be monetized. A senator who denounces corruption at the podium cashes a check from the very lobbyists he condemns. An administration preaches democracy abroad while pruning it at home.
The principle at work is the absence of principle — the belief that power itself is justification enough.
In sum, Donaldson’s and Gandhi’s sins are less commandments than coordinates, the moral map by which to navigate a world perpetually tempted by shortcuts. They remind us that the price of civilization is not paid in currency but in conscience.
Wealth, pleasure, and power drift easily toward decadence without the ballast of work, sacrifice, and principle. And decadence, as the Romans could testify, is the last luxury of empires in decline.
Gandhi believed in what he published in 1925; he gave this same list to his grandson, Arun Gandhi, written on a piece of paper on their final day together shortly before his assassination in 1948.
Perhaps we can write this on our hearts.
There’s so much to learn,
For more on the topic of Character, check out that section or browse our Archives. As a reminder members of the Ampersand Guild (our paid tier) have access to the full archives of Timeless & Timely.
Donaldson was an Anglican priest who eventually became Archdeacon of Westminster Abbey. Read his Wikipedia entry.
Well done!
Thanks for writing this, it clarifies a lot. Your analysis of Donaldson's 'Seven Social Sins' is remarkably pertinant. It's crucial to acknowledge these enduring challenges. This piece offers a very clear framework for understanding contemporary societal issues, highlighting the essential balance between ambition and conscience. Such an important read.