"All historical experience demonstrates the following: Our earth cannot be changed unless in the not too distant future an alteration in the consciousness of individuals is achieved"
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Kung is smuggling a revolution into a sentence that sounds almost politely pastoral. He starts with the hard ballast of “All historical experience,” a phrase that borrows the authority of the archive and the catastrophe. Then he pivots: the lever that moves the world is not policy or technology but “an alteration in the consciousness of individuals.” It’s a provocation disguised as realism: if history is our teacher, it’s taught us that structural fixes alone don’t hold when the inner software stays the same.
The intent is unmistakably ethical, but also strategic. Kung spent his career trying to build credible moral common ground across religions (his “Global Ethic” project) and to reform Christianity from within. In that context, “consciousness” isn’t New Age vapor; it’s a theologically informed claim about conversion, responsibility, and the formation of conscience. He’s arguing that the ecological and political crises of modernity are downstream of attention, desire, and the stories we tell ourselves about what counts as a good life.
The subtext is a warning to both secular technocrats and institutional religion. To the former: you can’t engineer your way out of nihilism. To the latter: doctrine without transformed people is pageantry. His timeline clause - “not too distant future” - is the quiet alarm bell; it adds urgency without apocalyptic theatrics, implying that the window for moral maturation is closing.
What makes the line work is its double bind: it sounds idealistic, yet it’s anchored in “historical experience.” Kung turns interior change from a private hobby into a public necessity, insisting that the fight for the planet begins in the mind, because that’s where permission for everything else gets written.
The intent is unmistakably ethical, but also strategic. Kung spent his career trying to build credible moral common ground across religions (his “Global Ethic” project) and to reform Christianity from within. In that context, “consciousness” isn’t New Age vapor; it’s a theologically informed claim about conversion, responsibility, and the formation of conscience. He’s arguing that the ecological and political crises of modernity are downstream of attention, desire, and the stories we tell ourselves about what counts as a good life.
The subtext is a warning to both secular technocrats and institutional religion. To the former: you can’t engineer your way out of nihilism. To the latter: doctrine without transformed people is pageantry. His timeline clause - “not too distant future” - is the quiet alarm bell; it adds urgency without apocalyptic theatrics, implying that the window for moral maturation is closing.
What makes the line work is its double bind: it sounds idealistic, yet it’s anchored in “historical experience.” Kung turns interior change from a private hobby into a public necessity, insisting that the fight for the planet begins in the mind, because that’s where permission for everything else gets written.
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