"Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the earth"
About this Quote
A theologian’s warning that lands like an indictment: not of technology, but of imagination. Schweitzer frames the crisis as a failure of foresight and prevention - two verbs that should be the basic tools of moral adulthood. “To foresee and to forestall” isn’t just planning; it’s ethical time-travel, the ability to feel responsibility for people you’ll never meet and places you’ll never see. When that capacity erodes, destruction isn’t an accident. It’s the logical endpoint of living only for the immediate.
The subtext is strikingly unsentimental. Schweitzer doesn’t blame “evil” in the melodramatic sense. He blames a shrinking moral horizon: modern life training us to treat consequences as someone else’s problem, or as tomorrow’s problem, until “tomorrow” becomes the earth itself. The starkness of “He will end by destroying the earth” is rhetorical pressure, not prophecy-as-spectacle. It’s meant to sound excessive so the listener can’t hide in gradualism. If you can imagine planetary collapse, you can no longer pretend your choices are small.
Context sharpens the edge. Schweitzer lived through industrial acceleration, world war, and the dawn of nuclear capability - eras when human power suddenly outpaced human wisdom. As a theologian famous for “reverence for life,” he’s arguing that ethics can’t remain personal or pious; it has to scale to systems, machines, and economies. The line works because it turns apocalypse into a moral diagnosis: the end isn’t punishment from outside, it’s self-inflicted negligence dressed up as progress.
The subtext is strikingly unsentimental. Schweitzer doesn’t blame “evil” in the melodramatic sense. He blames a shrinking moral horizon: modern life training us to treat consequences as someone else’s problem, or as tomorrow’s problem, until “tomorrow” becomes the earth itself. The starkness of “He will end by destroying the earth” is rhetorical pressure, not prophecy-as-spectacle. It’s meant to sound excessive so the listener can’t hide in gradualism. If you can imagine planetary collapse, you can no longer pretend your choices are small.
Context sharpens the edge. Schweitzer lived through industrial acceleration, world war, and the dawn of nuclear capability - eras when human power suddenly outpaced human wisdom. As a theologian famous for “reverence for life,” he’s arguing that ethics can’t remain personal or pious; it has to scale to systems, machines, and economies. The line works because it turns apocalypse into a moral diagnosis: the end isn’t punishment from outside, it’s self-inflicted negligence dressed up as progress.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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