Our "moral and spiritual lag"

‘As at the beginning of the Christian era, so again today,’ wrote Carl Jung in 1957, ‘we are faced with the problem of the general moral backwardness which has failed to keep pace with our scientific, technical and social progress.’(1)

Martin Luther King called this our moral and spiritual ‘lag’. He observed that ‘the richer we have become materially the poorer we have become morally and spiritually.’ We live, he said, in two realms:

The internal is that realm of spiritual ends expressed in art, literature, morals, and religion. The external is that complex of devices, techniques, mechanisms, and instrumentalities by means of which we live. Our problem today is that we have allowed the internal to become lost in the external. We have allowed the means by which we live to outdistance the ends for which we live.(2)


 (1)From The Collected Works of C G Jung, 1970 pp304-305

(2)Nobel Peace Prize Lecture December 11 1964