Malcolm Muggeridge in “Men Like Gods” –

Writers like Aldous Huxley and George Orwell have imagined the sort of scientific utopia which is coming to pass, but already their nightmare fancies are hopelessly out of date. A vast, air conditioned, neon-lighted, glass and chromium broiler house begins to take shape, in which geneticists select the best stocks to fertilise and watch over the developing embyro to ensure that all possibilities of error and distortion are eliminated.

Where is the need for God in such a set-up? Or even for a moral law? When man is thus able to shape and control his environment and being, then surely he may be relied on to create his own earthly paradise and live happily ever after in it.

But can he? It’s precisely here that the doubt arises. Let us take a quick, cool look at the world these men like gods have so far succeeded in bringing to pass. It’s a world of violence and destruction unparalleled in human history. Who can estimate the lives that have been lost and uprooted in the ferocious conflicts of our time; the buildings, the treasures of art and learning which have been wantonly destroyed; the misery and privations, the degradation of standards of truth and humanity which have accompanied their upheavals. And what about our present situation? Is it worthy of men like gods – with one part of the world glutted and surfeited with an excess of everything they need, or can be persuaded to need, andthe rest of the world getting hungrier and hungrier, more and more deprived of their basic necessities?…….

…….They can’t really have believed he’ll say to himself (a future historian or observer) that this notion of Progress they bandied about meant anything. That happiness lay along the motorways, and well being in a Gross National Product. That birth pills, easy divorce and abortion made for happy families, and sex and barbiturates for quiet nights. The must, he’ll conclude, be some other explanation; a civilisation must have been possessed by a death-wish which so assiduously and ingeniously sought his won extinction – physically, by devoting so much of its wealth, knowledge and skills to creating the means to blow itself and all mankind to smithereens; economically, by developing a consumer economy whereby more and more wants have to be artificially created and stimulated in order to take up an endlessly expanding production; morally by abolishing the moral order altogether and pursuing the will of the wisp of happiness through satiety; spiritually, by abolishing God Himself and setting up man as the arbiter of his own destiny. A big laugh there for our historian, I should guess, as, looking back, he notes how our generation of men proved the least like gods, the least capable of coping with the complexities and dilemmas of their time, of any that had ever existed on earth.”