Teilhard de Chardin became famous because of his theory of the Omega Point. But would the ultimate evolution of humankind turn out well or bad? ” Disease and hunger will be conquered by science…hatred and internecine struggles will have disappeared in the ever-warmer radiance of Omega [or] evil may go on growing alongside good, and it too may attain its paroxysm at the end of some specifically new form, There are no summits without abysses.”
At a public debate between Bernard Shaw and G. K. Chesterton at Kingsway Hall in London in 1927, the chairman Hilaire Belloc made this prophecy:
” The industrial civilization, which, thank God, oppresses only the small part of the world in which we are most inextricably bound up, will break down and therefore end from its monstrous wickedness, folly, ineptitude, leading to a restoration of sane, ordinary human affairs, complicated but based as a whole upon the freedom of the citizens. Or it will break down and lead to nothing but a desert. Or it will lead the mass of humanity to become contented slaves, with a few rich men controlling them. Take your choice”
[BBC Broadcast October 1927]
The Catholic theologian Ronald Knox was a robust champion of religion in age of “spiritual claustrophobia”, as he called it:
” There has grown up almost a ‘ conspiracy-mania’ about the teaching of religion …” it has no roots in common sense or in logic. We have made a dogma of dogmatism, we have a creed of creedlesslness, and our protest against formula is, in this age of catchwords, the most stereotyped formula of the lot”
[Knox, Caliban in Grub Street (1930) ]
Bernard Shaw said this in 1907 (when there was much admiration around for Nietzsche’s Superman idea):
” Beware of the pursuit of the Superhuman: it leads to an indiscriminate contempt for the Human. To a man, horses and dogs and cats are mere species, outside the moral world. Well, to the Superman, men and women are a mere species too, and also outside the moral world”.
[Don Juan in Hell]
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Paul Crook 