This is Dawson’s historical overview:

” There is a general; feeling today that the Victorian compromise was wrong – that war is unchristian, that business is unchristian and that even the State is to a great extent unchristian also. We have lost both the optimism of the Victorian Liberals and the old Conservative acceptance of the State and the social order as a God-given order. We find it much easier to understand the attitude of the early Church with its uncompromising hostility to the world and to the power of Mammon… The whole Christian tradition, and the prophetic tradition which lies behind it, are a standing protest against the injustices and falsehood of that which is commonly called civilization… Wherever the city of man sets itself up as an end in itself and becomes the centre of a self-contained and self-regarding order, it becomes the natural enemy of the city of God”

[Christopher Dawson, Religion and the Modern State, 1935]

This distinguished cultural historian (1889-1970) wrote many influential books in which he tried to rehabilitate religion as a driving force in western history. Among others he influenced T. S. Eliot and J. R. R. Tolkien. What was the challenge? As he wrote:

“The new secularized civilization is not content to dominate the outer world,..but claims the whole person. Once more Christianity is faced, as it was at the beginning, with the challenge of a world which will accept no appeal from its judgment…Indeed it would almost seem as though the prospect today was even darker than it was at the beginning. Then, at least, Christianity was a new thing in the world, and its possibilities were still untried; but now that Christianity has been in the world for 19 centuries, the modern world regards it as a thing of the past – a system that has been tried and found wanting, and that no longer has anything to offer modern man”:

Religion and the Modern State (1935) [see under Writings]

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.”

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]

See under Writings

Shaw loved to attack drama critics ” for their gross ingratitude to us, their arrant Philistinism, their shameless intellectual arrogance, their low tastes. their hatred of good work, their puerile romanticism, their disloyalty to dramatic literature, their stupendous ignorance, their susceptibility to cheap sentiment, their insensibility to honour, virtue, intellectual honesty, and everything that constitutes strength and dignity in human character….”

(piece in Daily Telegraph, 7 May 1908)

As Bernard Shaw wrote:: ” What really happened was that the impact of physical death and destruction, the one reality that every fool can understand, tore off the masks of education, art, science, and religion from our ignorance and barbarism, and left us glorifying grotesquely in the license suddenly accorded to our vilest passions and most abject terrors”.

{Heartbreak House]

Do you find here an echo of Freud’s theory in Civilisation and Its Discontents?