I was first introduced to Malcolm Muggeridge through the teaching of Ravi Zacharias. Malcolm had a way of expressing the complication of culture in succinct and creative ways. The following is Malcolm’s caricature of the West’s ever-increasing nihilism and stands as a stark picture of a culture in a blind-hurry to become extinct:

…[I]t has become abundantly clear in the second half of the twentieth century that Western Man has decided to abolish himself. Having wearied of the struggle to be himself, he has created

    his own boredom out of his own affluence,
    his own impotence out of his own erotomania,
    his own vulnerability out of his own strength;

himself blowing the trumpet that brings the walls of his own city tumbling down, and, in a process of auto-genocide, convincing himself that he is too numerous, and labouring accordingly with pill and scalpel and syringe to make himself fewer in order to be an easier prey for his enemies; until at last, having educated himself into imbecility, and polluted and drugged himself into stupefaction, he keels over a weary, battered old brontosaurus and becomes extinct.

Malcolm Muggeridge, from his essay “Jesus: The Man Who Lives,” in Seeing Through the Eye: Malcolm Muggeridge on Faith, ed. Cecil Kuhne (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005), 16.

HT