The Book Winston Churchill Needed Most

“There are nightmares of the future from which a fortunate collision with some wandering star, reducing the Earth to incandescent gas, might be a merciful deliverance.”

Winston Churchill made that observation in December 1931. Written in quintessential Churchillian prose, the essay “Fifty Years Hence” provided a gripping and insightful glimpse into the future of human civilization. In 1931, many probably discarded Churchill’s observation as the fatalistic musing of a cantankerous politician.

In 2010, one reads that statement by Churchill and gets chills.

We live at a time when Churchill’s “nightmares of the future” are becoming grim reality. Whether we admit it or not, mankind is nearing the point where a sudden and final collision between Earth and some “wandering star” would indeed be a “merciful deliverance” from the inconceivable horrors now hovering over us.

Churchill began “Fifty Years Hence” recalling that prior to the 17th century, human civilizations crawled forward, and sometimes backward, slowly. In some civilizations, progress stagnated and time stood still, sometimes for hundreds of years. With this historical perspective, Churchill then took stock of the rapid and spectacular accomplishments of mankind in the last century. “The changes have been so sudden and so gigantic that no period in history can be compared with the last century,” he surmised. And what is responsible for producing this “prodigious speed of man?”

“Science is the cause” (emphasis mine throughout).

The unleashing of the latent and terrific forces of “science” in the 17th century transformed human civilization, Churchill explained. Civilizations that for millennia had been empowered by “muscular energy” began to be driven by “molecular energy.” New scientific discoveries resulted in new technologies and inventions. And new technologies and scientific developments revolutionized human existence, and every facet of human relations, from the structure of society to industry to politics to economics to war.

Immense new sources of power … made possible novel methods of mining and metallurgy, new modes of transport and undreamed-of machinery. These in their turn enable the molecular sources of power to be extended and used more efficiently. … Each invention acted and reacted on other inventions, and with ever growing rapidity that vast structure of technical achievements was raised which separates the civilizations of today from all that the past has known.

Mankind has “enjoyed” more than 75 years of scientific advancement since Churchill penned those words. Scientists today grow human organs on the backs of rats; doctors transplant organs; and biologists genetically modify crops for greater food production. Ours is an age of computer chips and automated systems, of gps’s, Blackberrys, pcs, laptops and iPods.

“Whereas formerly the utmost that man could guide and control was a team of horses or a galleyful of slaves,” Churchill wrote, “it is today already possible to control accurately from the bridge of a battle cruiser all the power of hundreds of thousands of men, destroying the work of thousands of man-years.” These days, battle cruisers have been surpassed as war instruments. We live in the space age, an age of satellite-guided, unmanned aircraft, of high-speed Internet and satellite communication. Forget the bridgehead of a battle cruiser—today a person can stand in the comfort of an air-conditioned office in one country and with little more than a few keystrokes deliver a nuclear payload through a window on the other side of the planet.

In 1931, Churchill forecast a time when “explosive forces, energy, materials, machinery, will be available upon a scale which can annihilate whole nations. Despotism and tyrannies will be able to prescribe the lives and even the wishes of their subjects in a manner never known since time began.” Take an honest survey of this planet—we are living Churchill’s nightmares!

As much as he decried the ever increasing and spectacular advancement of science and its impact on human civilization, it wasn’t man’s material progress that Churchill feared the most. Above all, Churchill was concerned that despite the rapid advancement of human civilization, the character of humans, and mankind’s “virtues” and “wisdom” had not “shown any notable improvements as the centuries have rolled.”

Science had equipped humans with unprecedented power, but the terrifying nature of man “remained hitherto practically unchanged.”

Churchill worried that mankind’s acquisition of the powers of science and technology was rapidly outpacing mankind’s acquisition of the moral character and discipline needed to prevent those powers from obliterating human civilization. “We have the march of [man’s] intelligence proceeding more rapidly than the development of his nobility,” he wrote. In the end, “we may find ourselves in the presence of the ‘strength of civilization without its mercy.’”

In spite of all the contributions and improvements science had made to human civilization, Churchill worried that its primary contribution would be equipping mankind with the means of obliterating the human race!

In fact, this nightmare scenario terrified Churchill so much he believed it would be safer for man to “call a halt in material progress and discovery.” There are secrets, he wrote, “too mysterious for man in his present state to know, secrets which, once penetrated, may be fatal to human happiness and glory. … Without an equal growth in mercy, pity, peace and love, science herself may destroy all that makes human life majestic and tolerable.”

Winston Churchill was an intellectual. As a historian, he made a living acquiring, distilling and communicating knowledge. As a military and political leader, he encouraged scientific development and guided a multitude of new inventions, including the tank. Point is, it is impossible to discard Churchill as a simpleton and a man ignorant of the extreme value and importance of science and knowledge. The difference between Winston Churchill and most other intellectuals is that Churchill recognized many of his intellectual limitations—and, more significantly, the limitations of science!

Despite its splendid virtues, science, Churchill concluded, “does not meet any of the real needs of the human race”!

What good is scientific development, he asked, if it cannot answer the “simple questions which man has asked since the earliest dawn of reason—‘Why are we here? What is the purpose of life? Where are we going?’”

“Fifty Years Hence” is a prescient and profound essay. Yet it concludes by resurrecting questions and discussions that have perplexed mankind for thousands of years, questions that even Winston Churchill—an intellectual giant rarely afraid to venture an opinion on virtually any topic—simply could not answer.

Aren’t you interested in learning the answers to these questions? To learning why man was put on this planet, to learning about the purpose of life, to discovering where human civilization is headed? Wouldn’t you like to understand why science—despite its many fantastic contributions to human civilization—has only brought mankind to the brink of extinction?

Churchill spent his lifetime grappling with these questions. Now you can have them explained to you clearly, logically and with plenty of biblical proof. How? It’s simple: Request, then study, Mystery of the Ages. Written by the late Herbert W. Armstrong, this book, if studied with a humble and objective attitude, could provide a “merciful deliverance” from our nightmarish world.

Take the opportunity now: Request, then read, the book Winston Churchill needed most.