What’s This World Coming To?

THE speaker was a high-ranking Los Angeles police official. “It used to be that when someone killed someone else it was for a reason,” he said, adding: “Today there is a bigger percentage of killings for no reason, thrill killings.”

Across the country, the police commissioner of New York city made a similar point. “The kid today who has a .357 magnum and takes 42 cents off another kid or an old lady and because he doesn’t like the kid’s looks or the old lady’s tears, kills that person and then smiles when he’s arrested . . . Nobody can understand that. That’s scary.”

Senseless murders, wars, hostage-taking violence, all these are becoming commonplace in today’s world, driving terrorized citizens and victims to ask ‘What’s this world coming to?’

The Los Angeles police official had a theory. “History shows a society must maintain a certain level of morality to exist,” he pointed out to his listeners, “and I think we may be reaching a point where we are dipping below that level.”

Becoming desensitized

Some people would maintain that the police official overstated his case. In reality, they say, things are not all that much worse than they have always been. Are they right? Or have they simply been numbed by the steady barrage of shocking headlines?

Consider what is happening to schoolteachers in New York city. “Crime against New York City’s public school teachers has become so common that, for many of them, its existence no longer shocks,” stated the New York Times recently. A teacher who had been shoved, threatened, cursed and robbed on different occasions was quoted as saying: “You have to desensitize yourself, develop tunnel vision.”

As world conditions worsen, are people in general ‘desensitizing’ themselves, losing their perspective?

After all, most of us have grown up reading in our daily papers about wars, atrocities and deteriorating social conditions. We have never really known anything different. But some older ones still remember another age.

“The whole thing came to an end”

In a recent lecture, Harold Macmillan, former British prime minister, recalled the world of his youth. During the age of Queen Victoria people looked forward to “automatic progress,” he said. “Everything would get better and better.” Instead, “suddenly, unexpectedly, one morning in 1914 the whole thing came to an end.”

Average citizens have made similar observations. “Nobody expected World War I,” points out George Hannan, an American who was born in 1899. “It was a tremendous shock. People had been saying that the world had become too civilized for war. But world war came out of nowhere, like a bolt from the blue.”

Interestingly, a popular book in 1914 was Norman Angell’s The Great Illusion, which attempted to prove that war was unthinkable because of the damage it would cause to international finance.

Ewart Chitty was 16 and in his native England when the war broke out. “It was a different world before 1914,” he recalls. “There was a general sense of security that is lacking today. You took security for granted.” How many people take security for granted today?

“I was in Vienna, Austria, when the war began,” says Maxwell Friend, now 90. “People were changed by it. They became very patriotic and nationalistic. Many were hardened. I remember the refugees streaming into Vienna from the east, fleeing before the Russian army. They had lost everything, even their tears. They had wept until there were no more tears.”

War and religion

Imagine the scars left on those who survived World War I, a war unlike anything in human history. As The World Book Encyclopedia put it: “In World War I, for the first time in history, mankind came to know total war. Entire populations of the fighting nations worked in the war effort. Millions of men, women, and children were killed.”

“England was bled white,” says Ewart Chitty, who was in London at the time. In Austria, “the whole country was filled with blood and tears,” as Maxwell Friend puts it. How were the survivors affected?

“I think that during World War I a lot of the soldiers saw the hypocrisy of the clergy. It changed them. Many of them lost their respect for religion. Some turned against God altogether,” remembers Ewart Chitty, who adds: “When I was a boy, people in general were interested in God’s Word, the Bible. People respected the Bible. You could talk to anyone about it. That began to change after the war. Today people seem to have forgotten about the Bible altogether.”

John Booth, 78, recalls something similar happening in the United States. “The churches got very involved in the war effort,” he says. “All the preachers would talk about the atrocities of the Germans and they would preach that the war was necessary to ‘make the world safe for democracy.’

“All that patriotic fervor used to bother my dad, who was the sexton of our little country church. I recall Dad’s being saddened because a preacher in a nearby church had been removed from his pulpit for refusing to preach war.”

Honest-hearted people all over the world made similar observations. The result of such global warfare? “The war of 1914-1918 broke Europe’s waning self-confidence in the merits of its own civilization. Since it was fought between Christian nations, it weakened worldwide Christianity.”​—Encyclopædia Britannica.

Christianity or Christendom?

Actually, the outbreak of World War I did not shock everyone. For years, a small group of zealous Christians had been predicting that dramatic world events would occur in 1914. The group was called the International Bible Students, known today as Jehovah’s Witnesses.

“The Bible Students were very well known for their views on 1914,” recalls George Hannan, “and they were taking quite a bit of ridicule in the first half of the year, when everything seemed so peaceful. Folks were saying that the Bible Students were going to have to ‘pull up their date stake’ and plant it somewhere else.”

The sudden beginning of war caused many to recall the predictions of the International Bible Students. In its magazine section, the New York World of August 30, 1914, devoted an article to the Bible Students. The article stated that “the terrific war outbreak in Europe has fulfilled an extraordinary prophecy.”

Why was this small group of Christians expecting trouble when the major denominations of Christendom were caught by surprise? Because these witnesses of Jehovah were keen students of Bible prophecy. Bible prophecy has a great deal to say about conditions in this 20th century.