[In the following interview, Muggeridge presents contemporary society as beyond hope, and sees this as reason to hope for religious salvation.]

The face is familiar. The snow-white fringe of hair, the broad-tipped nose, the inimitable smile, with the corners of the mouth stretched wide as though fleeing panic-stricken from each other. The Malcolm Muggeridge who lounges comfortably in desert boots and work shirt has the outward look of that mass of electronic impulses the television talk-show hosts call “Muggeridge.” But the fleshly Muggeridge radiates warmth and friendship. He is a far more arresting presence than his electronic alter ego.

Here in Dallas, buckle of the Sunbelt, sits the genuine article, sipping debased American tea and talking of the end of the world, or at any rate the world as we know it. To talk in Dallas of such an outlandish event as the end of the world is no small feat. Whereas Detroit and Gotham, to say nothing of Manchester and Birmingham, may be rusting in the corrosive air of the post-industrial age, Dallas is on the boom. Its churches, too, by modern standards, are stuffed on Sundays.

There are likelier pulpits than Dallas for the apostle they call St. Mugg. Yet St. Mugg, as guest lecturer for two weeks at the University of Dallas (one of the country's finer private schools), is undaunted. He would have us know that, whatever the outward look of things, the easygoing world of liberal democracy, social tolerance, and onward-and-upward economics has about run its course. But, why mourn? Muggeridge talks as another might talk of a favorite bar's shutting its doors: with nostalgia and regret but with hope for a replacement that should prove better still. His lovely, soft-spoken wife, Kitty, nods supportively.

“A favorite theory of mine,” says Muggeridge, “is that in every dying civilization, you have a death wish. You see people doing all they can to bring it about.” Indeed, the world has perhaps never seen so concerted a death wish as now: just look around at the politicians, the clergy, the opinion-makers. “It is inconceivable.” Muggeridge declares flatly, “that anything, anything earthly, could reverse this process.” For now, we may “congratulate ourselves at least that we have seen what freedom means, but in ten or twenty years that won't be so. We are going to live in a world completely alien to us. We have got to accept that situation and try, as we are given enough courage or insight, to be true to our faith.”

And so the world is coming to an end. The hard sunshine of a Texas afternoon filters into the room, painting the furniture yellow. Why is the world coming to an end? Muggeridge shakes his head. There are so many reasons—so many, each one more vexing, and in some ways funnier, than the last.

Take the media. “I've come to feel,” sighs Muggeridge, the self-styled knock-about journalist, “that news is a kind of fantasy. Television and radio have made it more so. I call it Newszak. You have this medley of tunes that some people with whom you have nothing to do have picked out, and you hear them over and over.” Here is fantasy indeed—an event of no significance trumped up into a headline or a breathless bulletin; and all because something, anything, has got to be said.

“Standards of printing and writing have declined. Television news soon will be the news, which is a very dangerous situation. The golden age of journalism was in the Twenties and Thirties, and it's quite gone. Television has taken its place.”

Television! The word falls from Muggeridge's lips as if it were a jocular obscenity—the sort a roguish altar boy might utter during the anthem. Granted, it was television that brought St. Mugg his widest fame. But what a washer of perfectly good brains it has become. “I think Torquemada's crying his eyes out in Purgatory to think he missed out on television.”

The offenses to be laid at television's doorstep are grave ones. “I am prepared to argue that television does more harm when it's being serious than when it's being frivolous—in other words, when it's reporting the news. I think television destroyed Nixon, and it lost you the Vietnam War. It discloses all secret doubts and weaknesses. It is the death wish incarnate. Well! Just look at your war coverage. The whole thing was slanted beyond all thought against the United States. And now television is destroying the CIA. It's simply on the rampage.”

Now and again, Muggeridge says, he consents to show his face in the enemy camp. He will talk on television. But watch it? No chance. “I don't even own a set nowadays. I tell people I've had my aerials removed and I feel much better for it.”

Yet when people can be lured away from the box they immerse themselves in pornography. Muggeridge shakes his head again. “It is a sad thing that freedom involves the appearance of Penthouse. And, frankly, I see no sign of satiety. I find it difficult to believe that there's going to be a reaction. But there should be. Pornography is a sickness of the soul, and it's everywhere. I think it's utterly tragic.” Yes, and what a colossal irony that the tragedy of the situation should be understood best by the Soviets, who have banned pornography entirely. “It is a great relief not to see it in the Soviet Union,” Muggeridge confesses, almost through gritted teeth.

Still, who can wonder at the West's obsession? For pornography is part of the death wish. If the moral dilemma of the times has a core, Muggeridge says, “it is the dissociation of eroticism from procreation. Eroticism becomes an end in itself—like gastronomy. The end of gastronomy is the vomitorium. We lose our appetites entirely, and so I think we will lose our sexual appetites. The whole trend of the times is toward impotence.”

A modern Englishman, indeed, is required to know something of impotence—the national variety if not the sexual. The country is in a hash. “I think the future of England is more uncertain than at any time since the Civil War” (since 1646, that is, not 1865). “Both America and Britain are entered in the Gadarene Sweepstakes, but we're a length or two ahead at the moment.”

Of the present political parties, and of the politicians who infest them, there is nothing to be hoped. What is the alternative to the Labor government? “Margaret Thatcher!” cries Muggeridge with perverse glee, as if nothing could be funnier than the thought of a plum-voiced housewife as savior of the United Kingdom. Nor is the rest of Europe in noticeably better shape than Britain. “I certainly think Western Europe is going to collapse. It will be either a takeover, in the case of France and Italy, with the Communists masquerading as democrats, or it will be, as in England, a failure by government to govern.”

There is talk in England that a dictator may arise to bring order out of chaos. Does Muggeridge listen seriously to such talk? He does. “You have to consider that when a choice is offered, between dictatorship and chaos, it is customary to choose tyranny.”

And yet … and yet … suppose the world really is coming to an end. Is that necessarily so bad a thing? Muggeridge draws a breath. The corners of his mouth once more go haring off in opposite directions, and the blue eyes twinkle with a kind of constrained excitement. “Of course there is another side to this whole question of Western collapse. The discrediting of liberal society and Marxist society, from the point of view of truth and reality, is a wonderful thing. Solzhenitsyn has proved that attempts to condition mankind are a failure. Our present economic chaos shows this, too—that it's no good conditioning man as an economic animal. In Russia, recrudescence of transcendent belief has become a very real thing. And in the Western countries, people have lost confidence in this constant picture of everlasting prosperity. There is deep disillusion with the optimistic kingdom-of-heaven-on-earth view.” In Dallas, too? Ah, yes; even here.

It is at such a point that men turn at last to where Muggeridge's own eyes are fixed. They turn to God. “The Christian alternative is our only hope, our only prospect.” Muggeridge talks with terrific intensity. He is, once again, St. Mugg, apostle to the neo-pagans. “Christianity is certain and immediate salvation to all who avail themselves of it.” It would help, of course, if the churches were better shepherds, better watchmen over the souls committed to them. With organized religion, Muggeridge is decidedly impatient. The churches play around with their liturgies, effacing the sense of permanence that helps make religion attractive. “As for the poor old Anglican Church, I can't help feeling sorry for it; they have so completely taken up this social gospel. But of course so have the Roman Catholics.”

“Still, the only church I would join,” affirms Muggeridge, “is the Roman Catholic Church, which I have a sort of insane love for. But I would be an awful nuisance as a church member. You'll remember Groucho Marx's remark that he wouldn't want to be a member of any club that would have him as a member. Well, I wouldn't want to join a church that would accept me.”

Church or no church, the problem of good and evil, which is the central problem of mankind, is with us once more in all its awesomeness, and there is no way of evading it. “There will be a breakdown. Out of that breakdown will be a form of authoritarianism that is anti-Christian. These will be great testing times. But I don't feel at all hopeless. Where is the Church strongest? In Poland, which is a Communist country. And out of Russia, where religion is viciously persecuted, has come Solzhenitsyn, a man who speaks the language of Western civilization. So the faith will survive. The times will be hard, but God is on the side of those who worship Him, and His people will prevail.”

The man who is known as St. Mugg smiles once more. A triumphant smile; a smile of victory. What if the world is coming to an end? Who will miss such a world when a better one is on the way, devoid, if we are lucky, of politicians, pornographers, and television commentators? The thought is delicious. “No,” says Malcolm Muggeridge, savoring it, “I don't feel at all hopeless.”