When Evelyn Waugh was an undergraduate at Oxford, he spent his holidays with his family on the North End Road. The road ran through North London, between hopelessly suburban Golders Green and fashionably bohemian Hampstead. The post office nearest the Waughs' detached house was Golders Green. But whenever Waugh, already acutely class-conscious, wished to post a letter to his university friends, he would walk all the way to Hampstead so that his letter would bear the false if more fashionable postcode.

One can't imagine Eric Blair - aka George Orwell - ever stooping to such social climbing. Orwell may have been an Old Etonian, a tag that Lancing-educated Waugh would have gladly given his eye teeth for, but he regarded the class system as an odious disease to be fought rather than a social order to be accepted, and scaled.

Yet if the icon of the Left and the literary lion of the Right would not have agreed on where to post a letter, they had much more in common than being born in the same year, 1903. As the American author David Lebedoff shows in The Same Man, his study of Britain's two greatest 20th-century authors, published today, Orwell and Waugh shared many ideals, preoccupations and fears. Above all they agreed on what constituted a nightmare vision of their homeland - and that is the Britain we live in today.

Orwell and Waugh feared the appearance of a new elite made up of the so-called educated classes. They predicted that a New Boy Network based on test-score merit rather than lineage would sprout, which would wield power and influence with a still greater disregard for the “common people” than their predecessors had shown.

This lot would conduct themselves not in accordance to a traditional moral code. Rather they would be regulated by the opinion of their own group, that inner circle of, in Orwell's words, “scientists, technicians, teachers, journalists, broadcasters, bureaucrats, professional politicians”. Members of this elite would dread nothing more than failure to conform to one another's views and behaviour.

It sounds all too familiar: today, the elite's unwritten code - we now call it political correctness - has replaced morality. No one would dare call a teenage mugger or a knife-wielding gang member wicked. To judge in terms of traditional morality is automatically to be censorious, which in turn automatically earns you pariah status.

Yet other judgments, rooted not in a moral understanding of the Universe but in a social understanding reached by the chattering classes, are taken as gospel: that personal fulfilment takes precedence over all obligations, that cohabitation is as good as marriage, that being brought up by a single parent is as good as by two. Scour recent broadcasts, policy papers or the NUT website for a chink in the armour-plate defence of these positions, and you will be disappointed: the new elite protect their commandments with a ferocity that Orwell could only hint at in Animal Farm and 1984.

Both Orwell, the avowed atheist, and Waugh, the Catholic convert, railed against moral relativism. It risked blinding the intellectuals of the Left to Stalin's oppressive regimes, and the appeasers of the Right to Nazi atrocities; but beyond their immediate political context, both literary giants saw moral relativism as the coward's ducking and weaving away from the truth. And the truth, like good and evil, was an unwavering absolute.

Yet good and evil are today the preserve of fanatical fundamentalists. We hear talk of absolute values only in the mouths of the wild-eyed imam calling for jihad or the Bible-thumping Christian evangelical urging us to “pray the gay away”. In this way, absolutism has become a dirty word, while values have become ambiguous - easily changed to suit individual needs. Women's rights, children's lives, freedom of speech, protection from criminals: one person's core values are another's wrong-headed priorities.

Few novelists have portrayed decadence better than Waugh. From his days at Oxford, he was partial to sybaritic excesses - he belonged to clubs such as the Hypocrites, a favourite among gay undergraduates, which sported a notice on the club warning that “Gentlemen may prance but not dance”. Yet even Waugh recognised that although frenzied hedonism (parties, grand houses and casual sex) was fun, fun was not happiness. Orwell was no hedonist (though even when he chose to live like a tramp he was not above casual sex) and his socialist vision recoiled from contemporary materialism.

Both men reached the same conclusion: happiness was not found in mindless pursuits in the here and now but in a heart-felt connection with family, community and, ultimately, civilisation. The two authors' reaction would have been the same to the binge drinkers in our streets, off their heads on alcohol and drugs; to such recent offerings of the entertainment industry as the film Donkey Punch; to the Jordan wannabes carving up their bodies to increase their cup size; or to bling culture: horror, followed by elegantly written attacks on our bankrupt notion of happiness.

The Same Man places the work of these two literary giants cheek by jowl. Comparisons are riveting, but the conclusion is dire. For as we read Orwell and Waugh's prophetic warnings we cannot help a shiver of recognition. We have created a world they would have abhorred.

Cristina Odone is a writer and broadcaster

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