Bernard Shaw's Remarkable Religion: A Faith That Fits the Facts

Introduction
Preface xv
Here we have what is for me the paradox of Shaw’s career: A man of Shaw’s
profound understanding and personal shrewdness gave, for the last thirtyfive
years of his life, the wrong answers to almost all the questions that have
perplexed our age.
—Julian B. Kaye
The librarians and the teachers have begun to run to the planetariums. It is
hard to get in, however. The places are crammed with children who know
what to read in order to know what to see.
And Shaw’s ghost is in there with them, asking their advice on books that
he should scan in order to catch up. Catch up, hell, he’s been ahead of us all
of our lives. It is we who must do the running.
—Ray Bradbury
This book will contend that in the matters truly most important to our age
Kaye is wrong and Bradbury is right. Kaye, unable to reconcile his admiration
of Shaw’s prime with his distaste for the political pronouncements of
Shaw’s final years, concludes that Shaw was intellectually stuck in the Victorian
era. Having made a brilliant synthesis of the best thought of the
nineteenth century, he never was able to comprehend the very different
world of the twentieth. Obviously there is at least some truth in such an
assertion; no one ever completely transcends one’s own age, and Shaw was
fifty-eight years old at the outset of World War I, when that extraordinary
experiment in cultural and intellectual upheaval called the twentieth century
began in earnest. But if Kaye is right to the extent that he claims to be,
Shaw the thinker is essentially irrelevant to our own age. I believe that
Shaw’s ideas—both in general and in their specifics—are as urgently
needed today as they ever were. This book is an attempt to show why this
is so.