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

142 Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religion
lieves in its existence as a separate entity, a formidable Other. Each has
utter confidence in the basic goodness of other human beings: Barbara in
Bill Walker, and Undershaft in the varieties of human beings to whom he
sells his arms. Many otherwise perceptive critics go astray when confronted
with Undershaft; they cannot comprehend how such a unity is
possible because they imagine that Undershaft advocates indiscriminate
murder, but that is not in the least what he is saying. Like his daughter, the
sire of Major Barbara has faith in the consciences of his brothers and sisters—fellow
children of God. Barbara trusts Bill’s conscience to persuade
him not to assault women, and Andrew appeals to the consciences of the
poor to demand their freedom and dignity—and to be willing to kill if it is
not granted. For Shaw, as for Undershaft, poverty and slavery are forms of
living death; to accept them is to acquiesce in your own murder. If killing is
the only alternative offered to you, to choose the sword is to choose life.
The issue is whether to passively accept a large evil rather than actively
choose a lesser one. Most tolerate the greater evil rather than allow themselves
to feel contaminated by active participation in the lesser. Undershaft
does not, and that is the source of his contempt for the lust after “personal
righteousness.”
Some critics imagine that Shaw is offering Undershaft as a kind of Savior
of Mankind, an idea he vehemently repudiated (Collected Letters 3:
629). The search for a savior is quixotic folly because saviors are an idealist
delusion. If Shaw often depicted strong, positive and dynamic characters
like Undershaft it was not because he was dotty about Great Men, as some
imagine; it is because he believed in the future and wished to point us
toward what we might become rather than rub our noses in our present
follies. Caesar, Undershaft, Joan, and Lady Cicely are not supermen and
superwomen, because the superman does not yet exist. They are only hints
as to what he might become. Barbara and her father are both such beacons
of the future because they have unified souls, they have faith in their own
wills, and they have each dedicated themselves to a cause beyond themselves.
They are both doing God’s work because they have given themselves
over to the Will of which they are a part, the piece of deity in each of
them. They look at the world with open eyes and know the only way to
combat the copious evil they see is to face and transform it. To flee only
grants it possession of the field. They are realists. Barbara’s vision was at
first obscured by her youth and ignorance, but she has her father’s eyes.
The real conflict is not between father and daughter, but between realism
and idealism. Idealism, not surprisingly, has many champions. Nearly ev-