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

Introduction xvii
the facts asked it to. A religious science, he was convinced, would acknowledge
that the Holy Ghost was an observable fact. That both camps view
him as an eccentric heretic is not surprising. It is common in religious
circles to hear shepherds warning their flocks of the dangers of trusting too
much in reason, and even those scientists who are devout churchgoers regard
questions of the spirit as belonging to a realm of understanding entirely
separate from that of science. Those peacemakers who insist that
there is no necessary conflict between science and religion assume they
occupy different and mutually exclusive domains; they seek to maintain
peace through total segregation. Unfortunately, this is not a way to satisfy
those who believe in the unity of knowledge—a category that includes
most careful thinkers in both camps.
The most common way to explain Shaw’s paradoxical refusal to fit into
our accepted categories is to declare him intellectually inconsistent. His
philosophy was, in this view, a pastiche of various incompatible and illdigested
ideas, chosen more for effect than for content and patched together
with a cheerful arrogance that imagined it could plaster over jagged
discontinuities with bloated rhetoric and irreverent wit. Liberals who
could not reconcile his socialism and feminism with his harsher political
pronouncements after World War I found the inconsistent Shaw to be the
only Shaw they could understand or stomach. The Shaw who endorsed
capital punishment (euthanasia of the criminally unfit would be a more
accurate description of his view) and had good things to say about
Mussolini and Hitler was, they are sure, merely trying to shock, like a child
whose naughtiness is a bid for attention.
Shaw has always had a sizable following of loyal fans, most of whom
felt that these assessments were at best superficial, but none has satisfactorily
answered all of the critics. Shaw hoped to provide a religion for the
twentieth century, and in this he failed. That the twentieth century failed
Shaw may be closer to the truth, for the spiritual and intellectual bankruptcy
of contemporary nihilism, popularly called postmodernism, is leading
us ever closer to the rocks. The reckless irresponsibility of the intellectuals
is worse now than when Shaw exposed it in Heartbreak House
eighty-five years ago. The skipper is not drunk; he has abandoned the helm
on principle because his philosophy teaches him there is nowhere to go.
The people who accuse Shaw of inconsistency are progressives who deny
the possibility of progress. Perhaps there is hope for the twenty-first century.
There is certainly hope in one small but astonishing fact: Shaw was
right and the perennially fashionable nihilists are wrong. The critics who