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

152 Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religion
that they are whatever the individual says they are. From the Shavian perspective,
neither of these easy assessments is precisely true. The moralists
are rightfully concerned about the trivialization of ethics but wrong about
its cause. The mistake is believing that the promptings of the human soul
are either capricious or, worse, actively evil. Traditional religion teaches the
latter, while the former is one of the most regrettable legacies of the worship
of science. For Shaw, the source of ethical values was necessarily
within us, but it arises from the strivings of an imperfect and immanent
deity to express Itself through us. The choice perceived by many modern
intellectuals is between an absolute code of conduct imposed on sinful
mankind by a transcendent and perfect God, and a collection of conventional
ethical systems derived ultimately from the capricious dance of indifferent
atoms. Shaw understood that a subjective morality need not be a
capricious one. Ethical promptings from within might be as orderly and
knowable as the laws of physics. They are simply teleological rather than
mechanical; they are the laws of God and not those of the machine. Beliefs
about the nature of ethics are unavoidably related to metaphysical assumptions;
Shaw’s metaphysics—his religion—differed from both traditional
religion and modern scientism and produced a correspondingly distinct
ethics.
Ethics and Anarchism
When Shaw spoke of his religion, he sometimes provocatively called himself
a Protestant (for example, “On Going to Church” 389). He was not
referring to the faith of his birth but to his profound belief in the authority
of the individual conscience. He was a Protestant in the sense he used to
describe Siegfried; that is, “a totally unmoral person, a born anarchist”
(Perfect Wagnerite 44). How does a born anarchist develop into a passionate
socialist? Shaw’s most succinct answer to that question is the brief section
of The Perfect Wagnerite called “Siegfried as Protestant.” We need to
be governed because, he said, we are not all Siegfrieds. If we were, government
would be impossible as well as unnecessary. It would not necessarily
be a good thing if we were all Siegfrieds. The abolition of laws and codes,
Shaw goes on to explain, is no more a panacea than their strict enforcement.
The point is worth stressing because Shaw’s plays could be interpreted
as evidence that he thought otherwise. His plays are filled with
characters like Siegfried, whom Shaw describes as
a type of the healthy man raised to perfect confidence in his own
impulses by an intense and joyous vitality which is above fear, sick-