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

154 Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religion
from the opposite delusion. Most people are like Wagner’s giants, Fasolt
and Fafnir, and need the authority of law and social convention. Not
wicked monsters who must be restrained, they are honest, hardworking
creatures who need the guidance of those with greater intelligence and
imagination. They need not be stupid, as examples from Shaw’s work
show. They may be like Mr. Knox in Fanny’s First Play, whose wife tells
him: “If you have that [guiding spirit] in you, the spirit will set you free to
do what you want and guide you to do right. But if you havent got it, then
youd best be respectable and stick to the ways that are marked out for you;
for youve nothing else to keep you straight” (4:417). Those who lack guidance
within must rely on instruction without. Joey Percival, in Misalliance,
has imagination and intelligence, and as the son of three fathers he is
blessed with a broad education; yet he chooses external restraint because,
he says, he wants “to be free” (4:207). He seeks freedom from uncertainty
and fear. Shaw rejects both the moralist who would fetter us with iron law
because we are intrinsically evil and the Rousseauean anarchist who insists
that we would all be naturally good but for corrupt social institutions.
To the proposal of the anarchist, Shaw asks:
But if the natural man be indeed social as well as gregarious, how did
the corruption and oppression under which he groans ever arise?
Could the institution of property as we know it ever have come into
existence unless nearly every man had been, not merely willing, but
openly and shamelessly eager to quarter himself idly on the labor of
his fellows and to domineer over them whenever the mysterious
workings of economic law enabled him to do so? It is useless to think
of man as a fallen angel. (“Impossibilities” 14–15)
It is equally useless to think of him as captive devil, incapable of right
action except in the condition of slavery. If we are intrinsically wicked, how
did the moral codes needed to restrain us ever develop? One popular
theory, proposed by cynics since Thomas Hobbes, that moral systems imposed
by victors are accepted by the vanquished so that they may be reconciled
to their slavery, has some truth to it. If it were the whole story, however,
the masters would be free of such moral delusions and one would
expect a “higher” level of morality the lower on the social scale one descends.
This, as Shaw often pointed out, is not the case. But the freedom
from fear that ensues from being born a master allows the conscience to
have its say. Revolutionaries usually come from the ranks of the privi-