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

Ethics, Economics, and Government 155
leged. That is why institutions are necessary; not as prisons but as ethical
nurseries. They must be designed so as to encourage and develop the best
in us instead of provoking, as they often do, the worst.
Freedom and Restraint
Devising institutional means to encourage the best in us is no simple task,
and Shaw’s attempts to do it produced his greatest failures. His difficulties
were both conceptual and practical. The theoretical obstacles to balancing
freedom with restraint are obvious in his essay on the social education of
children that forms the preface to Misalliance. Throughout the essay he
repeats the question, What is to be done? Many of his answers are vague or
impossible. At times he seems to suggest that children should be allowed to
wander freely, unhampered by restraints or compulsions, assured of food
and shelter wherever they might go (4:101–2). Elsewhere he recognizes
that children need guidance in their natural thirst for knowledge and understanding
and that such guidance necessarily involves restraints. He is
clear about the nature of the problem: “We must reconcile education with
liberty” (4:76). He knows what we must not do, especially that we must
cease using schools as prisons to keep children out of their parents’ way
and break their spirits so they will be docile and unobtrusive when they do
return home. He specifies that education must engage the child’s natural
instincts for socialization and learning in a noncoercive way. But he is not
clear how to do it.
Shaw would approve of many of the changes of the past one hundred
years in the area of child development, but we have done nothing to remove
what he regarded as the most imposing impediment to sane child
rearing: “Obstructing the way of the proper organization of childhood, as
of everything else, lies our ridiculous misdistribution of the national income,
with its accompanying class distinctions and imposition of snobbery
on children as a necessary part of their social training” (4:50).
Our exploitive social system is founded on the economic machinery of
predatory capitalism, which in turn is founded on an ideology disguised as
science: modern market-centered economic theory. The ruling class, which
is the class that controls economic power, defines the rules of economic
“law” and presents them as inevitable, natural, and scientific. Shaw agreed
that any economic system must be based on fact and sound economic
theory; he disagreed that economic law shows poverty and inequality to be
inevitable. He believed that the facts and sound, scientific theory showed