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

170 Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religion
Force could be trusted to select the pairs. This is what he said in 1910, but
the same opinion is in The Intelligent Woman’s Guide and Everybody’s
Political What’s What?, among other places:
An improvement by direct breeding is impossible, not because there
is the smallest rational objection to a human stud farm, but because if
we set up a stud farm we should not know what to breed. The Eugenic
Society feels quite sure, apparently, that it can make a beginning by at
least breeding out tuberculosis, epilepsy, dipsomania, and lunacy; but
for all we know to the contrary, the Superman may be tuberculous
from top to toe; he is quite likely to be a controlled epileptic; his sole
diet may be overproof spirit; and he will certainly be as mad as a
hatter from our point of view. We really know nothing about him.
Our worst failures today may be simply first attempts at him, and
our greatest successes the final perfection of the type that is passing
away. Under these circumstances there is nothing to be done in the
way of a stud farm. We must trust to nature: that is, to the fancies of
our males and females. (“Simple Truth” 186)
All we can do is remove the artificial barriers we have erected between
potential mates through artificial inequality. Shaw’s program of eugenics
can be summed up in a single word: equality.
Natural Solutions in a Controlled Environment
Equality is Shaw’s answer to all of these evils of capitalism. Specifically,
you must equalize incomes, as “you cannot equalize anything about human
beings except their incomes” (“Case for Equality” 122). He took it for
granted that the achievement of such equality required that the state, as
representative of all the people, take possession of the means of production
and administer the distribution of the national income. The goal, however,
was not far different from that of the communist anarchists: a cooperative
society with the maximum possible freedom. Shaw’s contention was that
moral freedom could achieve social good only under socialism and equal
incomes. Vice and virtue are branches of the same tree. They are merely
injurious and beneficial effects of the same human propensities. “Human
nature is only the raw material which Society manufactures into the finished
rascal or the finished fellowman, as the case may be, according to the
direction in which it applies the pressure of self-interest” (“Socialism and
Human Nature” 96). The “natural cure” for vice “is the resistance of the
victims” (97). The “pressure of self-interest” works to restrain antisocial