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

Ethics, Economics, and Government 171
behavior but only when the victim is on an equal footing with the culprit.
The operation of self-interest as a guide to the betterment of society as a
whole sounds curiously like the invisible hand of Adam Smith, but Shaw
insists that it could be possible only when incomes are the same.
One of the beneficial effects of equalizing incomes is that “of securing
promotion by merit for the more capable” (Intelligent Woman’s Guide
101). Promotion by merit is not merely a different way of ranging the
human population on a scale of worth, from contemptible to revered.
Equality of income is a way of securing equality of respect. Shaw did say
that socialism would make possible a natural aristocracy, but it was not an
aristocracy of dominance, or intellect, or any of the gifts from God to the
human race that happen to be vested in one individual. Shaw’s last word in
his address to the Intelligent Woman was that under socialism the title of
“lady” would no longer be the distinction of the parasite but the mark of
“she who, generously overearning her income, leaves the nation in her
debt and the world a better world than she found it” (500). This, he points
out, is a distinction within the grasp of every able-bodied person.
Idiots and Inequality
One would think that this concept of “aristocracy” would be attractive to
the many, but Shaw suggested a discouraging reason why it is not so. At
the beginning of his conversion to socialism, Shaw and other socialists
thought the advantages of socialism were so obvious “that Socialism had
only to be put clearly before the working-classes to concentrate the power
of their immense numbers in one irresistible organization” bring about
the revolution immediately (“Transition” 173). It seemed merely a matter
of educating the proletariat, organizing them, and letting their self-interest
do the rest. The workers shocked their would-be benefactors by repudiating
socialism. Many socialists refused to believe that the workers could
be so blind. Shaw accepted the truth (with an occasional note of bitter
irony) but imagined that it was largely a result of the short-term interests
of the “parasitic proletariat”—those whose income was derived from catering
to the idle rich. A more important reason may be found in one of
Shaw’s little-noted observations: “Between persons of equal income there
is no social distinction except the distinction of merit. Money is nothing:
character, conduct, and capacity are everything. . . . That is why idiots are
always in favor of inequality of income (their only chance of eminence),
and the really great in favor of equality” (Intelligent Woman’s Guide 102).
Shaw should have noticed that the idiots are in the majority. He often