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

Ethics, Economics, and Government 177
ing throughout his life. He was also stressing the need to face the necessity
of killing and dismissed, almost as unimportant, the need to be certain that
only those whom society genuinely cannot tolerate are thus harshly
treated. He certainly knew how stupidly cruel his fellow citizens could be,
as he often inveighed against them for those very qualities. Could he imagine
that the Russian leadership was immune to the follies he testified
against in the English government? Or for that matter, the German and
Italian leadership? It is true that his mistakes about Hitler and Mussolini
were of a different order. He did not endorse them, as he did Stalin, but he
did oppose demonizing them as hysterical jingoism. Still, he failed to understand
the danger they posed. One suspects that he may have been a
jingoist in reverse, believing that foreigners were free from the cruelty and
self-delusion so obvious to him in his countrymen. Shaw’s failure, at any
rate, horribly illustrates the danger of relativist morality. The realist, like
the one in the example at the beginning of this chapter, who chooses to
participate actively in a lesser evil rather than passively allow a greater one
had better be very certain it is indeed a lesser evil. One must adopt an
attitude of extreme skepticism about one’s own knowledge and understanding,
but Shaw’s favorable judgment of Stalin was as cocksure as it was
dreadfully wrong.
His reaction to the Holocaust is particularly revealing. He simply did
not believe it. He did not believe it because he could not believe that people
could do such things, even though Nazi ideology emphatically labeled Jews
as “intolerable.” Perhaps he imagined that, like the Chaplain in Saint Joan,
the Nazis would recant in horror when brought face to face with the real
effects of their rhetoric of hate. Or perhaps he was repeating earlier pronouncements
in what would turn out to be very different circumstances:
he had dismissed as propaganda the stories of German atrocities during the
first Great War, and he was right then. He was wrong now. What had
changed? There is irony in the answer because in the intervening years, as
we all have come somehow to accommodate the horror of the Holocaust
within our view of ourselves as human beings, we have learned that one of
the “ideals” with which it was justified was that very “Science, with a capital
S,” which Shaw had denounced because it “claimed exemption from all
decent and humane considerations” (Sixteen Self Sketches 123, Proctor,
passim). 5 Shaw did not believe the stories about the death camps because
they appeared to violate his most fundamental assumptions about the
world: the creed of Major Barbara that we are moral equals, all children of
one father. He did not acquiesce in the calls to treat the dictators as devils