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

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178 Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religion partly because he knew that the surest way to make someone act like a devil is to treat him as one and also because he genuinely and profoundly did not believe in human devils. When he countered the accusations made against Hitler and Mussolini, it was invariably by admonishing his countrymen to cast out the beams in their own eyes before ranting about the mote in their neighbor’s eye. Julian Kaye is shocked that Shaw insisted on treating Hitler as a gentleman and that he opposed punitive “justice” to be exacted of Mussolini and the Nazis (194–95). A sympathetic critic observed in a similar vein that Shaw “wrongly but honorably opposed punitive treatment [for the Nuremberg defendants], much as he rightly opposed punitive reparations against Germany after World War I” (Rawson 3). Shaw’s belief was that vengeance, in whatever guise, was wrong. Any exception destroys the argument. Shaw’s position admits of no shadings: you either believe that two black eyes make a white one or you do not. Shaw thoroughly and honestly believed that all men were his brothers and all women his sisters. “Everybody says it: nobody believes it—nobody.” Nobody but Shaw. As for the rest of us, hypocrisy has become so completely second nature that when someone acts on a belief to which we all give lip service we literally cannot understand it. We search vainly for an explanation we can comprehend: hero worship, authoritarianism, elitism—anything but the truth staring us in the face. Naive, Shaw may have been; credulous, in some ways he undoubtedly was; but inconsistent he was not. Shaw underestimated the human capacity for cruelty and destructiveness. He was wrong. But if Shaw, judging by his own nature, believed the race of humans could not be capable of conscientiously systematic mass slaughter, and we, using the same method, actually knew better than he did, it is not an occasion for self-congratulation. If Shaw did not believe in the Holocaust because he could not imagine that the Germans, his brothers, would be capable of something so horrendous, then his error certainly was honorable. Those who would condemn him because German neo-Nazi revisionists—for very different reasons—also deny the fact of the Holocaust are assigning guilt by association, and that error is not honorable. It is not even sensible. Shaw’s Credulity Shaw may legitimately be faulted for overestimating human beings. He was amazed that the Ulster Protestants would have chosen division and strife rather than joining a united Ireland. “I guessed ahead, and guessed
Ethics, Economics, and Government 179 wrongly, whilst stupider and more ignorant fellow-pilgrims guessed rightly” (Pref. John Bull’s Other Island 2:874). Guessing again, he believed that dictators would be held in check by a natural democracy, by the people who knew good shoes when they wore them but did not know how to make them. He assumed that dictators would be less dangerous than ordinary rulers because they would be stripped of idealism and its accompanying aura: the “divinity that doth hedge a king” which is the last refuge of tyrants. Thus stripped naked, the dictator would be tolerated only as long as he did a good job. It did not turn out that way. Shaw also assumed that the reports of the death camps were hysterical, jingoistic exaggerations. He was wrong. These conclusions were not the confused distractions of a senile old man; they were entirely consistent with the most fundamental principles of Shaw’s philosophy. The question is inescapable: was Shaw fundamentally wrong? Did he merely appear to be right in the limited context of nineteenth-century civilization? Is the world divided after all into good men and scoundrels? Or perhaps there are only scoundrels, and the best hope for our moral pride is to claim pathetically that we are not as nasty as some of the other scoundrels. I know of no satisfactory refutation of this position. Conscious of the terrifying force of that argument and the teeming evidence behind it, Shaw could only counter that there is nothing worse than the council of despair. There is nothing worse because it is a self-fulfilling prophecy; because for evil to succeed it is necessary only that good people do nothing, as they must if they believe they can do nothing. There is nothing worse because the council of despair is a declaration of irresponsibility; it is Pilate washing his hands. And there is reason to hope. The moralists who cry out that without the restraint of absolute moral strictures and draconian penalties men and women will lapse instantly into viciousness and depravity give the lie to their own arguments, for the common chord struck by their moral hysteria is a measure of the fact that we fear sin at least as much as we covet it. Doubtless, as Shaw maintained, most people need some external restraints because they lack the internal moral strength to go it alone, and perhaps the lesson of the dictators and their dupes in the social chaos that followed the Great War is that most people are moral sheep who become easy prey to wolves in shepherd’s clothing when left on their own. If that is true, the moral abnegation of the intellectual nihilists is all the more reprehensible. At all events, the attacks on Shaw by liberal idealists are mistaken. They accuse him of inconsistency, of a naive and futile optimism, and of a snob-
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Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religio
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Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religio
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For Jalma, who made it possible.
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Contents Foreword by R. F. Dietrich
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Foreword “I believe because it is
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Preface Foreword xi The seed of thi
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Preface xiii hope to reach some of
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Introduction Preface xv Here we hav
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Introduction xvii the facts asked i
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o I Foundations of Faith
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Unity 1 A Creed for Living A Faith
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A Creed for Living 5 ticism toward
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A Creed for Living 7 posed to the i
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A Creed for Living 9 ally—at the
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A Creed for Living 11 tions of deat
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A Creed for Living 13 For many the
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A Creed for Living 15 fying faith.
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A Creed for Living 17 We have inesc
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Realism 19 Thus, I blush to add, yo
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Realism 21 evenhanded. Tyndall pres
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Realism 23 no scoundrels. A similar
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Realism 25 sage and confuse and dis
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Realism 27 tific materialism is utt
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Realism 29 of his fellows) is natur
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Realism 31 to be tied down to textb
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Realism 33 as they do not denote an
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Realism 35 women who disparage home
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Realism 37 woven out of words and i
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Consistency 3 The Will and Its Resp
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The Will and Its Responsibilities 4
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II o A Guide to Art and Life
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Dramatic Realism 4 A Playwright’s
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Illusionism Is Not Realism A Playwr
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Contradictions in Scientific Realis
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A Playwright’s Progress 79 view,
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A Playwright’s Progress 81 horror
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A Playwright’s Progress 83 My pla
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A Playwright’s Progress 85 disast
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A Playwright’s Progress 87 Shaw i
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A Playwright’s Progress 89 jectiv
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A Playwright’s Progress 91 suprem
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A Playwright’s Progress 93 certai
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A Playwright’s Progress 95 In cal
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A Playwright’s Progress 97 pishly
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A Playwright’s Progress 99 too
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A Playwright’s Progress 101 woman
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A Playwright’s Progress 103 focus
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A Playwright’s Progress 105 Candi
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A Playwright’s Progress 107 Shaw
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A Playwright’s Progress 109 strug
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A Playwright’s Progress 111 Not t
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A Playwright’s Progress 113 Amiab
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A Playwright’s Progress 115 find
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A Playwright’s Progress 117 sexua
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A Playwright’s Progress 119 culti
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A Playwright’s Progress 121 ing t
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The Organic and the Didactic 5 Majo
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Major Barbara 125 fundamental confl
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The Marriage of Science and Religio
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The Marriage of Science and Religio
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IV o A Peroration
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8 Catching Up with Shaw Shaw procla
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Catching Up with Shaw 237 would pre
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Catching Up with Shaw 239 to variou
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Catching Up with Shaw 241 rialists
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Catching Up with Shaw 243 Such goal
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Notes Chapter 1. A Creed for Living
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Notes 247 difficult to obtain, but
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Notes 249 turbing, these attitudes
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Works by Shaw Works Cited Notes 251
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Works Cited 253 Shaw and Ibsen: Ber
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Works Cited 255 ———. Introduc
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Works Cited 257 McRory, Desmond J.
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Works Cited 259 Weismann, August. E
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Aquinas, Thomas, 52 Archer, William
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Saussure, Ferdinand de, 74 Schopenh
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