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

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-