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

180 Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religion
bery that led him to idolize “great men” who turned out to be glorified
hoodlums. Shaw is consistent and his critics inconsistent. Eric Bentley, for
example, berates Shaw both for his optimism and for his presumed snobbish
dislike of the common people. But when Bentley declares on the one
hand that human beings are incapable of improvement and on the other
that political salvation will come from the common people, it is Bentley,
not Shaw, who is being inconsistent (Thinking About the Playwright 86–
97). It is just not sensible to declare both that human beings are corrupt
and depraved and that political salvation can come only from those least
equipped in education and culture. Shaw is surely right to maintain that
government by the masses is both impossible and undesirable and that the
only sensible goal is to have things run by those persons most competent
to run them, making certain that they are held fully accountable. Shaw
failed to come up with a convincing plan for making that happen, but then
so has everyone else. Shaw may have been naive, but he was not so naive
as to put his faith in “a unionized work force” in charge of everything
(Bentley’s solution).
Natural Democracy and the Dictators
Of course, from the point of view of the sentimental idealists, the most
damning charge against Shaw is that he was an elitist who had faith only
in the exalted few and had contempt for the masses. This, they say, is why
he endorsed Stalin and winked at Hitler and Mussolini. But Shaw’s own
explanation, though it may appear naive to us, is consistent with both his
philosophy and the other judgments he made throughout his life. He insisted
that, whatever their faults, they represented an advance on capitalist
plutocracy. Part of his reasoning has to do with his concern for responsibility.
In his exegesis of The Ring, Shaw portrays Siegfried as an advance over
Wotan because the latter had become the slave of his own godhead; that is,
the conventional system of law and duty, supernatural religion and
self-sacrificing idealism, . . . which is really only the machinery of the
love of necessary power which is his mortal weakness. This process
secures . . . fanatical devotion to his system of government; but he
knows perfectly well that such systems, in spite of their moral pretensions,
serve selfish and ambitious tyrants better than benevolent
despots. (Perfect Wagnerite 34)
The idolatry with which the established, “legitimate” government vests
itself becomes a cloak behind which scoundrels can hide. The same is true