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

8
Catching Up with Shaw
Shaw proclaimed the coming of the superman; he did not claim to be one.
He embraced realism and rejected ideals but failed as a prophet largely
because when confronted with facts that fiercely challenged his beliefs he
denied the facts rather than facing them and defeating them. The first half
of the twentieth century was not a congenial epoch for one who insisted
that all human beings are equally children of God. For Shaw the propensity
to commit evil was a disease of the soul, not its natural state, and
diseases have cures. He knew that the evil which spread throughout Europe
during the world wars and the malignant interlude between them
was the disease of Bill Walker’s shriveled soul in an epidemic state, infecting
whole societies and political systems, but he failed to see how virulent
the cancerous malady had become. Wishing to win us over to Major Barbara’s
faith in evil’s vulnerability to the curative power of good, he underestimated
the difficulty of the obstacle. And ironically, the gulf between his
understanding and that of the rest of the world that made him a prophet of
such vision may have led him into the folly which Archer claimed was his
natural condition: the blindness of apriorist thinking. The man who utterly
rejected principles became so used to the idea that he was right and
others wrong that he ceased to check the facts honestly. He had been right
to dismiss as hysterical nonsense the stories of German atrocities spread
by English propaganda during World War I; he dismissed similar characterization
of the evils of Nazism, and he was wrong.
His glaring error in the specifics obscures the surprising fact that he was
right about the general conditions that produce political evil: Nazism justified
its evils with idealism and only thereby was able to infect an entire
society. Shaw is still worth heeding, despite his mistakes, because the ideals
that produced the Nazi atrocities—ideals he opposed—are still with us.
Nazi racial concepts were built on Social Darwinism, and Social Darwinism
is grounded in the metaphysics of scientific materialism, a philosophy