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

242 Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religion
good rather than more evil, politicians with better instincts assume without
question that to take the Sermon on the Mount as a guide to social
organization would be certain political suicide. Shaw did not see his proposals
as outrageously idealistic but as sensible and practical. How else can
evil be countered but with good? Whether in Ulster, the Balkans, or our
own urban streets, the result of demonizing one’s neighbors is tragically
evident. Retribution is evil’s means of reproduction. Act on the assumption
that your neighbor is a devil and you are certain to become one yourself.
The idea of equality may not be as old as the Sermon on the Mount,
although Saint Paul insisted that we are members one of another. Many
Christians who would not tolerate a word said against the Sermon on the
Mount would be horrified at any attempt to put it into practice, and people
who idealize equality usually assume that the social fabric would disintegrate
were it seriously implemented. Much of the discussion of equality is
muddied by confused ideas about what it means, but Shaw understood
quite well that people vary enormously in talents and accomplishments.
Equality in social discourse is a matter of value, not abilities. He insisted
only that we treat people all the same. We speak of persons of exceptional
talents as “gifted,” thereby acknowledging that they are distinguished
merely by good fortune. Do we wish to reward people for their good luck?
Or punish them for misfortune? People are shocked to be told that they
live in a society that punishes people—on principle—for their disabilities,
but that is in fact the case. We simply do not have the courage to carry the
policy to its logical extreme and condemn paraplegics and the blind to starvation.
Modern liberalism is crippled by its acceptance of the idea that the
more highly skilled “deserve” more than the less talented because once
you concede that point, you effectively abandon equality; you must be
satisfied only with mitigating the worst effects of inequality, a procedure
that has the effect of shielding the evil doctrine from the examination it
needs. Shaw assumed, probably correctly, that a strictly equal distribution
of the national economic product would require distribution by a central
bureaucracy, something that appears impossible in today’s political climate.
It is not true, although widely believed by reformers as well as reactionaries,
that a centrally planned economy is unworkable, but its feasibility
could be demonstrated only by a commitment to making it happen
which is utterly absent today. If contemporary reformers accepted Shaw’s
belief in equality as morally imperative as well as his pragmatic concern
with goals rather than ideology, however, there is much they could do.