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

A Creed for Living 17
We have inescapably returned to the first and most important task: defining
the Shavian way of looking at the world. It must be defined and
clarified or we are lost, for it is the foundation of everything else: his individualistic
socialism, his belief in equality in morals and money, his assertion
of the primacy of the will, his approach to social organization, his
rational mysticism, his skeptical faith, his unswerving and obstinate flexibility,
his unscrupulous morality, and his puritanical immoralism. I will
refer to this fundamentally Shavian outlook by the somewhat unsatisfactory
title of realism—or Shavian realism. It is a distinctly unsatisfactory
term because it has been used in so many conflicting ways, and Shaw
himself, as Dietrich points out, plays on the slipperiness of its meaning
(20). But there is really no better term, and its use is demanded by the
terms used in that quintessentially Shavian document, The Quintessence
of Ibsenism. To understand this way of seeing, to analyze it, to break this
spontaneous vision of the way things are into a systematic philosophical
method, we will have to heed a precept of “The Revolutionist’s Handbook”:
“What a man believes may be ascertained, not from his creed, but
from the assumptions on which he habitually acts” (2:788). Once understood,
the principles of this special realism will be clearly seen as the simple
pillars on which all of Shaw’s seeming complexity is based.