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

Realism 29
of his fellows) is naturally good if only the moralists would leave him
alone; the idealist appears as a coward terrified of his own baseness and
potential depravity.
The realist at last loses patience with ideals altogether, and sees in
them only something to blind us, something to numb us, something
to murder self in us, something whereby, instead of resisting death,
we can disarm it by committing suicide. The idealist, who has taken
refuge with the ideals because he hates himself and is ashamed of
himself, thinks that all this is so much the better. The realist, who has
come to have a deep respect for himself and faith in the validity of his
own will, thinks it so much the worse. To the one, human nature,
naturally corrupt, is only held back from the excesses of the last years
of the Roman empire by self-denying conformity to the ideals. To the
other these ideals are only swaddling clothes which man has outgrown,
and which insufferably impede his movements. No wonder
the two cannot agree. The idealist says, “realism means egotism; and
egotism means depravity.” The realist declares that when a man abnegates
the will to live and be free in a world of the living and free,
seeking only to conform to ideals for the sake of being, not himself,
but “a good man,” then he is morally dead and rotten, and must be
left unheeded to abide his resurrection, if that by good luck arrive
before his bodily death. (222–23)
Then, after having put forth this final burst of eloquent passion and conviction,
Shaw’s brilliance collapses with a resigned sigh: “Unfortunately,
this is the sort of speech that nobody but a realist understands.” In it all,
the only explicit definition of realism we were given came from the mouth
of the idealist.
We are left with several unanswered questions: Why is the idealist, who
seems a destructive fanatic, superior to the Philistine, who at least can
claim a balanced psyche? And in what sense is a realist also an idealist?
One seductively simple interpretation of the parable is that the realist is
Jean Jacques Rousseau, the idealist is Saint Augustine, and the Philistine is
Mrs. Grundy. One thinks that we are all naturally good, one is sure we are
all quite bad, and the other does not understand the question but is certain
it is bad taste to ask it. There is truth in this interpretation but only a
partial truth. For one thing, there is more to the idealist than guilt and selfhatred.
An idealist is so called because he strives for something beyond and
(he hopes) above what actually is; that something is his ideal. Nobody uses