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

34 Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religion
throwing out the stale as we take in the fresh; recognizing that the
truth of yesterday is the superstition of today. . . . But I, being more
Ibsenite than Ibsen, do not admit that every unfulfilled intention is
an aspiration towards an ideal. I do not consider London Bridge the
ideal of the Bayswater omnibus; nor do I regard my umbrella as a
stepping stone to my ideal of a dry hat. (“Fragments” 94–95)
It is important when looking at the Quintessence to remember that Shaw
really was writing about Ibsenism, not Shavianism, and to be careful in
distilling pure Shaw out of Shaw’s Ibsen. Shaw agrees with Ibsen that ideals
can be useful and even progressive. The Quintessence has references to
the positive side of ideals. “Ideals,” he says, “are sometimes beneficent, and
their repudiation sometimes cruel. For ideals are in practice not so much
matters of conscience as excuses for doing what we like”(“Little Eyolf”
177). This passage was written for the 1913 edition, but it is not a recantation
of 1891. In fact, Shaw had explained the paradox a year earlier, in 1890.
The process by which a beneficial, revolutionary ideal becomes a conventional
and tyrannous one is described in the original Ibsen lecture:
Some day a man says ‘I will not fight a duel.’ ‘You are bound to’ reply
the neighbors. ‘I dont care: I dont want to; and I wont’ says the man;
and when the neighbors discover that he is not struck dead for his
temerity, nor Society dissolved by it, they follow his example, and
presently persuade themselves that they abstain from duelling on
principle. Again, there comes a time when the young lady whose
mother would rather see her die than working for a living, faces that
contingency and applies herself to mathematics with a view to teaching
in a High School. And no sooner has she thus driven her will clean
through her duty to her parents and to her sex, than she tries to
impose the same method of self assertion on all other women as a
matter of principle, whether they have any bent towards mathematics
or not. (“Fragments” 83)
Shaw wrote in 1913 that because ideals could be both beneficial and mischievous
it may happen “that of two people worshipping the same ideals,
one will be a detestable tyrant and the other a kindly and helpful friend of
mankind,” but in 1890 he had shown how the tyrant and the friend could
be the same person. In Shaw’s example, the rebelling female mathematician
is a friend to women like herself and a potential tyrant to women who
may detest mathematics. The feminist movement of our own era has provided
copious examples of similar tyrannical liberators: for example, career