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

Realism 35
women who disparage homemakers. I am personally acquainted with an
idealistic feminist who punished her ten-year-old daughter for playing
with dolls instead of toy cars and trucks. So although ideals may start—
indeed might always start—as tools of the will, they easily become its
mortal enemy. We start out finding “reasons” and “principles” for what we
want to do but may end by doing what we hate because we have persuaded
ourselves that we must be ruled by principle. We triumphantly tear down
one idol only to put up another in its place.
Idolatry
Ideals, indeed, are idols. In the 1913 preface Shaw claims even to have been
tempted to revise his book by substituting “the words idol and idolatry for
ideal and idealism” (101). He is quite serious; he means that an ideal is not
merely an abstraction or a principle but something in which people inappropriately
invest a certain kind of emotional energy, the kind that goes by
names like “reverence,” “veneration,” and “worship,” and which is typically
accompanied by adjectives such as “sacred,” “holy,” “inviolable,” and
the like. An important aspect of Shaw’s way of seeing the world is his almost
total immunity to such affective disorders. It is a reason this intensely
passionate man was thought by many to be emotionless and coldly
cerebral. A well-known anecdote tells how Shaw was informed by a phrenologist
that he had a hole where his “bump of veneration” ought to be
(Pearson 105). That cranial depression might well be called the “well of
realism,” for to a realist veneration is a form of spiritual self-abnegation
and ideals are a species of false gods.
Illusion and veneration are the diagnostics of ideals. Shaw insists on
their illusory quality even when the ideals in question are close to home.
In “The Illusions of Socialism,” he hints that the illusions of the title are
actually ideals when he explains that illusions are often “useful incentives
to men to strive after still better realities” (407). He describes two particular
types: flattering illusions and necessary ones. It becomes clear that they
overlap. They flatter socialists by portraying them as morally superior to
their enemies but are necessary to stimulate people’s interest in the cause
sufficiently to work hard for it. These illusions are as fiercely defended as
the ideals of marriage, for when those under the spell of socialist illusions
are confronted with a piece of socialism as a “raw reality” they react much
as does the idealist of marriage when presented with the truth about that
holy institution. Some (the Philistine socialists) merely dismiss the con-