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

36 Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religion
crete step toward socialism as fraudulent because it does not resemble their
dreams, but others “will violently denounce it, and brand its advocates as
frauds, traitors, and so on” (407). To “maintain the purity of their faith,
they begin to set up rigid tests of orthodoxy; to excommunicate the genuinely
scientific Socialist; to entrust the leadership of their organizations to
orators and preachers” (417). In short, they make a sacred idol of their
orthodoxy. Like the moral idealist, the political idealist sees anything short
of his ideal as hopelessly degraded and corrupt. Some of the confusion
created by Shaw’s parable is because the real distinction between Philistines
and idealists is not the propensity to objectify their aspirations and
passions as “ideals,” but because the idealists have more sensitive consciences,
deeper passions, and higher aspirations: they care more and are
not easily satisfied. That is why the idealist is a higher type than the Philistine.
But the ability to see things as they really are is the possession of the
realist alone.
Semantics
Ideals are abstractions that are regarded in a special way, a way that transforms
them from indispensable intellectual tools into illusory idols. They
are illusions when (despite Shaw’s identification of himself as a Platonist)
they are seen as Plato saw them, as independent and superior realities
rather than merely as useful fictions. In rejecting the idealist view of abstraction,
Shaw was very much in the mainstream of Western philosophy,
especially English analytical philosophy. He also instinctively understood
something that has particularly absorbed twentieth-century philosophy:
the immense power of language to distort our understanding of the world.
Shavian realism is a close sibling to the study of what in the decades of the
mid-century was called the field of semantics. The fundamental insight
of writers such as C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, S. I. Hayakawa, and
Stuart Chase was that we often confuse words with things, treating empty
phrases as if they were concrete realities. The confusion is particularly destructive
when we endow abstractions with deep emotional significance
and confound judgment with observation. The essence of Shavian realism
is that it avoids such errors. A good introductory course in realist vision
can be found in Chase’s The Tyranny of Words or S. I. Hayakawa’s Language
in Thought and Action. The fundamental delusion of idealism is a
misuse of language, a way of confusing words with realities. In particular it
is a consequence of “confusing what is inside our head with what is outside,”
as Hayakawa succinctly puts it (200). Ideals are empty phantoms