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

Realism 37
woven out of words and inflated with wishes or fears; they are given the
illusion of substance when they are blown up with our longings. They
begin with the simple mistaking of word for thing, but that alone is not
enough to sustain them. We cling to ideals because they are the crutches
and the shields of our enfeebled wills; we dare not face the world and say “I
want that such and such be done,” or “I wish thus and that,” or “I detest
and abhor this or the other” on our own authority: we must give our desires
and fears a foreign habitation and a name—one apart from and superior
to our own tremulous souls.
The wishes and fears are real. What is inside is not only real but is vital.
Shaw realized that the idealists have a valid point when they protest that
most of the exhortations to see things as they are, to avoid the distortions
of sentimentality and emotion, whether in the name of objectivity, naturalism,
realism, or science, are the commandments of death: they ask us to
eliminate all that is most vital. They seek to gain cold, objective truth at the
price of life itself, to deny or destroy what is inside for the sake of what is
outside. Shaw does not make that mistake; he insists only that we not confuse
the two, that we not confound the outside with the inside. He recognizes
that the idealist is a higher type than the Philistine because he will
not settle for mere bovine contentment; he cannot live without his aspiration
for something greater.
The Objectification of Desire
In the closing sentences of his preface to the Pleasant Plays, Shaw suggests
that his business is to dramatize the consequences “of our persistent attempts
to found our institutions on the ideals suggested to our imaginations
by our half-satisfied passions” (1:385). Ideals are illusions that are
either self-imposed or else clung to as if they had been. They are dangerous
because we invest in them our desires and fears; they are manufactured
receptacles for our passions: idols, in a word. The passions themselves
are real, are important, and must be acknowledged. Idealism errs to
the extent that it is the inclination to act as if our passions—our values and
desires—had objective as well as subjective reality. At heart, the realist’s
secret is a simple knack for always making the distinction between what is
inside and what is outside without also making the mistake of dismissing
the inside as mere contamination of objectivity. What is inside is life itself.
Realism is as simple as it is uncommon. Shaw’s estimate of one realist in
a thousand is probably generous. We can all claim to be realists with respect
to those ideals we happen not to share. We can, that is, if we forget