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

38 Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religion
that those seven hundred “Philistines” are quite as free from deluding ideals
as is the one realist. That should warn us to beware of feeling smugly
superior to nineteenth-century ideals. It is as easy to laugh at antiquated
ideals as at discarded fashions, but our children will laugh as heartily and
as justly at our own intellectual as well as physical garments. We wear our
clothes and our morals more loosely now than then, and that is no doubt a
good thing, but idealism is by no means dead; and an age in which presidential
elections are decided by the intensity of a candidate’s commitment
to flag worship should pause before condemning another age as idolatrous.
Realism, in Shaw’s sense, is as distinctly abnormal today as it was one
hundred years ago.
Idealism is seductive because it provides masks for realities we dare not
face. This is true of liberating ideals as well as enslaving ones; it is true for
the woman who made an ideal of her will to become a mathematician as
well as for the moralist who idealizes matrimony because he cannot face
the failure of his own marriage. Idealism is a mask whether it is used to
deny our wills or to liberate them. In the former case it allows us to hide
from our sense of failure and inadequacy. In the latter it provides a hedge
against responsibility. It allows us to avoid saying, “I will do it because I
want to.” Thus both forms of idealism are a denial of self and of responsibility.
Whether we thwart our wills or enable them, ideals provide a barrier
between ourselves and our wills. That is why they are pernicious.
Shaw’s rejection of idealism is inseparable from his belief in the inevitable
primacy of the individual will. It led as well to something he called
“moral equality.” On those three solid columns—realism, individualism,
and equality—his entire philosophy was carefully and logically built. For
all their logic and inevitability, however, some of those developments still
have the power to startle and even to shock.