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

40 Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religion
ceived little attention. Actually, it is a description of Shaw’s intellectual
development seen as a dialectical argument.
Shaw’s Intellectual Development
The realist (Shaw), although brought up in an environment of conventional
hypocritical piety, sees through such sham as soon as his critical
faculties develop. He recognizes that many of the institutions revered by
those around him are nothing but illusions. He sees that Falstaff was right,
and “honor” is nothing but a word; there is nothing in the objective, observable
world that corresponds to the word “honor.” He recognizes the
childishness of Bible-worship and the inconsistencies and improbabilities
of conventional religion. He becomes aware of an unconventional belief
system that proposes to be consistent and honest. It is based vaguely in
something called science; Shaw calls it rationalism and materialism. It is a
very refreshing religion for a disillusioned realist who thirsts most of all
for things as they are, not simply as we might cravenly wish them to be. It
has one glaring flaw: in confusing “objectivity” with “realism,” it fails to
acknowledge what is inside as well as what is outside.
Rationalism, for Shaw, is virtually indistinguishable from what philosophers
call utilitarian ethics. “Rationalists” attempted to discard superstition
and live entirely by the principles of reason. They concluded that a
rationally developed value system could be derived entirely through a
simple calculus of pain and pleasure. Schopenhauer’s great insight—that
will, not reason, was the source of human action—was hopelessly contaminated
in Shaw’s view by his acceptance of the “Rationalist-Mercantilist
error of valuing life according to its individual profits in pleasure” (Major
Critical Essays 310). 1 Shaw saw that Schopenhauer did not understand
the significance of his own insight, for will is not merely motive power but
the source of all values: the pessimistic conclusion that will is a malign
force is unjustified and self-contradictory. You cannot declare that will is
bad because will is the foundation of all value: as Bertrand Russell put it,
“Outside human desires there is no moral standard” (“What I Believe”
62). Shaw instinctively understood that all our values come not from outside
but from inside ourselves; and in this he was in complete accord with
recent philosophy: A. J. Ayer claims that one of the few twentieth-century
notions on which philosophers now agree is that “there is no such thing as
an authoritative guide to moral judgement” (15). Both ethical judgments
and those longings we think of as immoral or selfish come from the same
place, from within ourselves; they are aspects of what we want—of our