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

42 Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religion
‘Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren
ye have done it unto me’ is not Altruism or Othersism . . . it
accepts entire identification of ‘me’ with ‘the least of these.’ (Quintessence
[1913] 181–82)
If Shaw seems at times to follow a utilitarian road, it is because, like the
utilitarians, he rejected external moral codes; he was not concerned with
whether a given action conformed to some ethical principle but with “its
effect on happiness” (Quintessence 292). The word “happiness” is misleading,
and Shaw changed it in 1913 to “life,” perhaps to avoid precisely
the confusion of his views with what he had called in the 1891 edition the
“mechanical utilitarian ethic . . . which treats Man as the sport of every
circumstance, and ignores his will altogether” (238). 2 Shaw’s observation
that the utilitarian ethic ignores man’s will is revealing, for it shows that
he saw that the utilitarian, blindly following his calculus of pain and pleasure,
is as much the victim of hallucinatory ideals as is the conventional
moralist. The will cannot be reduced to pleasure and pain. It follows its
own road and is the ultimate source of both sin and salvation.
Utilitarian Idealism
I became personally aware of the folly of utilitarian idealism when I witnessed
a friend of mine in a heated dispute with his wife about leaving a
bird feeder untended while they went on vacation. The wife was greatly
distressed at the idea of leaving the birds unprovided for, while her husband
insisted that the purpose of the bird feeder was to “provide for our
pleasure, not the birds!” His pleasure principle ultimately won out, leaving
both husband and wife forlorn: she because of the distress of the birds; he
owing to his wife’s unhappiness.
Now this is a strange sort of Calvinist hedonism indeed, its unswerving
tenet being that you must strive to be selfish no matter how miserable it
makes you. Of course, the utilitarian illusion that all values can be reduced
to the relative measurement of pleasure and pain is given the lie, as Shaw
was fond of pointing out, by the observation that “if you test life by striking
a balance between the pleasures and the pains of living, you will go
straight . . . and commit suicide” (Practical Politics 2). When you perversely
choose instead to live, the utilitarian idealist may try to convince
you that you are the victim of superstition and illusion, but he fails to see
that the will to live, to help others, or even to provide for small hungry
birds is no more irrational than the will to avoid pain. Pain and pleasure
may be in some way more primitive expressions of the will, but they are