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

The Will and Its Responsibilities 57
into a stature commensurate with your own (for we must be convinced
that ours is the more advanced manifestation of the world-will)? How is
moral progress possible? If we lapse into passivity on the grounds that one
person’s will is as good as another’s and that despite our differences we are
all condemned to be who we are, do we not invite irresponsibility in the
way feared by Erasmus and other opponents of determinism? They argue
that if we give up an inch of the individual’s free will, whether to God’s
unknowable decree, the laws of physics, or a “will of which I am a part,” we
provide the shirker with the unanswerable excuse that “I cannot help myself,
that is just the way I am made.” But individual wills, although expressions
of something larger, are to a significant extent identical with our
“selves.” We cannot blame our wills on anyone or anything else; we are
our wills. For Shaw, the highest responsibility was responsibility to oneself;
this does not tell us how we may influence the ethical perceptions of
others, but it does point the way, which is to awaken that higher self in
others and expose it to those facts that have sensitized our own. We can
only adopt what Shaw called the apostolic rather than the Athanasian attitude.
The former is a desire to convert others to our beliefs for the sake of
sympathy and light; the latter is an impulse to murder people who do not
agree with us (Pref. Misalliance 4:70). That is all we can do.
On inspection, it turns out to be quite a bit. The simplest technique is
just to expose people to the facts. Some of what we think of as immoral
behavior is based on ignorance of the facts. The difficulty arises when such
ignorance is willful self-deception designed to help people hide from their
own consciences. Realist moral persuasion depends, then, on rending the
veils of illusion and forcing the self-deceived to face the truth. This is never
easy, for we hate to stand naked before our consciences, but it is possible
when the objects of persuasion are hiding from their own ideals. Then one
may say: “This is what you profess; that is what you actually do. Prove that
you truly believe what you say by changing your actions to comply with
your protestations.” That is the essence of the nonviolent technique used
by Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. Despite the unflattering things that
Shaw said about ideals, moral progress often results when actions catch up
with ideals: American society is still reluctantly moving toward the ideals
professed in the Declaration of Independence, goaded from time to time by
the likes of Martin Luther King Jr. But the methods of Gandhi and King
would not have worked in places such as Nazi Germany or the South Africa
of apartheid, where racist exploitation and brutality were supported