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

58 Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religion
by popular ideals rather than unacknowledged violations of them. Where
slavery is sanctified as religion and genocide as science, quiet moral persuasion
appears a frail straw indeed.
The Uses of Ideals
Since ideals are such effective tools for social pioneers like King and
Gandhi, it is worth reconsidering what Shaw regarded as the Ibsenist position:
that ideals should constantly be examined and questioned, with the
new replacing the old in pace with the growth of human consciousness.
What can be so wrong with ideals so long as they are not allowed to stagnate
and become a hindrance rather than a help to the human spirit? The
creation of new ideals allows us to resolve conflicts between higher and
lower manifestations of the will in the direction of spiritual progress. Instead
of scorning Thomas Jefferson as a hypocrite for owning slaves while
expounding the ideal of human equality, would it not be more sensible
(and safer, lest anyone inquire too closely into the correspondence between
our own actions and ideals) to rejoice that ideals exceed actuality, for they
are spiritual aspirations. We should think of them as unfulfilled goals, as
food on which our spirits can grow until we can shed the old ideals as a
snake sheds its skin, recognizing that what had protected our ethical
growth in former stages now serves only to constrict it. Shaw, on whom
the lesson of The Wild Duck was not lost, would agree that for the majority
of the human population this argument was inescapable. Those who cannot
think in moral terms without ideals must of course have them, but that
some people cannot move without wheelchairs is no reason to compel universal
use of them. It is always better, says the realist, to face the truth than
to hide from it. But part of the truth is that many will not face it under any
compunction, and we could well ask, as Relling might have Gregors Werle,
“What harm does this dishonesty do?”
The answer to that question is the heart of the Shavian ethical position.
It has to do with the reason that such dishonesty is so universally tempting.
What is the source of its seductive power? Ideals come in many guises.
The most pernicious, at least from Shaw’s point of view, is the arbitrary
standard of behavior self-righteously imposed by the powerful and cravenly
accepted by the weak. But what of the progressive idealist, the one
who stands up for a new ideal, such as the woman who abandons ideal
femininity to espouse the ideal of sexual equality? Can we fault her for
moral cowardice? Yes, says the realist, for although she has the (not inconsiderable)
courage to defy conventional ideals, she lacks the courage to do