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

66 Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religion
that one can pay for misdeeds through punishment—serves the guilty in a
manner similar to the way inequality serves the “idiots” of society: it protects
them from having to face themselves. As the worthless of society
shun the honest image of their own worth, so do the guilty seek refuge
from the glare of their own consciences. They can be saved as Major Barbara
saves Bill Walker, by bringing them inexorably face to face with their
own souls, but like Todger Fairmile, they will struggle against their salvation
with a strength born of terror. Again the irony that the “natural”
solution—in this case the regulation of ethical behavior by the conscience
of each individual—is possible only under the most controlled and disciplined
of circumstances.
These natural solutions to human problems never happen naturally.
The abolition of decency laws will not have everyone going around naked.
The purpose of clothing is to hide not our beauty but our ugliness. Modesty
has nothing to do with it. The natural growth of the individual soul as
well as of society depends on the acceptance of the naked truth about our
souls; the ideal of justice is precious to us because it is a lie.
Impracticable People
Responsibility to oneself, provided it is honest and the subject has not been
degraded into inhumanity by poverty and brutality, is a powerful moral
restraint. The trick is to prevent evasion of this terrifying responsibility.
Realism means responsibility: the responsibility to face moral truths. But
if Shaw’s vision of a responsible society makes fearful demands of its citizens,
it requires even more of its governors, for they must eventually confront
the existence of souls so atrophied that they are irredeemable: those
Shaw refers to as “impracticable people.” Like his Major Barbara, Shaw
does not accept that these are “scoundrels” (which is not a description but
a license to inflict injury with an air of piety), he merely observes, as he did
of actual inmates he had seen, “that as it was evidently impossible to reform
such men, it was useless to torture them, and dangerous to release
them” (“Imprisonment” 857). Shaw’s answer to the inevitable question,
What, then, do you do with them? is simply: Kill them. No issue more
starkly illustrates the difference between Shaw and the sensitive humanitarians
with whom he was normally allied. He cannot be said to support
capital punishment, for he did not accept any form of punishment. He rejected
the three conventional objectives of criminal imprisonment: retribution,
deterrence, and rehabilitation. The first is a barbaric superstition,