George Bernard Shaw: Mystic or Atheist?
by Gary Sloan
(e-mail: [email protected])
[December 24th, 2004]
Shaw (1856-1950) was one of the
world’s most celebrated playwrights. Via such plays as Man and
Superman, Major Barbara, Caesar and Cleopatra, Arms and
the Man, Saint Joan, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Heartbreak
House, Candida, The Doctor’s Dilemma, The Devil’s Disciple,
Back to Methuselah, and Pygmalion (an adaptation of which
became the movie My Fair Lady), the expatriate Irishman forged a grand
repertoire in English second only to Shakespeare’s. Awarded the Nobel
Prize for literature in 1923, long after his days as a struggling artist, Shaw
refused the £7000 prize, commenting that “the money is a lifebelt thrown to a
swimmer who has already reached the shore in safety.” At his behest, the
money was given to the Anglo-Swedish Literary Alliance.
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| “While Jesus fared better than Yahweh, Shaw impugned the doctrines of atonement and universal love. Atonement he deemed a demoralizing and unchristian doctrine...” |
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In his waning years, he became an
international icon. In George Bernard Shaw: His Life and Personality,
Hesketh Pearson describes the adulation:
“Whatever he said or did was treated with respect, tinged with awe. When he clowned people laughed dutifully, when he cut a caper they
applauded reverentially. Every word he uttered was cabled across several
continents. Every nonsensical joke he made was gratefully accepted as the
garnered wisdom of a profound thinker.” Though Shaw was susceptible to bouts
of megalomania, he was capable of viewing his apotheosis with amused
detachment. “I am the most extraordinary man in London,” he informed writer Ernest Rhys, “and
you are quite welcome to give this fact on my authority.”
Shaw was an indefatigable crusader
for social amelioration. At a time when the English stage trafficked in
romantic fripperies, he awakened complacent audiences to a host of social ills
abetted by conventional morality, bourgeois respectability, and ossified
institutions. “I was a social reformer and doctrinaire first, last, and
all the time,” he wrote. “I saw a way through the Valley of the Shadow
and believed that when men understood their predicament they could and would
escape from it.” Enlivening didacticism with mordant wit, he dissected slum
landlordism, prostitution, marriage, free love, politics, militarism,
nationalism, jingoism, capitalism, evangelism, and other isms steeped in
hypocrisy, cant, and deceit.
He was a lifelong socialist, vegetarian, and pacifist. His
first public speech, made in 1885 before the Industrial Remuneration Conference
in London,
scorched capitalism. The speech opened: “I hope any
shareholders and landlords who may be present will accept my assurance that I
have no more desire to hurt their feelings than to give pain to burglars.
I merely wish to point out that all three inflict on the community an injury of
precisely the same nature.” As a leading pundit for the Fabian Society,
Shaw was instrumental in the formation of the Labor Party, which assimilated
the genteel form of Marxism espoused by Fabians.
His vegetarianism was actuated by
an egalitarian view of species and concern for humanity. He envisioned a
cortege of animals paying him posthumous homage: “My will contains
directions for my funeral, which will be followed not by mourning coaches, but
by herds of oxen, sheep, swine, flocks of poultry, and a small traveling
aquarium of live fish, all wearing white scarves in honor of the man who
perished rather than eat his fellow-creatures. It will be, with the
exception of the procession into Noah’s Ark,
the most remarkable thing of the kind ever seen.” A carnivorous
lifestyle, he believed, coarsened sensibilities, squandered natural resources,
and debased workers in the meat industry
Shaw was reviled for his intransigent pacifism. During the First World
War, his Common Sense About the War earned him
the epithet Most Hated Man in England.
Having averred that the British were as crass and pugnacious as the Germans, he
was ostracized throughout the land, even by erstwhile friends. On the eve
of World War II, in a talk broadcast by the B.B.C., the octogenarian defended
pacifism by citing the Gospels: “The pacifist movement against war takes
as its charter the ancient document called ‘The Sermon on the Mount.’ The
sermon is a very moving exhortation, and it gives you one first-rate tip, which
is to do good to those who despitefully use you and
persecute you. I, who am a much hated man, have been doing that all my
life, and I can assure you that there is no better fun; whereas revenge and
resentment make life miserable and the avenger hateful. The lesson we
have to learn is that our dislike for a certain person, or even for the whole
human race, does not give us any right to injure our fellow-creatures, however
odious they may be.”
Until he was thirty or so, Shaw called himself an atheist. He became one,
he later quipped, before he could think. He adjudged the doctrines of the
Church of Ireland, which he attended as a child,
unintelligible or absurd. Since the first of its Thirty-nine Articles
describes God as “without body, parts, or passions,” he waggishly theorized
that the church was atheistic. An incomprehensible god, he opined, was
tantamount to no god. In 1875, he blazoned his atheism abroad. In a
letter to Public Opinion, a Dublin
newspaper, he “announced with inflexible materialistic logic, and to the
extreme horror of my respectable connections, that I was an atheist.” In Immaturity,
the first of five novels he wrote in his twenties, the young protagonist,
obviously Shaw’s alter ego, walks pensively in the cloisters of Westminster
Abbey: “His hushed step, impressive bearing, and reflective calm, marked
him as a confirmed freethinker.”
At a bachelor party, when someone alleged that a local infidel had been slain
by a wrathful god, Shaw proposed to demonstrate “the absurdity of the belief in
violent interferences with the order of nature by a short-tempered and
thin-skinned supernatural deity.” Pulling out his watch, he announced he
would dare the Almighty to strike him dead within five minutes. “The
effect,” he later recounted, “was electrical. Neither skeptics nor
devotees were prepared to abide the result of the experiment. In vain did
I urge the pious to trust in the accuracy of their deity’s aim with a
thunderbolt, and the justice of his discrimination between the innocent and the
guilty. In vain did I appeal to the sceptics to accept the logical outcome of their scepticism.
It soon appeared that when thunderbolts were in question there were no sceptics.” The host, fearing the impious challenge
would precipitate a stampede of guests, forbade the experiment.
To save Shaw from hell-fire, a friend prevailed on a Roman Catholic priest to
catechize the upstart atheist. Having repaired with his catechumen to a
church cell, the priest began:
“The universe exists; somebody must
have made it.”
“If that somebody exists,”
interposed Shaw, “somebody must have made him.”
“I
grant that for the sake of argument,” said the priest. “I grant you a
maker of God. I grant you a maker of the maker of God. I grant you
as long a line of makers as you please; but an infinity
of makers is unthinkable and extravagant; it is no harder to believe in number
one than in number fifty thousand or fifty million; so why not accept number
one and stop there, since no attempt to get behind him will remove your logical
difficulty?”
“By your
leave,” Shaw replied, “it is as easy for me to believe that the universe made
itself as that the maker of the universe made himself, in fact much easier; for
the universe visibly exists and makes itself as it goes along, whereas a maker
for it is a hypothesis.”
Fifty years later, Shaw stuck to his guns. He told an interviewer for a
church magazine: “A First Cause is a contradiction in terms, because in
causation every cause must have a cause; and therefore there can no more be a
First Cause than a first inch in a circle. If you once admit a cause that
is uncaused, you give up causation altogether. And if you do that, you
may as well say that everything makes itself. I daresay every black
beetle thinks it must have a complete explanation of the world as one of the
indispensable qualifications of a respectable cockroach.”
Congenitally deprived, he liked to
say, of the phrenologist’s “bump of veneration,” Shaw scoffed at superstition,
churches, ecclesiastics, rituals, ceremonies, and creeds. In The
Adventures of the Black Girl in Search for God, a sardonic tale
published in 1933, he derided the myopic sectarianism that strews dissension
among Christians. In an African forest, the girl meets a stooped and
disheveled fisherman (St. Peter) bearing on his shoulders a huge paper
cathedral. As he is leaving, several more bedraggled wayfarers appear,
each carrying a smaller paper church. They implore the girl: “Do
not believe the fisherman. Do not listen to those other fellows.
Mine is the true church.” As the girl hastens away, the sojourners throw
stones at one another.
Shaw favored parliamentary
legislation to abrogate the Church of England. In “The Church Versus
Religion,” he depicted the average rector as a bigoted toady of secular power
and privilege: “He claims and exercises all the liberties of a
country gentleman, and wallows openly in class prejudices. Often he snubs
the poor and sides with the squire against them; he sees to it that servility
and imperialist militarism are inculcated in the Church schools; he pitches the
emblems of Christian peace into the cellar and waves the Union Jack the moment
there is any question of war; he supports the way of the police as God’s
appointed way of dealing with crime.”
Shaw depicted the god of Abraham
and Moses as a boastful, imperious, and sanguinary fiend. When the black
girl finds him, he commands: “Kneel down and worship me this very
instant, or dread my wrath. I am the Lord of Hosts: I made the heavens
and the earth and all that is in them. I made the poison of the snake and
the milk in your mother’s breast. In my hand are death and all the
diseases, the thunder and the lightning, the storm and the pestilence. On
your knees, girl; and when you next come before me, bring me your favorite
child and slay it here before me as a sacrifice; for I love the smell of newly
spilled blood.”
While Jesus fared better than
Yahweh, Shaw impugned the doctrines of atonement and universal love.
Atonement he deemed “a demoralizing and unchristian doctrine, a means by which
we cheat our consciences, evade our moral responsibilities, and turn our shame
into self-congratulations by loading all our infamies on to the scourged
shoulders of Christ.” Vicarious remissions of guilt were inherently
ignoble and unjust.
Notwithstanding his paean to “The
Sermon on the Mount,” Shaw considered it psychologically impossible to obey
“the commandment to love one another.” Humans weren’t lovable
animals: “If you tell me to be perfect as my Father in Heaven is perfect,
I can only say that I wish I could. That is more politic than telling you
to go to the zoo and advise the monkeys to become men and the cockatoos to
become birds of paradise.”
Even when he no longer
thought of himself as an atheist, Shaw lauded atheists for clearing minds of
theological rubbish: “The real religion of today was made possible only
by the materialistic-physicists and atheistic critics who performed the
indispensable preliminary operation of purging us thoroughly of the ignorant
and vicious superstitions which were thrust down our throats as religion in our
helpless childhood.” Against an atheism born of despair and anger, Shaw counterposed “the youthful atheism with which every able
modern mind begins, an atheism that clears the soul of superstitions and
terrors and servilities and base compliances and hypocrisies, and lets in the
light of heaven.”
In the 1890s, Shaw renounced atheism and repackaged
himself as a mystic. He also tinkered with his past. Now, his
atheism had not really been atheism. He had called himself an atheist
only “because belief in God meant belief in the old tribal idol called Jehovah;
and I would not pretend I did not know whether it existed or not.” While
atheists still cleaned the Augean stables of superstition, they were now deemed
“superficial and light-minded.” They overrated reason: “I exhausted
rationalism at the age of twenty-four,” Shaw told his friend Dame Laurentia McLachlan, an abbess,
“and should have come to a dead stop if I had not proceeded to purely mystical
assumptions.” The roots of his mysticism stretched deeper and
deeper: “I am, and I always have been, a mystic,” he informed an audience
in 1911. As an Irish Protestant, he was born to the manner: “The
true Protestant is a mystic, not an Institutionalist.”
Shaw’s
renunciation of atheism was accompanied by sallies against scientific
materialism. By undermining teleological conceptions of the cosmos,
science eviscerated joy and hope: “If there is no purpose or design in
the universe,” Shaw told an audience, “the sooner we all cut our throats the
better, for it is not much of a place to live in.” At a toast to Einstein
in 1930, Shaw polarized science and religion: “Religion gives us
certainty, stability, peace. It gives us absolutes which we long for.
Science is always wrong and never solves a problem without raising ten more
problems.”
Shaw skewered Darwinism “When its whole significance dawns on you,” he wrote
in the Preface to Back to Methuselah, “you heart sinks into a heap of
sand within you. There is a hideous fatalism about it, a ghastly and
damnable reduction of beauty and intelligence, of strength and purpose, of honour and aspiration, to such casually picturesque changes
as an avalanche may make in a mountain landscape, or a railway accident in a
human figure.” Darwinism sabotaged morality. It “proclaimed that
our true relation is that of competitors and combatants in a struggle for mere
survival, and that every act of pity or loyalty is a vain and mischievous
attempt to lessen the severity of the struggle and preserve inferior varieties
from the efforts of nature to weed them out.” Apparently, it never
occurred to Shaw that natural selection might favor altruism and
cooperation.
Victorians, Shaw contended,
initially embraced Darwinism because it resolved the metaphysical problem of
evil. In an undesigned world, plague,
pestilence, famine, diphtheria, cancer, tuberculosis, and other natural ills no
longer had to be reconciled with the sovereignty of an omnipotent and
benevolent deity. People could say: “All this wonderful adaptation
of means to end, all this design which seems to imply a designer is an
illusion; it may have all come about by the operation of what we call blind
chance.” Good riddance to “a spiteful, narrow, wicked, personal God, who
was always interfering and doing stupid and cruel things.” Later, after
the flush of relief had subsided, the world “felt the void.”
To fill the void, real or imagined,
Shaw began to spread “the Gospel of Shawianity.”
He evangelized for an idiosyncratic version of Henri Bergson’s
creative evolution, stripped of the Frenchman’s ruminations on space, time,
duration, memory, and mind. Shaw’s gospel also has affinities with
evolutionary notions propounded by Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck, Alfred Russel Wallace, Petr Kropotkin, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. From
the first decade of the 20th century to the end of his life, in
speeches, essays, stories, letters, and plays, Shaw expatiated on the life
force—a mysterious power, immanent in living matter, that supposedly drove
evolution. Shaw reified the power as an inchoate deity struggling to
actualize itself in organisms. Every species had been an instrument of
its effort to acquire power, knowledge and understanding. Through trial
and error, at a laggard pace, it inched its way upward: “Conceive of the
force behind the universe,” Shaw said in “The New Theology,” a 1907 speech, “as
a bodiless, impotent force, having no executive power of its own, wanting
instruments, something to carry out its will in the world, making all manner of
experiments, creating reptiles, birds, animals, trying one thing after another,
rising higher and higher in the scale of organism, and finally producing man,
now and then inspiring that man, putting his will into him, getting him to
carry out his purpose.”
The life force exhorted humans to
seek signs of cosmic intent: “Remember, you are not here merely to look
after yourself. I have made your hand to do my work; I have made your
brain, and I want you to work with that and try to find out the purpose of the
universe.” The life force esteemed self-sacrifice. In The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet,
a play, the life force infiltrates the conscience of a disreputable horse thief
who risks his life to save a child. Afterwards, the homespun thief
edifies his cohorts: “You bet the Lord [aka the
life force] didn’t make us for nothing; and He wouldn’t have made us at all if
He could have done His work without us. By gum, that must be what we’re
for! He’d never have made us to be rotten drunken blackguards like
me. He made me because he had a job to do. He let me run
loose till the job was ready; and then I had to come along and do
it. And I tell you it didn’t feel rotten; it felt bully, just
bully.”
Like
Darwinism, creative evolution demystified evil. It was an inevitable
byproduct of the life force’s quest for self-realization: “Many of the
earlier efforts of this force—for example, the tiger—remain, and the
incompatibility between them and man exists in the human being himself as the
result of early experiments, so that there are certain organs in the body which
are perishing away, and are of no use and actually interfere with our later
organs. And here you have the explanation of that great riddle which used
to puzzle people—evil and pain. A number of things which are at present
killing and maiming us in our own organism have got to
be evolved out of us and the process is painful.”
In Shawianity,
God was a work in progress, not a fait accompli. In a 1909 letter
to Leo Tolstoy, Shaw explained: “To me God does not yet exist; but
there is a creative force struggling to evolve an executive organ of godlike
knowledge and power; that is, to achieve omnipotence and omniscience; and every
man and woman born is a fresh attempt to achieve this object. We are here
to help God, to do his work, to remedy his whole errors, to strive towards
Godhead ourselves. ” In its odyssey to achieve
fruition, the life force would create ever-higher forms of humanity--supermen,
super-supermen, supermen to the third power: “When one instrument is worn
out, I will make another, and another, and another, always more and more
intelligent and effective.”
Shaw
fused the life force with the instrument. In “The New Theology,” he
prepped his audience: “When you are asked, ‘Where is God? Who
is God?’ stand up and say, ‘I am God and here is God, not as yet completed, but
sill advancing towards completion, just in so much as I am working for the
purpose of the universe, working for the good of the whole society and the
whole world, instead of merely looking after my personal ends.’” God
“would provide himself with a perfectly fashioned and trustworthy
instrument. And such an instrument would be nothing less than God
himself.”
The concept of a life force, vital
force, élan vital, res
naturae (Shaw considered the terms
interchangeable) scarcely needs a critique. That ghostly impresario was
exorcised long ago from mainstream biology. In the 1930s, the Encyclopedia
Britannica set forth the standard model of life: “A living organism,
from the point of view of the scientific observer, is a self-regulating,
self-repeating, self-repairing, physico-chemical
complex mechanism. What we call ‘life’ is the sum of its physico-chemical processes, forming a continuous interdependent
series without break, and without the interference of any mysterious extraneous
force.” Today, the mind itself is being elucidated in the language of
nerve cells, neurotransmitters, hormone surges, and repetitive neural
networks. Despite the protests of die-hard vitalists,
the life force remains a superfluous will-o’-the
wisp.
According to Hesketh
Pearson, “Shaw’s most sympathetic friends agreed that he had a hopelessly
unscientific mind, and to discuss biology with him was impossible and
ridiculous.” Shaw adduced no evidence in favor of the life force, other
than an extraneous insistence that Darwinism was incompatible with hope,
aspiration, and altruism. He merely postulated the existence of the force
and described its modus operandi. When Shaw invoked the life force
to explain the course of evolution up to the present, he violated Occam’s Razor,
the principle of parsimony in hypotheses, since what the life force purports to
illuminate can be illuminated without it. When Shaw described the future
course of evolution, he ratcheted up his propensity for wild
surmise.
Shaw’s motive for believing in the
life force was more emotional than intellectual. The conviction that
virtue and wisdom will ultimately vanquish wickedness and ignorance justified
his humanitarian zeal, bulwarked his native optimism, and quieted his inner
demons. Shaw, someone said, was a mixture of Mephistopheles and Jesus
Christ. Though he ridiculed churches, clerics, orthodoxy, and anthropomorphic
gods, he retained the moral fervor of his Protestant heritage. When
hawking the life force and socialism, he was a holy prophet pitching the Kingdom of Heaven.
Ironically, despite his repudiation
of atheism, Shaw may have died an unwitting atheist. Though he called
himself a mystic, his credentials were suspect. He had had no mystical visitation, he didn’t believe that the ultimate reality is
ineffable, that the material world is illusory, or that all is well despite
appearances to the contrary. He didn’t deny the reality of space and
time, nor did he think a beneficent spirit suffuses every nook and cranny of
the universe. He didn’t believe in the god of the Bible or the god of the
philosophers. He altogether rejected the concept of a transcendent creator,
“a somebody behind the something.”
In truth, Shaw didn’t believe in an
existing God at all. What he believed was that evolution, eons hence,
will produce a godlike race in which the life force will consummate its quest
for godhead. If, as theologians and philosophers have traditionally
maintained, current existence is a necessary attribute of god, Shaw qualifies
as an atheist, albeit an involuntary one.
Resources
and Avenues for Further Study
· Google: George
Bernard Shaw
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