The Political Devolution of George Bernard Shaw.
From Candida to Man and Superman to The Apple Cart.
Unraveling a tangle of democracy, autocracy, evolution, and eugenics.
Burton Weltman
Prologue: The Best of Times and the Worst of Times.
I am writing this piece in late-August, 2020 during times that are politically both extremely perilous in the United States but also hopeful. We have a would-be authoritarian President whose life has been one-long effort to dominate over others, and who is busy fomenting racism, misogyny, xenophobia, violence, and pernicious lies of all sorts toward that end. He is, in effect, promoting a killer pandemic through criminal negligence and misinformation, all for self-serving political purposes. In this context, we have a national election coming up in November that could determine whether democracy will long survive in the country. That’s the bad news.
The good news is that we also have movements for racial and gender justice that currently have the support of majorities of people in the country. And a majority of the public seems to oppose Trump and his policies. So, maybe he will be voted out in November and some sense and sanity will return to our government. It is a perilous but also a hopeful situation for people like me who believe in making the world better through caring rather than worse with hating.
The situation raises many social and political questions for which we can look to history and literature for answers. Among these questions is one posed by the upcoming election as to whether Americans are willing to support democracy. How can it be that someone as vile as Donald Trump was elected President, and how can it be that some forty percent of the public still support him after almost four years of misrule? Is there something in our political ideology that predisposes Americans toward would-be strong men and a politics of enmity?
Another question is posed by the Me-Too, Black Lives Matter, and other current social movements as to how to think about people whose social and political views were acceptable in their times but are abhorrent to us today. Should some of them be cancelled, to use a current phrase? Can some of them be critiqued but still saved from complete rejection?
I think that George Bernard Shaw provides a useful test case for these questions.
Presenting Problem: Should we cancel George Bernard Shaw?
What to do about George Bernard Shaw? Shaw has often been considered the second-best playwright in the English language, second to only Shakespeare. He is a wonderfully witty writer who satirized everything, including himself and his own ideas. Shaw was very popular during his lifetime. He won a Nobel Prize for literature in 1925. And his plays continued to be very popular after his death in 1950. There is even a highly-regarded theater festival in Ontario, Canada dedicated to Shaw’s plays. He has been widely esteemed, that is, until recently.
In recent years, Shaw has come under criticism for anti-democratic and illiberal statements that he made later in his life. His reputation has suffered and critics have questioned whether we should still consider him to be a great playwright and to perform his works. Shaw’s politics evolved, or rather devolved in my opinion, over the course of his long career. Having begun as an advocate for democracy and diversity, he ended up supporting dictators and eugenics. Having begun as a supportive satirist of democracy, he moved to skepticism and finally to cynicism.
Shaw’s ironical and self-mocking style allowed most people for most of the last century to gloss over his increasingly antidemocratic and illiberal pronouncements. But his views have come under closer critical scrutiny in recent years, and they don’t stand up to the scrutiny.
A reevaluation of Shaw raises at least two important questions. First, what happened to Shaw that led him to go down the antidemocratic path, and can we identify ideas in his earlier works that predisposed him to the positions he took later? Was there something in his earlier ideas, some flaw or skewing, that predisposed him to move from liberalism to authoritarianism? And do other progressives share similar illiberal ideas that might undermine their own efforts and even help their right-wing opponents?
Second, what should we think about Shaw, and others like him, whose social and political views were within the range of respectability in their times but are abhorrent to us today? How do we reckon with someone like Shaw, whom we have reason to admire but also reason to reject? Is it morally feasible for us to continue to enjoy his plays while critiquing their messages and him?
Shaw lived ninety-four years, from 1856 to 1950, during which time he wrote dozens of plays and essays. He was a prodigious writer and left a lot to look at. I think, however, that by looking at a small sample of his works, I can hazard some answers to the questions I have asked about him. Toward that end, I am going to examine the Fabian Essays, written in part and edited by Shaw in 1888, and three of Shaw’s plays that reflect the contours of his devolution.
The first play, Candida, was written in 1893 and represents Shaw’s early days of optimism. The second play, Man and Superman, was written in 1903 and reflects a turning point in Shaw’s ideas. It seems to exemplify the ambivalence of a person who doesn’t quite know which way he is going. The third play, The Apple Cart, was written in 1928, and it reflects Shaw’s cynical turn against democracy and toward dictatorship. In looking at these works, I think we can see tendencies in his earlier writings – an elitism coupled with impatience – that predisposed him to his later positions. At the same time, I think there are reasons still to read and perform his plays.
The Devolution of George Bernard Shaw.
Shaw’s plays are ironical, satirical, extremely witty, and full of provocative ideas. He gloried in making controversial statements, claiming that his goal was to epater le bourgeois, that is, to shock and stick it to the staid, conventional middle class. Shaw was, nonetheless, much to his ostensible chagrin, very popular among his bourgeois audience during his life.
Shaw was an avowedly political playwright whose plays promoted his ideas. He insisted that writers, and everyone else for that matter, needed to believe in and strive for something bigger than themselves, and their works should reflect these goals. Shaw’s life was, however, a particularly long one that extended over many social and political eras, and his works reflect the different positions that he took over those years. And therein lies the problem.
Shaw started in the late nineteenth century as an advocate of democracy, socialism, and cultural diversity. As the years went by, he continued to advocate for socialism but became increasingly disenchanted with diversity and democracy, and increasingly enchanted with eugenics and dictatorship. His idea of socialism took on a distinctly authoritarian cast.
By the 1920’s and 1930’s, Shaw was speaking favorably of Mussolini, Stalin, and even Hitler. He did not support the totalitarianism or brutalitarianism of these dictators, nor did he support their racism, sexism, antisemitism or xenophobia. But he came to admire dictators for their alleged efficiency – Mussolini, after all, supposedly made the Italian trains run on time – a view that was shared by many respectable people. Shaw also came increasingly to promote eugenics as a means of genetically producing intelligent people capable of living in modern society.
In delineating the devolution of Shaw’s political ideas, I think that a key factor was his understanding of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of the ubermensch. Or rather, his misunderstanding. I think Shaw misread Darwin and Nietzsche, and misread them in elitist, illiberal and antidemocratic ways similar to the right-wing Social Darwinians of the late nineteenth century and the Nazis of the twentieth century.
When Shaw became frustrated with the slow pace of social reform and with what he saw as the ignorance of the general public, his misreading of Darwin and Nietzsche put him on an intellectual path that trended downhill from democracy to autocracy and from diversity to eugenics. And he found himself in what he later conceded was some pretty nasty company.
As I will explain more fully below, Shaw portrayed evolution as a teleological process that aims at producing creatures with ever-higher levels of intelligence. In his view, biological evolution is a straight-line development of ever-more intelligent beings from amoebas on upward, with human beings currently at the highest point.
In this view, fitness, as in survival of the fittest, is defined as having a high IQ, in particular a high level of linguistic and logical intelligence. The sort of intelligence possessed by Shaw and people like him. This is a view of evolution that predisposed Shaw to elitism and to scorn for the democratic masses who did not have Shaw’s linguistic and logical intelligence. And it was not, in any case, the view of Darwin.
Shaw also viewed both social evolution and biological evolution as deterministic processes. That is, what is had to be, and what will be has to be. In Shaw’s view, a mark of wisdom is to recognize which way things are flowing and go with the flow, albeit getting ahead of the flow so that we can individually and collectively take the best advantage of it. Intelligent people will do this. The unintelligent won’t, and they are the problem.
Shaw shared with right-wing Social Darwinians and Nazis the view of evolution as a competition for dominance among species, social groups, and individuals, each trying to get over on each other. This view predisposed him to miss the cooperation that often drove biological and social change. Shaw was not big on cooperation in his writings. People are usually trying to get over on each other. Shaw used this view of evolution to argue for the workers’ getting over on the capitalists, but it was also used by Social Darwinians who sought to maintain the dominance of the rich over the poor and by Nazis who sought to kill off the Jews. In any case, it was not Darwin’s view of either biological or social change.
I think that Shaw also misused Nietzsche’s concept of the ubermensch. Ubermensch is conventionally and misleadingly translated as superman but it literally means overman. The concept is usually mistaken to refer to someone who dominates over other people, and this domination is then taken to be a good thing for the progress of humanity. On this basis, the concept was usually rejected by progressives but welcomed by Social Darwinians and Nazis.
But Nietzsche intended the concept of ubermensch to primarily mean someone who dominates over himself, someone who is never satisfied with what he is but is continually trying to get over and beyond himself. And that, in Nietzsche’s view, is how humanity progresses. Shaw’s misunderstanding of ubermensch predisposed him to favor dictators, which Nietzsche did not.
Shaw’s misreadings of Darwin and Nietzsche were common in his day and are still common today. They are, however, misreadings with consequences to Shaw’s political ideas and to the political ideas of other people, both then and now. Shaw was by nature elitist and impatient. His misreading of evolution and the ubermensch provided a channel for his elitism and impatience, and a rationalization for the devolution of his political ideas from democratic to autocratic. His goals were always progressive and humane, but he ended up in the company of fascists.
When progressives turn toward authoritarianism, it is generally out of elitism and impatience. They think they know what is in the best interests of the public and they want to make it happen fast. When conservatives turn toward authoritarianism, it is generally out of fear and loathing of the masses. They want to keep the masses in their lowly place and stomp out any threats to the status quo. Right-wingers are invariably better at authoritarian politics than progressives and, as a consequence, left-wing authoritarianism generally ends up feeding a right-wing narrative.
Based on his misreading of Darwin and Nietzsche, Shaw was intellectually predisposed to go down an antidemocratic path when he became frustrated with the way things were going in the world. That does not mean his devolution was predetermined or inevitable. He had alternative routes along the way that he could have taken, and that others took, but he chose not to.
Other progressives – impatient or impelled by a sense of urgency – have gone down similar paths, some of them channeled through misreading Darwin or Nietzsche, others by reading or misreading Marx and other theorists. Ideas make a difference, and the wrong ideas can lead you in the wrong direction. Shaw’s antidemocratic inclination and predisposition toward authoritarianism were not obvious in his optimistic early writings. But they were there.
Shaw as Evolutionary Socialist: Democratic Socialism made painless and easy.
Fabian Essays on Socialism: Capitalists will pave the way.
Shaw was a founding member of the Fabian Society, a thinktank that was organized by a group of intellectuals and literati in 1884 with the purpose of promoting the gradual and peaceful transition of English society from capitalism to democratic socialism. Among its early members were Beatrice and Sydney Webb, Emmeline Pankhurst, H.G. Wells, Edith Nesbit, Bertrand Russell, Annie Besant, and Shaw.
The Fabians were a group of what we today would call public intellectuals who sought to influence social and political development through their research, writing and teaching. In 1889, they published a book of essays on the politics, economics, and morality of socialism, with Shaw as the editor and the author of a key essay defining socialism.[1]
The gist of the Fabians’ argument was presented by Shaw. It was that with the rise of large-scale factories, and the growth of large-scale cities, socialism had become inevitable in England and America, despite the laissez-faire capitalist ideology that was predominant in those countries at that time. In describing the evolution toward socialism, Shaw focused on three key trends.
The first was the ever-increasing growth of public services and government regulations within the capitalist system. From roads, ports, tariffs and other government services and regulations that make trade possible, to police, sanitation, fire fighters and other public services that make cities livable, capitalism and capitalists couldn’t survive without ever-increasing government involvement in the economy, and this pointed the way toward socialism.
The second trend was the growth of the largest corporations into oligopolies and monopolies. This development would make simple and painless a government takeover of those industries. The Fabians expected a government takeover to naturally occur once the public service sector and other public controls of the economy had gotten big enough. In an argument that paralleled that of Karl Marx but that concluded without the need for a revolution, the Fabians claimed that capitalists were themselves creating the circumstances of their own demise. The decline of capitalism and rise of socialism was a simple process of social evolution that had started with the Industrial Revolution.
The third trend was development of an organized and educated working class that had gained the right to vote and would eventually vote to replace capitalism with socialism. This socialist working class was the creation of the capitalists themselves. They are the ones who congregated the workers together in large factories and cities which made it possible for the workers to organize themselves and get over on their bosses. And the capitalists are the ones who pushed for schools to educate the workers so that they could function in the new factories and cities. Having taught the workers to read, the capitalists had enabled the workers to read the Fabians’ socialist literature.
In the end, Shaw concluded, as industrial conglomeration proceeds and small-scale businesses run by the owners themselves are replaced by mammoth corporations run by salaried managers, capitalism will eliminate the need for capitalists and it will be simple to replace private ownership in the hands of a small group of do-nothing capitalist owners with public ownership in the hands of workers. The transition from capitalism to socialism, and getting over on the few remaining capitalists, will be so smooth that hardly anyone will notice the change.
The tone of Shaw’s writing in the Fabian Essays was optimistic. Democratic socialism seemed inevitable in his view. But there are at least two aspects of Shaw’s political views here that point toward his problematical positions later. First, from Karl Marx, the father of scientific socialism, he took the idea of capitalism morphing into socialism albeit, in Shaw’s view, this would occur through elections and without a revolution. People would recognize the increasing collectivism that was developing under capitalism and would take the logical last step toward socialism.
This last step depended, however, on democratic electoral action by the workers. When in the course of time this transition did not seem to be occurring fast enough or at all – that is, workers were not electing Fabian socialists who would take the necessary action – Shaw became frustrated with a gradual democratic path to socialism. From this frustration came his increasing interest in dictators who he thought could unilaterally make the necessary decisive changes.
Second, from Robert Owen, the father of English socialism, Shaw took the idea of workers raising their intellectual levels through education so that they would be able to support a democratic socialist society. Shaw seemed, however, to assume that higher intellectual levels meant workers becoming high-brow intellectuals like him and his colleagues. When Shaw did not see this happening to his satisfaction, he became frustrated with education and became interested in eugenics as the means of producing a sufficiently intellectual populace. But not yet.
Candida: Updating and upstaging Voltaire in an age of feminism and socialism.
Shaw wrote the play Candida in 1893, four years after the Fabian Essays.[2] It is a drawing room comedy that revolves around a competition for the affections of a beautiful young lady named Candida between her clergyman husband, James Morell, and a young poet, Eugene Marchbanks. The play is a fitting complement to the Fabian papers that Shaw wrote and edited in the late 1880’s. It exemplifies the seemingly blithe belief of the Fabians that socialism will naturally and inevitably evolve from industrial capitalism, and that socialists need merely promote the idea of socialism and intellectually prepare the public for the transition.
Morell is a clergyman who espouses Christian Socialism and a gospel of love. He is in general a staid and mundane man who loves, honors and generally obeys his wife. He comes alive when the welfare of humankind is the subject, and especially the subject of socialism. Morell is a wonderfully impressive speaker and is immensely popular, receiving a continuous stream of invitations to speak at meetings and conferences, and a continuous stream of plaudits. His life’s goal is to educate people about socialism as the fulfillment of Christian love. He is personally kind and generous to a fault, and he is devoted to the happiness of his wife to the point of being willing to bless her going off with Marchbanks if that is what will make her happy.
Marchbanks is a ne’er-do-well young nobleman who claims to have had a horrid childhood in a family that mentally abused him and derided his incipient creativity. Marchbanks is a self-styled poetic genius, a superior person who is above the mundane affairs of ordinary people. His idea of a good life is to live off the labor of others: “To be idle, selfish and useless, that is, to be beautiful and free and happy.” Marchbanks continually whines about his supposed misfortunes: “My heart cries out bitterly in ITS hunger.” He is a weak person who is intuitive about others’ weaknesses and uses his intuition as a means of getting over on them. Marchbanks uses passive-aggressive emotional techniques to manipulate Morell into feelings of insecurity, inferiority and jealousy, and to manipulate Candida into feelings of protectiveness toward him which he hopes will lead her to elope with him.[3]
Candida is a smug, all-controlling, down-to-earth woman who mocks the socialistic idealism in Morell and the poetic idealism in Marchbanks. She is a typical Shavian woman who uses her wiles to get over on the men in her life. Shaw considered himself something of a feminist, and he was for his day. The Fabians included women on equal terms as men and campaigned for women’s suffrage. But Shaw was somewhat backhanded in expressing his esteem for women in his plays and essays. He seemed to believe that men and women possessed equal intelligence and skills, but he had a somewhat jaundiced view of what he saw as women’s biologically-based motives, which he claimed were to find a suitable male mate and make children. As a result, the women in Shaw’s plays tend to be on the make for a husband, and they generally get their man.
Candida is portrayed as like a cat playing with her prey. Although she toys with both Morell and Marchbanks, there never is any real chance that she will abandon Morell and go off with Marchbanks. Marchbanks is neither sufficiently needy nor sufficiently malleable. Morell needs her most and is the most malleable. In the end, when she announces her intention to stay with Morell, she proclaims that “I build a castle of comfort and indulgence and love for him, and stand sentinel always to keep little vulgar cares out.” That is, she takes care of home and hearth so that he can go out and try to take care of the world. She represents the moral proclaimed by her namesake Candide in Voltaire’s Candide that taking care of hearth and home should be the first order of a person’s business.[4] But I don’t think that is the moral of the play.
Candida thinks Morell is a noble fool to preach socialism to a populace that has been so thoroughly indoctrinated with the capitalist gospel of selfishness. She tells him that he is right in what he says about socialism and human rights, and that people who hear him preach invariably agree with him. “But,” she insists, “what’s the use of people agreeing with you if they go out and do just the opposite?”[5] But the point of Morell’s preaching is not to make people change their ways. It is to prepare them for the changes that are taking place despite them.
The underlying message of the play is, I think, that while Morell seems to be an idealistic fool – like Candide in Voltaire’s play before Candide concludes that there is no place like home – Morell is actually preparing people intellectually for the inevitable evolution to socialism predicted by Shaw and the other Fabian Socialists. Morell is softening them up. And that, I think, is the message and moral of the play.
This message is illustrated in the play by the actions and reactions of Burgess, Candida’s father, who is a nasty, greedy capitalist. At the beginning of the play, Burgess berates Morell for wanting him to raise his workers’ wages. Burgess complains that “You never think of the harm you do, putting money into the pockets of working men that they don’t know how to spend, and taking it from people that might be making good use of it.” But at the end of the play, Burgess discloses that he has raised the wages of his workers because he wants to get some local government contracts, and the local government is requiring higher wages and better working conditions for the employees of its contractors.[6]
This turn of events exemplifies the message of the Fabians that capitalism will inevitably evolve into socialism, and do so with the help of the capitalists themselves. It is a Panglossian world view that everything is ultimately for the best. Morell is a wise fool and Candida is his helpmate in his wise foolishness. And in this play, Shaw still seems confident in the beneficent outcome of social evolution. But he does not stay so for long.
Shaw as Eugenics Socialist: A Race of Super(sic)men will save us.
Man and Superman: Shaw in Transition.
Man and Superman is a remarkable work. And I use the word work to describe it because it is more than just a play. It has four distinct parts. First, there is a twenty-six-page introductory letter from Shaw addressed to a friend of his in which Shaw explains his reasons for writing the play and ostensibly outlines the philosophy behind the play. Then there is a forty-one-page pamphlet on social and political philosophy that has supposedly been written by the main character in the play just before the action in the play begins.
Then there is the play itself. Finally, in the middle of the third act of the play, there is a long dream sequence which essentially constitutes a one-act play in itself, and is often performed by itself. Each of the parts reflects a slightly different take on the ideas that the work discusses, including democracy and eugenics. The different takes seemingly reflect Shaw’s ambivalence.
Man and Superman was written in 1903, ten years after Candida. During that time Shaw’s belief in the inevitability of democratic socialism had been shaken. The right to vote had been extended to virtually every male citizen in England, but progress toward democratic socialism had seemingly been stalled. Shaw seemed unsure now whether the social evolution he had previously predicted in the Fabian Essays was going to come true, and whether ordinary people were willing and able to support such a change. Eugenics now becomes a major issue for him.
Shaw is known for his ironic and satirical portrayal of almost everything, including his own pet ideas. But in Man and Superman, he seems to be arguing with himself, satirically but seriously, and making fun of things in each part of the work that he takes seriously in other parts. The ideas in the work are in turmoil, and their convolution seem to point toward Shaw’s devolution.
Introduction to Man and Superman: Letter to Arthur Bingham Walkeley.
Shaw’s introduction to Man and Superman purports to be a letter to his friend Arthur Bingham Walkeley explaining why Shaw has decided to fulfill Walkeley’s wish that Shaw write a play about the famous fictional character Don Juan. It is a mock letter because Walkeley apparently never made any such request and because the play is not about Don Juan, with the partial exception of the dream sequence in the third act which features a character named Don Juan but isn’t about Don Juan’s well-known adventures.
The gist of the twenty-six-page letter is, instead, a diatribe about the need to breed a biological race of genius supermen who would be capable of choosing socialism as their economic system and running it as a democracy. Such a development would also fulfill what Shaw sees as the underlying purpose of the universe, which is to produce beings of ever higher intelligence.
Shaw claims that the social evolution toward democratic socialism was being stymied by the low intelligence level of the average person. He dismisses education as having failed as a means of elevating the intelligence of the general public, and he no longer has “illusions left on the subject of education, progress, and so forth.” He insists that the problem is biological rather than educational and that there aren’t enough genetically intelligent people. He is not advocating the elimination of unintelligent people because he thinks dumb people will not survive in the long run anyways in modern society. What Shaw wants is for intelligent people to be directed to mate with other intelligent people.[7]
Shaw condemns what he calls the current system of promiscuous baby-making which is superficially controlled by men but actually controlled by women who invariably get over on the men. Women are the baby-makers and in the process of natural selection, they determine the fate of the human race. The problem is that women do not prioritize intelligence in choosing mates. So, the system of natural selection must be replaced by a system of intelligent selection that will promote the artificial evolution of intelligent people. The artificial evolution of super intelligent people will, in turn, supplement the social evolution of capitalist society toward democratic socialism.
While acknowledging that kings, aristocrats, and dictators of the past were even worse than democracy is today, Shaw complains that “We are all now under what Burke called ‘the hoofs of the swinish multitude.’” He warns that “our political experiment of democracy, the last refuge of cheap misgovernment, will ruin us if our citizens are ill-bred.” And he concludes his Jeremiad by predicting that “We must either breed political capacity or be ruined by Democracy.”[8]
At this point in his devolution, Shaw has not abandoned democracy, apparently deeming it the worst form of government except for all the rest. But he is clearly disappointed with democratic government, society and culture. Citing Nietzsche as his inspiration for the idea of the superman, Shaw claims that Man and Superman promotes intelligent breeding as a serious solution to the major social problems of his day. But the seriousness of this suggestion is undercut by the mocking tone of the next part of the work.
The Revolutionist’s Handbook and Pocket Companion.
The Revolutionist’s Handbook and Pocket Companion is a forty-one-page political pamphlet supposedly written by John Tanner, who is the hero of the play Man and Superman. On the title page of the pamphlet, Tanner identifies himself as “John Tanner, MIRC (Member of the Idle Rich Class).” Then in the opening sentence of the pamphlet, Tanner defines a revolutionist as “one who desires to discard the existing order and try another.” The flippancy of “MIRC” and the words “and try another” are a tip-off that this document is being written in a whimsical style. Tanner seemingly does not intend for readers to take him seriously. This is a different tone than that claimed by Shaw speaking as Shaw in his introductory letter to Walkeley.[9]
Although Tanner describes himself as an erstwhile revolutionist and declares that “any person under the age of thirty who, having knowledge of the existing order, is not a revolutionist, is an inferior,” he goes on to claim that all revolutions have been and must be failures. “Revolutions,” he insists, “have never lightened the burden of tyranny: they have only shifted it to another shoulder.” Setting himself up as a revolutionary and then knocking himself down, all on the first three pages. So, what is the point of the handbook? What does the revolutionist Tanner want?[10]
Eugenics. Alluding to Nietzsche’s declaration that God is dead, Tanner claims that “Man must take in hand all the work he used to shirk with an idle prayer” to God. Citing Nietzsche’s concept of the superman, Tanner claims that merely changing social institutions, such as transitioning from capitalism to socialism, would be irrelevant without creating a race of supermen to function in the new institutions. “We must, therefore, frankly give up the notion that Man as he exists is capable of progress.” Like Shaw in his introduction, Shaw speaking as Tanner promotes intelligent breeding, but he takes it a step further.[11]
Whereas Shaw focused on breeding for intelligence in his letter to Walkeley, Tanner insists that supermen must not merely be superior in intelligence but must also be creative, and be able to think outside of the box as we say today. Tanner explains that “we want a superior mind,” but not if those minds are “conventional.” Conventional geniuses will merely find ingenious ways to perpetuate the existing order. They are worse for society than dummies. Echoing Nietzsche, Tanner says that “Man must rise above himself.”[12]
Tanner does not want to pave the way for rule by individual supermen or an elite class of supermen. He does not aim for dictatorship or aristocracy. He wants to create a genuine democracy which he says can happen only if there is true equality among people. In turn, true equality can happen only through controlled, intelligent breeding to produce a human species consisting completely of supermen.
Unlike many proponents of eugenics, such as the Social Darwinians, Tanner is not a racist and does not want to create a homogeneous or pure race. To the contrary, he wants diversity in breeding so that combining all the best characteristics of the world’s racial and ethnic groups will make for the fittest human species. Echoing Shaw in his prefatory letter, Tanner wants to breed for fitness and let the unfit die out naturally as part of the evolutionary process.
Fitness is a Darwinian term, as in the evolutionary survival of the fittest species. Social Darwinians in the late nineteenth century defined fitness primarily in terms of strength and wealth. The rich and the powerful were ostensibly the fittest people and the goal of evolution. This was a misconstruction of Darwin’s evolutionary theory. In Darwinian terms, fitness means being able to adapt to changing circumstances. Adaptation could be hindered by great wealth, brute strength, and conventional intelligence, all of which might lead a person to insist on maintaining the status quo rather than changing to meet changing circumstances. Which is what Social Darwinians did then and their right-wing descendants do today.
Tanner is not a Social Darwinian. He adopts Darwin’s conception of fitness and insists that “the survival of the fittest means finally the survival of the self-controlled.” The fittest are those who can stay calm in the face of crises, can critique their habitual behavior, and can change their ways to fit a changing environment.[13]
In his plan for creating people fit for democracy and socialism, Tanner goes a step further than Shaw did in the introduction and he calls for the abolition of marriage. Tanner claims that marriage is an obstructive and obsolete institution. The institution of marriage tries to keep fit partners from procreating if they are not married or are married to someone else. That is silly, Tanner claims. And, in any case, it doesn’t work well.
Promiscuity abounds despite the restraints of marriage. With all the promiscuity among married and unmarried couples, and with all the unwed mothering of children, Tanner claims that marriage won’t be missed by many when it is gone. Just as the Fabians claimed that ninety-nine percent of people wouldn’t even notice the abolition of capitalism, Tanner claims they won’t miss the abolition of marriage. Marriage is a fraud and an obstacle to genuinely diverse breeding. With the end of marriage, intelligent breeding can fully proceed.
Tanner concludes his pamphlet with the proclamation that “Our only hope, then, is in evolution. We must replace man by the Superman.” And “The only fundamental and possible Socialism is the socialization of the selective breeding of Man.” Dismissing Fabian Socialists as merely a bunch of talkers, he proposes that the British government create “a State Department of Evolution” to coordinate breeding policy. But Tanner provides no specifics as to how this could or would be done. Thus, he seemingly consigns himself to the class of mere talkers and relegates his big ideas to humorous oblivion.[14]
The Play Man and Superman.
Man and Superman is a delightfully witty play but it is intellectually the least interesting part of the work in which it is placed. The first two acts are a drawing room comedy in which the self-styled revolutionist John Tanner is being stalked by a young woman, Ann Whitefield, who wants to marry him. Ann is a smug, all-controlling woman, not unlike Candida in this respect, but Ann is also passive-aggressive in her relations with others. She plays on their guilt feelings to get over on them and get them to do what she wants, and she eventually guilt trips and guilt traps Tanner into marrying her. Tanner complains of her “damnable woman’s trick of heaping obligations on a man, of placing herself so entirely and helplessly at his mercy,” that he has to do what she wants. Ann is being pursued by Tanner’s best friend Octavius Robinson who desperately wants to marry Ann. Ann toys with Octavius while maneuvering to snare Tanner.[15]
Tanner struts and spouts radical anti-marriage epigrams throughout the play. He is described as “a megalomaniac” who exudes “a sense of the importance of everything he does.” He carries himself with “Olympian majesty” and “his frockcoat would befit a prime minister.” He is “prodigiously fluent of speech,” a wise guy always ready with a wise crack rejoinder. As Shaw says of himself in his introduction to the play, Tanner’s stated goal is to epater le bourgeois and make himself obnoxious to most of those around him. And Tanner thinks that his authorship of The Revolutionist’s Handbook and Pocket Companion has put him completely beyond the pale of middle-class acceptability and beyond the reach of any middle-class woman. He is wrong.[16]
As with Morell in Candida who is patronized by his wife for his radical views, Tanner is patronized for his views by Ann, who doesn’t think he really believes the things he says in his pamphlet. And, seemingly he doesn’t because he lets himself get caught in Ann’s marital web. This is a key difference between Morell, who really does believe in his socialist views, and Tanner who is seemingly too flippant to really believe in anything. In moving from Candida to Man and Superman, the heroes of Shaw’s plays have gone from sincere to cynical, which seemingly reflects Shaw’s own descent. Another key difference in the plays is that Candida tried to help her husband promote his socialistic views, whereas Ann tries to wean Tanner from his views and seemingly succeeds.
Tanner is a self-styled know-it-all, but he is completely oblivious that Ann is maneuvering and manipulating him until he finds himself trapped. At that point, he makes a desperate run for freedom in the third act to the Sierra Nevada Mountains in Spain. There, he falls in with a band of bandits who identify with various left-wing ideologies, as anarchists, social democrats, or nihilists. Tanner and the bandits bandy about various socialistic ideas that seem ridiculous in the circumstances. The play essentially mocks the ideas of socialism that were seriously promoted in the Fabian Essays and Candida, as well as the ideas promoted in Tanner’s pamphlet and Shaw’s introduction to the play.
Tanner is followed by Ann to the Spanish mountains and in the fourth act, he gives in to marrying her and settling down. “Marriage is to me an apostasy,” he complains, and “the young men will scorn me as one who has sold out.” But he, nonetheless, seems reconciled to marriage and happy to do it. In the last lines of the play, Tanner is still ranting to his fiancé and their friends against marriage and middle-class respectability. When someone engages in a side conversation, he looks around to see if anyone is listening to him. Ann tells him: “Never mind dear, go on talking.” Tanner responds in seeming bewilderment with the word “Talking,” and everyone laughs. All he has been doing throughout the play is meaningless talking.[17]
The play ends up essentially as a lot of ado about nothing. Shaw has promised us something radical in his introduction and in Tanner’s pamphlet, but he has delivered a fairly conventional comedy of manners. Witty and well done, but rather tame and quite cynical in its overall tone. A far cry from the sincere tone of the Fabian Essays and the underlying optimism of the play Candida. Shaw is seemingly a man arguing against himself and losing the argument.
Don Juan in Hell
In the middle of the third act of the play, Tanner is camping with the bandits in the Spanish mountains when one night he has a dream. It is a dream about Don Juan in Hell, and it consists of a debate between Don Juan and the Devil about the advantages and disadvantages of Heaven and Hell. They are joined by other characters from the traditional Don Juan story, including Ann whom Don Juan was in the process of seducing when her father intervened and Don Juan killed him. Don Juan in the dream looks like Tanner and Ann in the dream looks like Ann in the play.
In this dream, dead people get to choose between an afterlife in Heaven or in Hell. Hell is a festive place of selfish pleasure. Heaven is a dull place of good intentions and good works. Many people who were good in life choose to spend their afterlife in Hell. Many people who were bad in life choose to spend their afterlife in Heaven. Having spent many hundreds of years in Hell, Don Juan has decided to move up to Heaven.
In so doing, Don Juan inveighs against an existence of mere pleasure and in favor of a purposeful existence. This was a major theme of Shaw’s introduction: that the universe has an evolutionary purpose and that man’s purpose was to further that of the universe. The Devil replies that in the overall scheme of things a purposeful life is really a meaningless life: “You think,” he tells Don Juan,” that because you have a purpose, Nature must have one.” Based on his eternity of existence, the Devil assures Don Juan that the universe has no purpose and that the idea of making things better is foolish. “Where you now see reform, progress,” he explains, is really “nothing but an infinite comedy of illusion.” And he cites numerous examples of human perfidy and the failure of reformers.”[18]
Reformers, the Devil claims, invariably do awful things in the name of reform. And “Men,” he chides Don Juan, “are never at a loss for an excuse for killing one another.” When Don Juan accepts the idea of killing for a good cause with “What of that?” I think we are expected to see that the Devil is right in his cynicism toward Don Juan’s newly found moralism. And when Don Juan then cites Nietzsche in support of his goal to make men into supermen, I think we are expected to agree with the Devil’s reply to “Beware of the pursuit of the Superhuman. It leads to an indiscriminate contempt for the Human.” As in Milton’s Paradise Lost, the Devil has most of the best lines in this playlet, except that Shaw, unlike Milton, seems to mean it. It’s a cynical message and just the opposite of the message Shaw conveyed in his introductory preface. Shaw seems in this work to be in the throes of contradiction.[19]
Shaw as Dictatorial Socialist. A Super(sic)man will save us.
The Apple Cart: The Preface.
As Shaw became steadily more discouraged by the prospects and practices of democracy, he became more interested in authoritarian solutions to social problems. In 1929, he premiered a play called The Apple Cart. In the play, the prime minister of England is trying to get the King to stop publicly criticizing the prime minister’s policies. He wants to muzzle the King. The King’s response is to threaten to resign as King, run for Parliament, and try to become prime minister. Since the King is apparently more popular than the current prime minister, the King would probably win and, thereby, “upset the apple cart.” In the end, the prime minister backs down and things go on as before.[20]
As was Shaw’s usual practice, he wrote a long preface to the play, a twenty-three-page preface for a seventy-page play. In the preface, Shaw explains his ideas behind the drama and defends autocrats. He claims that kings, who serve for life, generally have more governmental experience and expertise than elected politicians since “the king works continually whilst his ministers are in office for spells only.” And kings, Shaw claims, must gain their ends aboveboard. Elected politicians, in contrast, gain their ends through sleazy “selfish methods of dominating the feebly recalcitrant, the unreasonable, the timid, and the stupid.” Citing Mussolini for support, Shaw justifies kings and others autocrats “making a desperate bid for dictatorship on the perfectly true plea that democracy has destroyed all other responsibility.”[21]
Shaw goes on to claim that Abraham Lincoln was a “demagogue” and a “humbug” when Lincoln proclaimed that government should be “of the people, for the people, and by the people.” Of and for the people, yes. By the people, absolutely no. Ordinary people, Shaw sardonically wrote, can’t write good laws any more than they can write good plays. As capitalism has become more socialistic, he explains, with “a huge communistic framework of public services and regulations,” it has become imperative “to construct a political system for rapid positive work.” So, Shaw concludes, we must get rid of “all the pseudo-democratic obstructive functions” of our political system. That is, we must get rid of what most of us think of as democracy and replace it with an authoritarian regime that can get things done quickly and efficiently.[22]
The Apple Cart: The Play.
The Apple Cart is a genial but immensely cynical play. It is witty but wordy, consisting entirely of debates among the various characters about politics. King Magnus, a fictional King of England, is the main and most sympathetic character. He is jousting for power with the elected Prime Minister Proteus and Proteus’ cabinet ministers, and he has been making public statements critical of Proteus and his ministers. He is making life hard for them.
Proteus and the other ministers complain that the King is interfering with their efforts to do the public weal, and is undermining democracy in the country. The King replies that “democracy is humbug” and that he is only trying to protect the public from the unbridled incompetence and corruption of the elected government, and “the tyranny of popular ignorance.” “Only the king,” he claims, “is above that tyranny” and he alone stands for “conscience and virtue.”[23]
Democracy and the public take a complete beating in the play, even from the democratically elected officials. The economics minister, Bill Boanerges, for example, is the leader of the country’s trade unions, a worker who has worked his way up from poverty to officialdom. In describing his relationship to his constituents, Boanerges says “I say to them ‘You are supreme: exercise your power.’ They say, ‘That’s right: Tell us what to do.’” So, he does. The public wants “a strong man,” Boanerges claims, someone to tell them what to do. “That’s democracy,” Boanerges concludes and, although he is portrayed as a pompous ass, he seems to be speaking for Shaw.[24]
A side theme in the play is Shaw’s ongoing portrayal of women as predators and as the power behind the male throne, in this case literally. King Magnus has an enchanting mistress, Orinthia, whom he can’t do without. She is a self-styled goddess who claims that ordinary people exist “to sweep the streets for me.” Her claim to greatness consists in her being, not in her doing. “Do not pretend,” she tells the King, “that people become great by doing great things. They do great things because they are great.” She essentially articulates Shaw’s case for supermen.[25]
Orinthia wants the King to divorce his dowdy housewife Jemima so she can have a chance to do great things as his Queen. He won’t do it. “You gathered me in like a daisy,” he replies to Orinthia, and he tells her that he cannot give her up, but he cannot marry her. He needs his housewife Queen. She takes care of him so that he can play the role of King. This is very similar to Candida’s relationship with Morell in Candida. In the last lines of the play, the King whines that he does not want to eat his dinner, but his nanny wife leads him off to the dining room with the words “Come on, like a good little boy.”[26]
Although Shaw claims in his preface to The Apple Cart that the play deals with socialism, there is nothing in the play about socialism. All the characters seem to agree that big corporations run everything and that neither they, the politicians, nor the public have any real power or ability to change things. The play consists entirely of witticisms and political backtalk, and it is all about the game of politics and politics as a game. Nothing about social and economic policy. It is as though all that matters is who is in power, not what anyone stands for or actually does. It is a thoroughly cynical play.
By the time of The Apple Cart, Shaw had come a long way ideologically since his contributions to the Fabian Essays. Although he still supported what he called socialism, his support for democracy had virtually disappeared along with his faith in the intelligence of the general public. And as Shaw’s support for dictators increased, so did his support for eugenics. Although he ostensibly based his political views on Darwin and Nietzsche, Shaw’s ideas reflected a misreading of them both. A common misreading by many people then and now, and a source of ideological confusion from then to the present-day.
Evolution and Supermen: Shaw’s Misunderstanding of Darwin and Nietzsche.
Like most intellectuals in Europe and America during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Shaw was strongly influenced by what he took to be Darwin’s theories of evolution. Like many intellectuals during this period, Shaw was also greatly influenced by what he took to be Nietzsche’s theory of the superman. And like some intellectuals during this time, Shaw tried to put the two theories together. The problem is that Shaw got Darwin and Nietzsche wrong, and he got them wrong in ways that fueled his increasingly illiberal and undemocratic views, and that continue to fuel people’s illiberal and undemocratic views to the present day.
Shaw’s misreadings of Darwin and Nietzsche have been especially common in right-wing political circles. The theory of evolution and the idea of the superman were misused to justify right-wing Social Darwinism in the late nineteenth century and Nazism later in the twentieth century. Shaw did not intend to find himself in this right-wing company. Even as his views devolved, he always meant well and hoped to do something to help humankind, and remained committed to socialism.
In his support for Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin, Shaw was seemingly misled in part by the fact that Mussolini had been a leader of the Italian Socialist Party before he turned fascist, that Hitler was the leader of the National Socialist People’s Party, the full name of the Nazis, which initially had some self-styled socialist members, and that Stalin was the Communist leader of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. They were dictators who used the word socialism. Shaw was a wordsmith who was often a captive of words. He got fooled by their socialistic rhetoric or, rather, fooled himself. Other progressives who have supported revolutionary dictators and dictatorial regimes that were ostensibly socialistic have similarly been fooled or fooled themselves, and their thinking has often followed an anti-democratic path similar to Shaw’s.
Nietzsche and Napoleon.[27]
Shaw’s illiberal and undemocratic ideas flowed naturally and logically from his misunderstanding of Darwin and Nietzsche. His flawed premises led him to right-wing conclusions, despite himself. Other progressives have started with similar premises and followed a similar path although they did not specifically cite Darwin or Nietzsche as their mentors. The ideas were essentially the same, as were the consequences.
Shaw’s misunderstanding of Nietzsche began with his acceptance of the common mistranslation of the German word ubermensch as superman. Shaw effectively became a captive of that mistranslation. Nietzsche was a proponent of what he called the ubermensch, which both literally and figuratively translates into English as overman. An overman is a very different being from a superman. Although Nietzsche’s language with respect to the overman is inflated and extravagant and he portrays the overman as a superior person in power and glory – Napoleon Bonaparte is his model – Nietzsche’s overman is not necessarily superior to other people in his natural powers. He is not a superman with super powers.[28]
Nietzsche’s overman is an uncommon man because he overcomes what is common in himself and overcomes the conventions of common people. He is continually making and remaking himself. “I teach you the overman. Man is something to be overcome” Nietzsche’s alter ego Zarathustra proclaims in Thus Spoke Zarathustra.[29] The overman is in a continual state of becoming, never satisfied with what he has done or become, but always seeking to go beyond himself.
Nietzsche’s language is bombastic, caustic and elitist, but his ideas, including the idea of the overman, don’t have to be interpreted that way. Nietzsche wrote in the style of epater le bourgeois that was popular among avant garde writers in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and that Shaw adopted. Shaw, however, seemed to get caught up in Nietzsche’s rhetoric, lost the track of Nietzsche’s reasoning, and got led astray.
The overman essentially lives according to Jean Paul Sartre’s existentialist formulation that “we are not what we are and we are what we are not,” that is, we are continually making choices that define who we are and the definition of ourselves is continually changing. We are our choices, and an overman is continually changing through those choices. In this view, overcoming can be done by anyone who is willing to go beyond themselves and beyond the conventionalities. And you do not have to be a high-brow intellectual like Shaw and his colleagues to do this.
Nietzsche’s praise for Napoleon was not primarily based on his military conquests and his overcoming of other people but on Napoleon’s conquest and overcoming of himself. There is a story about Napoleon that I think can be used to illustrate Nietzsche’s idea of the overman. It is said that at the start of some battle, Napoleon’s adjutants came hurriedly up to him with the worrisome news that the enemy was adopting a tactic for which they had not prepared. “What should we do,” they wailed. Napoleon supposedly replied with complete calmness, “First, we will commit ourselves, and then we’ll see.” It was a characteristically enigmatic response, and there is at least a triple-entendre embedded in Napoleon’s reply.
First, there is the pragmatic meaning that we will decide what is best to do once we have seen the way things develop from our first forays. Such a pragmatic response was typical of the resourceful Napoleon, who could change tactics at will.
Second, there is an epistemological meaning, that seeing comes from commitment. You see only through commitment to something that requires that seeing. Seeing is purposeful, and seeing a thing is a pragmatic consequence of deciding to do something about that thing.
Finally, there is an ontological meaning that self-development is based on commitment. We commit ourselves and then we see what we become. In this regard, it is almost an existentialist statement similar to Sartre’s existentialist formulation on becoming. With each tactical change, Napoleon was overcoming his past practices, evolving in a new way, and redefining himself.
Each of these meanings is inherent in Nietzsche’s idea of the overman. They are very different from the reading of Nietzsche that Shaw fell into, a reading that extols domination over other people. In Shaw’s case, it was the domination by progressive intellectual politicians over the masses of people for their own good, but the same misreading was used by the Nazis to rationalize their brutalitarian domination over the masses.
Darwin and Cockroaches.[30]
Shaw got Darwin wrong because he read two consequential ideas into evolutionary theory that aren’t there. First, he read evolution teleologically, as though it has some preordained purpose and goal. Second, he claimed that the driving force behind evolution, its preordained purpose and the meaning of the universe, was the rise of intelligence, with human intelligence as the goal.
Evolution, in Shaw’s view, was the preordained ascent of humans from amoebas in the primeval muck to masters of the universe. Evolution was based on survival of the fittest, and intelligence was the key to fitness. Measures of intelligence would indicate which species, which societies, and which individuals would have the ability to adapt and survive in changing circumstances.
Shaw’s was a view that was common among scientists in his time and is still common among laypeople today. In this view, evolution has been a straight-line development of ever-higher high-brow intelligence, that is, the kind of logical and linguistic intelligence that has historically been most valued in Western culture. Individuals evolve, species of individuals evolve, and societies evolve, and the key to all of this evolution is intelligence.
In this view, humans are uniquely capable of using their intellects to creatively adapt their environment to themselves, to change their circumstances to fit themselves, rather than merely responding to circumstances mechanically through instinct and trying to adapt themselves to their environment. And for this reason, humans are supposedly the fittest creatures on earth. This view is, however, a misreading of Darwin and is not supported by science.
In evolutionary theory, adaptability does not require high-brow intellectuality. And evolution does not seem to go in a straight line with respect to the development of any biological characteristics or any species, let alone a trend toward greater intelligence. Species come and go, survive, thrive and die out, in ways that do not seem logical or preordained toward any goal. But like many people, Shaw fell prey to the sort of human-centered thinking that kept people for so many centuries from recognizing that the earth is not the center of the universe.
One of the longest surviving and most adaptable creatures in the world, for example, is the cockroach, which has been around for some three hundred and fifty million years, far longer than humans have and far better equipped to survive the environmental disasters that humans are wreaking on the world. And cockroaches are not known for their high-brow intellectual abilities.
Adaptability, in fact, comes in many different forms and many creatures have the ability to creatively adapt their circumstances to themselves. Beavers are well known for their engineering skills in building dams to make homes for themselves. Giraffes act as foresters when they make room for acacia trees, the leaves of which they particularly like, by killing the seedlings of other types of trees. Black ants act as shepherds when they cultivate herds of black flies for food, anesthetizing them so that they won’t fly away, and then milking them for a fluid that the ants consume. Termites act as farmers when they regurgitate wood to fertilize fungi that they cultivate for food. Humans are not the only creatures that creatively work with their environments, nor are we the best or most efficient. Just say “global warming.”
Shaw also had it wrong when he claimed that intellectuality was the key to human development and evolutionary success. While human intellectuality is probably the most spectacular thing about humans as compared to other species, it is not the most important thing about humans that has enabled us to survive and thrive. It is our sociability, our ability to live and work together, too cooperate with each other and care for each other, that has enabled us to adapt to changing circumstances and fit us, so far, for survival. What is called “interpersonal intelligence” by Howard Gardner and other psychologists is the key. We humans have a naturally high level of interpersonal intelligence or empathy, some of us more than others, but all of us are capable of being cooperative.
We are “social animals” in Aristotle’s words. So that even though we humans have few survival instincts and have to invent most of the things and skills we need to survive, it is through cooperation that we do this. It is cooperation that extends to the past, as we learn from our predecessors’ failures and build upon their achievements. It is the cooperative accumulation of knowledge and skills over time, passed down through the generations, that has enabled humans to survive and thrive. It is cooperation that extends to the future as we try to make the world better for our descendants. Most of all, it is cooperation with our comrades as we try to make our way together in the world. Shaw never seemed to get the importance of cooperation and did not portray it well in his plays. His characters were merely groupings of individuals without any sense of solidarity. His failure to understand cooperation was a key factor in his political devolution.
Shaw’s advocacy of eugenics was based on his belief that human intelligence had reached a point at which humans could have some effect on evolution, still riding the wave of evolution’s predetermined course, but able to make some useful adjustments to that course. He wanted people to use their intelligence to breed for even greater intelligence and for greater equality in intelligence. Shaw believed that a human race of super-intelligent supermen could be genetically produced like breeding purebred dogs. But the traits that he wanted people to have, namely intellectual flexibility and pragmatic adaptability, do not seem to be biologically inheritable. Whether Shaw liked it or not, these are traits that are learned and then honed through practice. And they are not confined to bookish intellectuals like Shaw and his colleagues.
Educators from the turn of the twentieth century to the present day, including John Dewey then and Howard Gardner more recently, have shown that humans are endowed with multiple types of intelligence. Bookish intelligence is only one among a half dozen or more different types of natural aptitude. Every person has more or less of each aptitude, and different people can be more or less taught to excel in each of the aptitudes. Contrary to Shaw’s contention, no one is uneducable and everyone can learn to think outside the box and creatively respond to their circumstances. This is something that I learned from embarrassing personal experience.
When I was in college, I had a summer job as a temporary worker on a cleanup crew at the Merchandise Mart in Chicago. None of the regular members of the crew had gone to college, some of them were barely literate. Most of them were racists and anti-Semites, and they often targeted me with bigoted comments because I am Jewish. I began the job with feelings of superiority over these guys. My coworkers were clearly worse than ignoramuses when it came to academic subjects, cultural issues and social relations, the sorts of things in which I excelled. But they sure knew how to clean a building.
This was not a simple broom and dust cloth operation. There were lots of cleaning products and equipment to deal with, and different treatments were necessary for different surfaces. It was complicated. The work required intelligence, expertise, and even creativity, and my coworkers had invented many novel ways of doing things. They took pride in what they did, and they did it well. Time and again, they would have to instruct me in how to do something. And despite the bad feelings between them and me, they made sure I knew how to do things right, and that the work was properly done. I often felt like a fool. In my memory of those times, I still do.
But I learned some important things that summer that I have tried not to forget ever since. The first was that I was not as smart and superior as I had thought. The second was that people can be dumb about some things but smart about others. Finally, I learned that people who are otherwise bigoted and hostile may be willing to cross boundary lines to work with outsiders on a common project. Those guys were willing to overcome, or at least overlook, their prejudices to work with me – a privileged member of a despised ethnic group – and to teach me and mentor me when it came to doing the work we had in common. And I learned to overcome my arrogance and to work with them, despite their prejudices and their rude and crude behavior. Perhaps my experience at the Merchandise Mart can be seen as a model of democracy at work.
Shaw was able to recognize the talents of unintellectual people and attribute what we would call multiple types of intelligence to them. In Man and Superman, he has a character who is a chauffeur and auto mechanic. The man is portrayed in favorable terms as a clever mechanic and down-to-earth thinker. But he is also portrayed as the kind of person in whom the government could not be entrusted. This disparaging view of unintellectual people is what ultimately led Shaw to become increasingly authoritarian in his politics, and it’s where I think he went wrong.
The Bad News and the Good: Democracy and Education.
Shaw had it wrong when he claimed that a high level of high-brow intellectuality was the key to a successful democracy. Resting his hopes for democracy on the evolution of a race of super-intellectuals, at first through education and then through eugenics, Shaw was setting himself up for a rejection of democracy. His race of super intellectuals was impossible.
But it was also unnecessary. It is our natural and necessary cooperativeness that makes democracy possible. And it is through the cultivation of that cooperativeness, through education and experience, that social progress can occur. Historically, lasting social reform has come from the bottom-up and not from the top-down as Shaw would have it. Unfortunately, not all of us recognize or accept the fact of our natural sociability.
Dark periods in history are almost invariably a consequence of egoism and selfishness or fear and hatred coming to the fore. Those emotions are part of the human makeup, and they can be cultivated or provoked so that hostility overcomes our empathy and sociability. It is also the case that some of us are incapable of feeling empathy or acting socially. Think Donald Trump.
We in United States have been bombarded with right-wing Social Darwinism in various forms, with its emphasis on selfish individualism and hostility to others, for the last one hundred twenty-five years. This miseducation has colored most Americans’ ideological responses to social issues. As result, when Americans are asked ideological questions, they generally give right-wing answers. When, for example, people over the last century have been asked whether or not they support social programs to help the poor or minorities, the results have generally been that two-thirds of the respondents are against such programs based on their adherence to an individualist ideology.
But, when people have been asked more concrete and personal questions as to whether the government should keep people from starving or being discriminated against, the results have generally been two-thirds in favor. Ideologies and ideological questions are cold blooded and generally get cold-blooded answers. But concrete questions about specific people evoke empathy, and the overwhelming majority of Americans then support a cooperative response.
The bad news of our time is that systematic racism and sexism permeate American society, and some one-third of the people could reasonably be considered fascists. They are inspired by fear and hatred against blacks, Hispanics, immigrants, liberals, Muslims, Jews, gays, peaceniks, and anyone else who seems to them to be a threat to their privileged existence as white people. These Americans are anti-democratic in ideology and authoritarian by nature. They are encouraged by the current President of the United States and they support him.
But these are mostly old people, especially old white men, who remember the good old days of unrestricted white male dominance over everyone else. And although they are mounting a last ditch, scorched earth-defense of their privileges in the form of Trumpism, their day is passing. The good news is that every generation of young people since the 1960’s has been more progressive than the last, and these progressive young people will soon be running the country. If we survive the damage of the “apres moi, le deluge” assault on the world by the Trumpists, there should politically be better days ahead.
As I am writing this essay, the world is engulfed in a pandemic that is being spread by people breathing, coughing and sneezing on each other. We have been told by all the leading scientists and doctors that the single best way to prevent the spread of the disease is for people to wear face masks. Wearing a mask is, thus, largely an empathetic and cooperative action that helps others and the society as a whole. Unfortunately, the President and his right-wing supporters have made wearing masks an ideological issue.
Some two-thirds of the American public say that they support wearing masks and wear masks themselves. The one-third who oppose the masks and don’t wear them generally do so on the grounds of either individualistic ideology or pure I-don’t-want-to-be-bothered selfishness. While the individualistic behavior of this minority of people has so far wreaked havoc on efforts to contain the disease, it is still significant that the overwhelming majority of Americans support the cooperative effort.
The guys that I worked with at the Merchandise Mart were filled with fears and hatreds of people unlike themselves. But they had sufficient empathy to work with me toward a common goal. That, I think, is the key to adaptability and survival. It is a natural human attribute that needs today to be applied to broader social and political ends, as it has been in the past and still can be. That is a task for education and it is the test for democracy.
Finale: Should we cancel Shaw? I say “No.”
So, what are we to make of Shaw? Shaw got a lot of things wrong but I think he didn’t mean it and he wasn’t mean about it. Shaw promoted eugenics and railed against democracy in ways that were similar to those of racists and fascists in his day. But his intentions were humane. He hoped to use eugenics to breed a more egalitarian human race of highly intelligent beings. Shaw’s intentions were in sharp contrast with those of the Social Darwinians and the Nazis who wanted to use eugenics for inegalitarian and inhumane purposes.
Shaw also promoted dictators in terms similar to those used by the fascists. But, again, his intentions were humane. Shaw hoped that dictators could bring about a socialist transformation that would make a better life for the masses of people. His goal was in sharp contrast to that of the right-wing authoritarians who wanted dictators to keep down the masses and force people to accept a miserable existence.
So, what to do with Shaw? When dealing with ideas and actions that are unacceptable to us today but that were within the range of respectability in the past, I try to make a distinction between what could be called genteel wrongheadedness and vicious wrongdoing. Genteel wrongheadedness is often a kind of snobbery. It is looking down on others as inferiors, as when some people say that Jews are socially unacceptable or that Jewish businessmen are all shysters.
Vicious wrongdoing is an attempt to actively do harm to another group, as with the Nazis and the QAnon people who think that Jews are running and ruining the world and must be wiped out. Genteel wrongheadedness is unacceptable but not necessarily unforgivable. Vicious wrongdoing is unacceptable, unforgivable, and unforgettable. Charles Dickens was, for example, a genteel racist toward Jews, but he is still one of my favorite authors.
I think we can characterize Shaw as genteelly wrongheaded, as someone who looked down upon ordinary people but meant them no harm. To the contrary, he hoped to make the world a better place for everyone through eugenics and dictators. He explicitly refused to target any group for oppression. He expressly rejected any restrictions on people he considered unintelligent. He merely wanted to encourage mating among the intelligent. I think that Shaw was idiotic in his support for eugenics and dictators, but not vicious. His views are unacceptable and must be condemned, but I don’t think he need be cancelled.
I think we can continue to enjoy his plays without moral qualms, albeit with the cautious and critical attention with which we should approach any work from another time and place. To those of us who believe in democracy, his plays offer an intellectual challenge to see the flaws in his works and hone our own beliefs. Shaw was very smart and very clever. If you are not careful, he can snare you into his way of thinking without your being aware of it. Reading him with critical attention is good practice.
His plays also offer us an opportunity to analyze how and why a person devolves politically in the way that Shaw did. His example might help us to understand the devolution of American politics, and help explain how a populace that twice elected Barack Obama could have then elected Donald Trump. For these reasons, I think his plays should continue to hold a place in the literary canon of our times.
BW 8/30/20
Footnotes:
[1] Fabian Essays. George Bernard Shaw, Ed. Kindle Books: Pantianos Classics:
[2] Candida. George Bernard Shaw. New York: Signet Classic, 1960.
[3] Ibid. Pp.201, 208.
[4] Ibid. P.233.
[5] Ibid. P.210-211.
[6] Ibid. P.186.
[7] Man and Superman. George Bernard Shaw. “To Arthur Bingham Walkley.” New York: Signet Classic, 1960. P.251
[8] Ibid. Pp.250, 251.
[9] Man and Superman. George Bernard Shaw. “The Revolutionist’s Handbook and Pocket Companion.” New York: Signet Classic, 1960. P 406
[10] Ibid. P.407
[11] Ibid. P.408
[12] Ibid. P.416
[13] Ibid. P.417
[14] Ibid. Pp.432, 433.
[15] Man and Superman. George Bernard Shaw. “The Play.” eBook: Start Publishing LLC., 2012. P.33.
[16] Ibid. P.10.
[17] Ibid. P.134
[18] Man and Superman. George Bernard Shaw. “Don Juan in Hell.” New York: Signet Classic, 1960. Pp.370-371
[19] Ibid. Pp.350, 352, 373.
[20] Plays Political. George Bernard Shaw. “The Preface.” London: Penguin Books, 1986. P.95
[21] Ibid. P.11, 12, 14.
[22] Ibid. Pp.15, 18-19, 21, 28.
[23] Plays Political. George Bernard Shaw. “The Play.” London: Penguin Books, 1986. Pp 62,66, 67
[24] Ibid. Pp.43-44
[25] Ibid. P.77
[26] Ibid. Pp.79, 102
[27] On Nietzsche, see Walter Kaufmann. Nietzsche: Philosopher Psychologist Antichrist. New York: Meridian Books, 1966.
[28]Friedrich Nietzsche. Beyond Good and Evil. New York: Vintage Books, 1966. P.178.
[29]Friedrich Nietzsche. Thus Spoke Zarathustra in The Portable Nietzsche. New York: Viking Press, 1954. P.124.
[30] On Darwin, see Janet Browne. Charles Darwin: The Power of Place, Vol. II. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002.
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