Bernard Shaw and Totalitarianism

Longing for Utopia

M. Yde

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781137330192
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137330208
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire européenne

This book reveals the genuity of Shaw's totalitarianism by looking at his material - articles, speeches, letters, etc but is especially concerned with analyzing the utopian desire that runs through so many of Shaw's plays; looking at his political and eugenic utopianism as expressed in his drama and comparing this to his political totalitarianism.

1

Previsions of the Superman in the Coming Age of Will: The Quintessence of Ibsenism^*

He who had to all appearance mocked at the faiths in the forgotten past discovered a new god in the unimaginable future. He who had laid all the blame on ideals set up the most impossible of all ideals, the ideal of a new creature.

G.K. Chesterton¹

I

In the preface to The Quintessence of Ibsenism Shaw remarks that during the spring of 1890 he and his fellow Fabians were at a loss for a topic to which to devote a series of lectures for that coming summer. Finally, they were “compelled to make shift with a series of papers put forward under the general heading ‘Socialism in Contemporary Literature’ “ (vii). Such are the humble beginnings of what has turned out to be one of Shaw’s most fascinating essays. Shaw delivered the lecture at St. James’s restaurant on the evening of 18 July 1890. It was not long after this that Ibsen took London by storm, and Shaw thought it an opportune time to revise and expand his original essay and add it to the many discordant voices just then arguing over the relative merits or demerits of the Norwegian playwright. It was first published in the summer of 1891. Since then the essay has usually been understood as a good indicator of Shaw’s own thinking, rather than a reliable guide to understanding Ibsen’s dramaturgical strategy and philosophy of life: the quintessence of Shavianism rather than the quintessence of Ibsenism.

Shaw wrote The Quintessence shortly before completing his first play, Widowers’ Houses (1892), and prior to its publication he had been known mostly as a talented music critic and powerful orator and propagandist for socialism. It is hard to know what exactly Shaw’s intentions were when he moved from Dublin to London in 1876, but clearly they involved a literary career, as between 1879 and 1883 he wrote five ambitious novels. The last one, An Unsocial Socialist, reflected his conversion to socialism in 1882, which was instantaneous after hearing the American economist Henry George deliver a lecture on land nationalization. After An Unsocial Socialist he exchanged novel writing for progressive politics and was a familiar presence within the Socialist Revival, appearing frequently at the many socialist organizations and delivering speeches. In 1884, he joined the Fabian Society, a newly formed organization of moderate, middle-class socialists. Although he began a career as a book reviewer at the Pall Mall Gazette in 1885, his primary preoccupation at this time was intense study of economics, helping to formulate Fabian policy as a member of its executive committee, and indefatigably promoting the virtues of socialism in both print and speech. Consequently his short book of 1891, The Quintessence of Ibsenism, was something of a departure for him.

More than anything else, the essay is an account of Shaw’s faith in the autonomous will of human beings, his philosophy of history, and his view that his age marked a turning point toward a radically new age. Major changes in the way humankind views its place in the world, which eventually manifest in a restructuring of institutions, are initiated by rare individuals—pioneers, Shaw calls them—who have the courage to see reality unadorned with illusions. One such individual is Ibsen. Pioneers are of two types: one sees certain activities normally regarded as ethical as being wrong; the other sees an activity normally regarded as wrong as being acceptable. Shelley was a pioneer of both types, according to Shaw, and Ibsen of the second variety—which is evident, Shaw says, by the frequency of scurrilous attacks against him in the daily newspapers. Shaw shows that progress depends on individuals who strike against convention, thereby scandalizing their contemporaries, by reminding his readers that many of their heroes were formerly denounced: “Luther as an apostate, Cromwell as a traitor, Mary Wollstonecraft as an unwomanly virago, Shelley as a libertine, and Ibsen as all the things enumerated in the Daily Telegraph” (4). Of course Shaw has been proved right by Ibsen’s subsequent status as a classic of Western literature.

It should be remembered that Shaw initially presented his essay as a speech to the Fabian Society, and that it was supposed to be directly concerned with the issue of socialism. But while socialism is rarely mentioned or alluded to, the essay does concern itself with a future society of re-made institutions brought about by a revolution in thinking about ethics and the individual’s relation to the world, society, and his or her own self. In other words, The Quintessence does relate to Shaw’s lifelong passion for “world-bettering,” for fashioning a new society, precisely what the Fabians were devoted to; but Shaw looks at the problem from the angle of the single individual, an angle he had never publicly presented before and which only indirectly, in the most implicit way, deals with the economic reordering of society. Shaw sees history as passing through various stages; having passed through an age of faith, Shaw sees his own period as being in the last throes of the age of reason, where the utilitarian ethic of Bentham dominates and “acting logically with the object of securing the greatest good of the greatest number” (5) is the dominant ethos; but he sees this as passing, or at least he hopes that it is, and Ibsen, he believes, is one of the pioneers signaling the advent of the next age, which will be an age of will, an age where “happiness consists in the fulfilment of the will” (69).

It is not that the individual no longer uses the faculty of reason, but that reason is now to be understood as the servant of the will. Charles Carpenter has written that Shaw’s doctrine is tripartite, that it “consists of three basic elements. The human will, man’s link with a cosmic force, channels the evolutionary impulse; the intellect, a distinctively human faculty, looks for the most efficient way to fulfill the will; and ideas … the alternative paths that the intellect considers in its search.”² All ages involve a different orientation and a different conception of duty: in the age of faith the orientation was “to God, with the priest as assessor. That was repudiated; and then came Man’s duty to his neighbor, with Society as the assessor. Will this too be repudiated, and be succeeded by Man’s duty to himself, assessed by himself?” (8). This, Shaw contends, is the prophetic message of Ibsen’s plays, and Shaw himself clearly believes such a new orientation is imminent.

Shaw lived in a period of great social change, and intellectuals were busy trying to figure out and influence the course of the future, oscillating from despair at God’s seeming abdication to overwhelming joy at the possibilities of building a new world with new men and women independent of God and his burdensome claims. Shaw’s optimism and utopian mindset might very well have overlaid a deeper sense of panic at living in this brave new world. In May of 1887, he had reviewed Samuel Butler’s Luck or Cunning? for the Pall Mall Gazette. Butler’s book was an attack against the Darwinian idea that mere chance was the guiding force in the evolutionary development of humankind, where “mind is banished from the universe.”³ The book had a profound impact on Shaw, and its ideas form the background to his major philosophic plays, Man and Superman (1903) and Back to Methuselah (1921). Besides Butler’s positive philosophy, Shaw had recently been influenced by Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation (1818), although he converted Schopenhauer’s pessimistic philosophy of will into a philosophy of will that was much more optimistic.⁴ Shaw did not believe in evil as a force in the human personality, only in the evil of institutions that had outlived their time, such as capitalism in the late nineteenth century. Such a view explains why Shaw did not think of Hitler, Mussolini, or Stalin as evil, but rather applauded them for, as he believed, attempting to dismantle a moribund capitalism.

Whether or not Shaw’s optimism regarding the future of humankind was a cover for darker forebodings, the fact remains that the 1891 Quintessence intimates the dawning of a new era, where the human being will live first and foremost for his or her own self, and since “social progress takes effect through the replacement of old institutions by new ones” (4) this new era will result in the formation of new social institutions. And while the idea that the human being will live to satisfy his or her own will might sound like an endorsement of selfishness or solipsism—subjectivism—Shaw says that the will of human beings will be in conformity to a larger will, Schopenhauer’s “world will,” which will later be renamed the Life Force and become the cornerstone of his philosophy. But this element is barely mentioned in The Quintessence; in fact it is so underemphasized that Sidney Webb, a key member of the Fabians, wrote his future wife after hearing the initial paper, saying, “It’s very clever … But his glorification of the Individual Will distresses me.”⁵ Webb was not the only one concerned with Shaw’s glorification of the individual will; Shaw republished the book in 1913 with additions meant to make it “clear that he is enshrining individual will only when it works in harmony with the world-will.”⁶ This begs the question: how does one know—and perhaps more importantly, how are others to be assured—that one’s will is in harmony with the “world’s will” or Life Force? The Nazis claimed to be in harmony with the world’s will, working according to the laws of evolution and preparing the way for a superior race to lead us into the Promised Land; and the Soviets also believed they were in harmony with the Law of Historical Change, leading the way to a classless society.

Shaw believed that those he called in The Quintessence philistines and idealists were the greatest impediment to the arrival of the golden age he hoped for; with the decline of religious belief, they would need to be inculcated with a new faith that would guarantee their cooperation. Positive change required strong highly intelligent and motivated leaders with benevolent intentions and a docile population ready to follow their lead. This point of view would develop over the years, not receiving clear and detailed articulation until he was able to view and consider the totalitarian regimes that achieved so much success while his Fabians achieved, so he thought, so little. His religion of the Life Force, which was much more to him than simply a convenient replacement for a lost Judeo-Christian worldview, was developed fully some time after the writing of The Quintessence, and is first announced in Man and Superman at the beginning of the twentieth century.

We can see the Shavian religion in inchoate form in this essay. His very first sentence, if we exclude his brief preface, announces such a point of view. After the chapter heading, “The Two Pioneers,” we read: “THAT IS, PIONEERS of the march to the plains of heaven (so to speak)” (1). This is significant not only because it alludes to Shaw’s ultimately religious intentions, but also because it signifies, by his parenthetical “so to speak,” that for Shaw religion was a matter of this world, with nothing otherworldly about it. After boasting in his boyhood that he was an atheist, he later claimed to be a mystic; but his teleological view was oriented in the concrete world of human beings and institutions; this world was literally to become, through the efforts of pioneers like Ibsen and himself and Sidney Webb (and later of such ruthless political animals as Lenin and Stalin), a heaven on earth. And this “religious” intention is clear already in The Quintessence, where he announces in a footnote that “the will is our old friend the soul or spirit of man” (6).

There is a sense of inevitability about the golden age that men like Ibsen are heralding. If Shaw had any doubts about a world governed by individual will supposedly in harmony with a larger world will, they are not announced in this essay. Certainly the kind of future that might be imminent in a world unmoored from its theological base does not seem to trouble him, at least not in this essay, as it did Nietzsche, who according to Camus in The Rebel was terrified of such a future and worked incessantly to eliminate its possibility:

Nietzsche never thought except in terms of an apocalypse to come, not in order to extol it, for he guessed the sordid and calculating aspect that this apocalypse would finally assume, but in order to avoid it and to transform it into a renaissance. He recognized nihilism for what it was and examined it like a clinical fact.⁷

Nietzsche of course also lauded the individual of superior will, but in 1891 Shaw had not yet read Nietzsche, and later claimed he arrived at his ideas independently. Shaw attempts to subvert the subjectivism that pervades the ethos of his book by alluding to a larger spiritual reality; he mentions the “soul or spirit of man” in the footnote just mentioned, and briefly references the importance of the individual will being in harmony with the larger world will, but the prevailing message of the book is the supremacy of the ungoverned individual will, which should have to answer to no one but itself.

In The Rebel, Camus—writing with a backward glance at the Holocaust and two world wars with untold millions slaughtered, as well as Stalin’s purges and the development and dropping of the atomic bomb—was able to see more clearly what Shaw could or would not, but interestingly his outline of history is almost identical to Shaw’s. For Camus, the killing of Louis XVI was more than just the murder of another king; it was the death of an idea—the divine right of kings—and the beginning of our modern era. By killing one of God’s anointed, the regicides were in fact killing God, and in his place they substituted reason or the idea of secular justice. In this sense Camus and Shaw are in agreement, the age of reason and secular justice does indeed follow upon the age of faith; and for Camus, too, the age of reason is succeeded by an age of will, but with a horrifying aspect that Shaw was unable or unwilling to envisage: “the will to power came to take the place of the will to justice, pretending at first to be identified with it and then relegating it to a place somewhere at the end of history.”⁸ Camus goes on to say that “the revolutionary movement of our times is primarily a violent denunciation of the formal hypocrisy that presides over bourgeois society” and that all “that they have preserved is the vision of a history without any kind of transcendence.”⁹ Shaw was of course a revolutionary engaged in a “violent denunciation of the formal hypocrisy that presides over bourgeois society”; and I would argue as well that Shaw’s revolutionary outlook is consonant with Camus’ recognition that the revolutionary movement of his time is “the vision of a history without any kind of transcendence.” Shaw’s Life Force may theoretically be transcendent as well as immanent, but his concern is purely with an immanent force and its manifestation in individuals, in human society and its institutions. And as will be found out in the 1920s and 1930s, he will cling to this ideal vision of the future and condone almost any atrocity if he feels it necessary for bringing forth a new world order. Justice will indeed be relegated to the end of history—that is, to the final triumph of utopia; until then, anything goes.

II

While we can see Shaw’s philosophy of the Life Force and the triumph of a future utopia ruled by heroic men and women implicit in The Quintessence, nonetheless he makes certain ethical pronouncements that his commitment to his ideal will later force him to abandon. For instance, in condemning men for treating women as objects with which to fulfill their desires he propounds the following maxim: “to treat a person as a means instead of an end is to deny that person’s right to live” (19). In his analysis of The Wild Duck Shaw makes the very sensible observation that it is not possible to compel a person to a higher plane of being if they are not yet inwardly prepared to rise to it: “It is useless to make claims on him which he is not yet prepared to meet” (51). And speaking of Ibsen, Shaw says that he “protests against the ordinary assumption that there are certain supreme ends which justify all means used to attain them; and insists that every end shall be challenged to show that it justifies the means” (67). But while this might be true of Ibsen, and perhaps true of Shaw in 1891, later in his career Shaw will contradict these words with statements such as the following:

How is it then that the leaders of the Russian revolution have been able to do what I cannot do: that is, to set up an effective inquisition to enforce to the death the dogma that forsytism—parasitism—is the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Content
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: George Bernard Shaw: Revolutionary Playwright
• 1. Previsions of the Superman in the Coming Age of Will: The Quintessence of Ibsenism
• 2. Utopia in Flames: Shaw and Wagner’s Ring: The Perfect Wagnerite
• 3. From Hell to Heaven: Creative Evolution and the Drive toward the Military-Industrial-Religious Complex: Man and Superman, John Bull’s Other Island, Major Barbara
• 4. Shaw’s Modern Utopia: Back to Methuselah
• 5. Shaw’s Totalitarian Drama of the Thirties; or, Shaw and the Dictators: Geneva, The Millionairess, The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles
• 6. George Bernard Shaw 1856–1950, Utopian to the End: Farfetched Fables
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index