Tag Archives: Back to Methuselah

The Life Force Speaks to G.B.S. Out of the Evolutionary Whirlwind

bernard-shaw-on-self-effacement
In our last post, we touched on Bernard Shaw’s all but single-handed creation of a “religion of the future”: Life Force Worship. Not surprisingly, a faith in which God does not exist (yet) was not widely welcomed by the conventionally religious. Perhaps more surprising is the animus Shaw got from the scientifically literate—an animus that still persists today.

Shaw’s friend H. G. Wells, himself a former pupil of T. H. (“Darwin’s Bulldog”) Huxley, told Shaw that his religion embodied “an almost encyclopedic philosophical and biological ignorance.” And Richard Dawkins remembers with shame that “my own appreciation of Darwinism as a teenager was held back for at least a year by Shaw’s bewitching rhetoric in Back to Methuselah.”

Why such hostility? In the spirit of Story, let’s play with this question in a free-verse fable — with an accompanying video …

He was sitting there minding his own business and trying his best to write a potboiler replete with adulterous affairs and a couple of good sword fights when it had him round the throat again demanding:

“How dare you disobey me thus?
I who made the fish to thirst for the air and create nostrils for itself and feet so it could walk upon the earth:
I who made the giraffe to stretch its neck to attain the green beauty of the leaves:
and the mouse to insist on wings and arrange them out of its own flaccid flesh so it might fly in the dark like a bird:
and apes like you to seek more mind out of muddled mute sludge over eons of hit-and-miss attempts:
a mind to be my pilot and my guide and you use it to feed your own greedy face.”

“There you go spewing Lamarckian nonsense again,” said he.
“And if that isn’t bad enough you make me talk it too:
mystical gobbledygook that flummoxes science and slurs divinity and goads all sentient clusters of cells subscribing to fact or faith to shout ‘Blasphemy!’ from the bowels of billion-year-old lungs:
and who can blame them?
And to make matters worse you make me believe it myself:
you make me a cursed genetic freak and a puncture on the face of life and a damned mutation with no like organism to breed more of my kind with:
you make me to speak with such infernal roundabout wit that my fellow creatures are too delighted by how I say things to pay the first shred of attention to what I have to say:
just as you did with Jesus Christ damn you:
and now I demand to know if I’m to be crucified like he was.”

“Certainly not,” it replied. “You’ll live to be ninety-four.”

“Too old to be martyred and too young to learn,” he moaned.

“Remember the giraffe,” said the Life Force out of the Chaos.

The Evangelist and the Evolutionist

From William Jennings Bryan to George Bernard Shaw …

GBShaw1900It might seem like a rather big leap from our previous two blog posts to this one — from the Bible-thumping Bryan to the vitalist Shaw. But consider what Shaw had to say about the theory of Natural Selection:

[W]hen its whole significance dawns on you, your heart sinks into a heap of sand within you. There is a hideous fatalism about it, a ghastly and damnable reduction of beauty and intelligence, of strength and purpose, of honor and aspiration…. To call this Natural Selection is a blasphemy, possible to many for whom Nature is nothing but a casual aggregation of inert and dead matter, but eternally impossible to the spirits and souls of the righteous.

jpegThis is from the preface to Shaw’s monumental five-play cycle Back to Methuselah, written some six years before Bryan took the witness stand in Dayton, Ohio. Of course, he and Bryan had both fallen for a gross caricature of what Daniel Dennett calls “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea.” But that’s hardly a surprise. Theirs was the heyday of “Social Darwinism,” the idea that “might makes right” in human society as well as in nature.

Also, as William Jennings Bryan says in the play I recently posted, “There was a war, remember?” Bryan believed that neo-Darwinism had done nothing less than bring civilization to the brink of suicide during the years 1914 – 18. Shaw said precisely the same thing in Back to Methuselah …

Neo-Darwinism in politics had produced a European catastrophe of a magnitude so appalling, and a scope so unpredictable, that as I write these lines in 1920, it is still far from certain whether our civilization will survive it.

140px-William-Jennings-Bryan-speaking-c1896Bryan and Shaw were of sharply opposing mentalities, to put it mildly. Even so, they were both men of faith for whom the idea of a universe devoid of meaning was intolerable. But Shaw’s faith, unlike Bryan’s, was by no means conventional. As he wrote to Leo Tolstoy,

To me God does not yet exist; but there is a creative force constantly struggling to evolve an executive organ of godlike knowledge and power; that is, to achieve omnipotence and omniscience; and every man and woman born is a fresh attempt to achieve this object.

Shaw was seeking a new religion that would harmonize with scientific thought. At the same time, he yearned like Bryan for a creed that the materialistic science of his age seemed actively to deny. But did “faith” mean the same thing for Shaw as it did for Bryan? I think they would at least have understood each other’s meaning.

Both Shaw and Bryan studied and admired the Christian anarchist writings of Leo Tolstoy, who rejected St. Paul’s definition of faith as “the substance of things hoped for, and the evidence of things not seen.” His was a definition of faith that Bryan and Shaw could have agreed upon:

Faith is the force of life. If a man lives, then he must believe in something. If he did not believe that there was something he must live for he would not live. If he does not see and comprehend the illusion of the finite he will believe in the finite. If he does understand the illusion of the finite, he is bound to believe in the infinite. Without faith it is impossible to live.