Books: PREFACE TO MAJOR BARBARA: FIRST AID TO CRITICS
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George Bernard Shaw >> PREFACE TO MAJOR BARBARA: FIRST AID TO CRITICS
Now this is not a healthy state of things. The advantages of
living in society are proportionate, not to the freedom of the
individual from a code, but to the complexity and subtlety of the
code he is prepared not only to accept but to uphold as a matter
of such vital importance that a lawbreaker at large is hardly to
be tolerated on any plea. Such an attitude becomes impossible
when the only men who can make themselves heard and remembered
throughout the world spend all their energy in raising our gorge
against current law, current morality, current respect
ability, and legal property. The ordinary man, uneducated in
social theory even when he is schooled in Latin verse, cannot be
set against all the laws of his country and yet persuaded to
regard law in the abstract as vitally necessary to society. Once
he is brought to repudiate the laws and institutions he knows, he
will repudiate the very conception of law and the very groundwork
of institutions, ridiculing human rights, extolling brainless
methods as "historical," and tolerating nothing except pure
empiricism in conduct, with dynamite as the basis of politics and
vivisection as the basis of science. That is hideous; but what is
to be done? Here am I, for instance, by class a respectable man,
by common sense a hater of waste and disorder, by intellectual
constitution legally minded to the verge of pedantry, and by
temperament apprehensive and economically disposed to the limit
of old-maidishness; yet I am, and have always been, and shall now
always be, a revolutionary writer, because our laws make law
impossible; our liberties destroy all freedom; our property is
organized robbery; our morality is an impudent hypocrisy; our
wisdom is administered by inexperienced or malexperienced dupes,
our power wielded by cowards and weaklings, and our honor false
in all its points. I am an enemy of the existing order for good
reasons; but that does not make my attacks any less encouraging
or helpful to people who are its enemies for bad reasons. The
existing order may shriek that if I tell the truth about it, some
foolish person may drive it to become still worse by trying to
assassinate it. I cannot help that, even if I could see what
worse it could do than it is already doing. And the disadvantage
of that worst even from its own point of view is that society,
with all its prisons and bayonets and whips and ostracisms and
starvations, is powerless in the face of the Anarchist who is
prepared to sacrifice his own life in the battle with it. Our
natural safety from the cheap and devastating explosives which
every Russian student can make, and every Russian grenadier has
learnt to handle in Manchuria, lies in the fact that brave and
resolute men, when they are rascals, will not risk their skins
for the good of humanity, and, when they are sympathetic enough
to care for humanity, abhor murder, and never commit it until
their consciences are outraged beyond endurance. The remedy is,
simply not to outrage their consciences.
Do not be afraid that they will not make allowances. All men make
very large allowances indeed before they stake their own lives in
a war to the death with society. Nobody demands or expects the
millennium. But there are two things that must be set right, or
we shall perish, like Rome, of soul atrophy disguised as empire.
The first is, that the daily ceremony of dividing the wealth of
the country among its inhabitants shall be so conducted that no
crumb shall go to any able-bodied adults who are not producing by
their personal exertions not only a full equivalent for what they
take, but a surplus sufficient to provide for their
superannuation and pay back the debt due for their nurture.
The second is that the deliberate infliction of malicious
injuries which now goes on under the name of punishment be
abandoned; so that the thief, the ruffian, the gambler, and the
beggar, may without inhumanity be handed over to the law, and
made to understand that a State which is too humane to punish
will also be too thrifty to waste the life of honest men in
watching or restraining dishonest ones. That is why we do not
imprison dogs. We even take our chance of their first bite. But
if a dog delights to bark and bite, it goes to the lethal
chamber. That seems to me sensible. To allow the dog to expiate
his bite by a period of torment, and then let him loose in a much
more savage condition (for the chain makes a dog savage) to bite
again and expiate again, having meanwhile spent a great deal of
human life and happiness in the task of chaining and feeding and
tormenting him, seems to me idiotic and superstitious. Yet that
is what we do to men who bark and bite and steal. It would be far
more sensible to put up with their vices, as we put up with their
illnesses, until they give more trouble than they are worth, at
which point we should, with many apologies and expressions of
sympathy, and some generosity in complying with their last
wishes, then, place them in the lethal chamber and get rid of
them. Under no circumstances should they be allowed to expiate
their misdeeds by a manufactured penalty, to subscribe to a
charity, or to compensate the victims. If there is to be no
punishment there can be no forgiveness. We shall never have real
moral responsibility until everyone knows that his deeds are
irrevocable, and that his life depends on his usefulness.
Hitherto, alas! humanity has never dared face these hard facts.
We frantically scatter conscience money and invent systems of
conscience banking, with expiatory penalties, atonements,
redemptions, salvations, hospital subscription lists and what
not, to enable us to contract-out of the moral code. Not content
with the old scapegoat and sacrificial lamb, we deify human
saviors, and pray to miraculous virgin intercessors. We attribute
mercy to the inexorable; soothe our consciences after committing
murder by throwing ourselves on the bosom of divine love; and
shrink even from our own gallows because we are forced to admit
that it, at least, is irrevocable--as if one hour of imprisonment
were not as irrevocable as any execution!
If a man cannot look evil in the face without illusion, he will
never know what it really is, or combat it effectually. The few
men who have been able (relatively) to do this have been called
cynics, and have sometimes had an abnormal share of evil in
themselves, corresponding to the abnormal strength of their
minds; but they have never done mischief unless they intended to
do it. That is why great scoundrels have been beneficent rulers
whilst amiable and privately harmless monarchs have ruined their
countries by trusting to the hocus-pocus of innocence and guilt,
reward and punishment, virtuous indignation and pardon, instead
of standing up to the facts without either malice or mercy. Major
Barbara stands up to Bill Walker in that way, with the result
that the ruffian who cannot get hated, has to hate himself. To
relieve this agony be tries to get punished; but the Salvationist
whom he tries to provoke is as merciless as Barbara, and only
prays for him. Then he tries to pay, but can get nobody to take
his money. His doom is the doom of Cain, who, failing to find
either a savior, a policeman, or an almoner to help him to
pretend that his brother's blood no longer cried from the ground,
had to live and die a murderer. Cain took care not to commit
another murder, unlike our railway shareholders (I am one) who
kill and maim shunters by hundreds to save the cost of automatic
couplings, and make atonement by annual subscriptions to
deserving charities. Had Cain been allowed to pay off his score,
he might possibly have killed Adam and Eve for the mere sake of a
second luxurious reconciliation with God afterwards. Bodger, you
may depend on it, will go on to the end of his life poisoning
people with bad whisky, because he can always depend on the
Salvation Army or the Church of England to negotiate a redemption
for him in consideration of a trifling percentage of his profits.
There is a third condition too, which must be fulfilled before
the great teachers of the world will cease to scoff at its
religions. Creeds must become intellectually honest. At present
there is not a single credible established religion in the world.
That is perhaps the most stupendous fact in the whole
world-situation. This play of mine, Major Barbara, is, I hope,
both true and inspired; but whoever says that it all happened,
and that faith in it and understanding of it consist in believing
that it is a record of an actual occurrence, is, to speak
according to Scripture, a fool and a liar, and is hereby solemnly
denounced and cursed as such by me, the author, to all posterity.
London, June 1906.