The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God (14 page)

And, as he said elsewhere, “The world is waiting for Man to redeem it from the lame and cramped government of the gods.”
32
But Shaw frankly acknowledged that “the precise formula for the Superman . . . has not yet been discovered. Until it is, every birth is an experiment in the Great Research which is being conducted by the Life Force to discover that formula.” But he insisted that there is an “irresistible urge” to achieve an ever higher stage, a desire toward perfectibility: “In the heaven I seek [there is] no other joy than the work of helping Life in its struggle upward.”
33
In
Don Juan
he wrote, “I tell you that as long as I can conceive something better than myself I cannot be easy unless I am striving to bring it into existence or clearing the way for it. . . . I tell you that in the pursuit of my own pleasure . . . I have never known happiness.” Or, as Shaw wrote to Tolstoy in 1910: “To me God does not yet exist. . . . The current theory that God already exists in perfection involves the belief that God deliberately created something lower than Himself. . . . To my mind, unless we conceive God as engaged in a continual struggle to surpass himself . . . we are con
ceiving nothing better than an omnipotent snob.” And in the Postscript he added to
Back to Methuselah
as late as 1944: “God . . . is therefore not a Person but an incorporeal Purpose, unable to do anything directly.”
34

Again, this view informed his politics as much as his plays and ideas. “The ethic and religion of socialism seek not the ideal society through the ideal individual, but conversely, the ideal individual through the ideal society.” Through politics, society would achieve an ever-widening communal identity by means of an evolutionary process “in which each new level of development incorporated what was most necessary or ‘true’ from the half-truths of earlier stages.” The “good” is a process of endless improvement “that need never stop and is never complete.”
35

These ideas were incorporated into his plays, where the essential form is one of
movement
that usually carries beyond despair to a synthesis in the shape of a new and firmer grasp on reality, by way of an evolution leading to a more complete self-awareness through a dialectic of action and reaction. In
Candida
, the clergyman’s wife, Candida, asked to choose between her “weak” husband and her would-be lover, realizes she has learned to live without happiness: “life is nobler than [happiness].” As in his other plays, Shaw presents the choice as being between the truer and the less true, not between absolutes.
36

Shaw’s plays focus on superhuman, perceptive models (Don Juan, Caesar, Saint Joan, Undershaft, Henry Higgins, the early long-livers in
Back to Methuselah
), whose function, whether in a “world historical sense” (
à la
Hegel) or on a private, mundane, domestic level, is to encourage ordinary individuals (Cleopatra, Barbara Undershaft, Liza Doolittle, Ellie Dunn) into a larger participation in their own destiny.
37

Shaw took hope seriously—it is for him, as Robert Whitman has pointed out, a form of moral responsibility. “To be in hell is to drift (a denial of purpose); heaven is to steer. . . . Life is a force which has made innumerable experiments in organizing itself . . . into higher and higher individuals.” Shaw’s superman, in contrast to Nietzsche’s, is not a goal, an end product; rather, it is a process, a stage of development: “Heaven is not a place but a direction.”
38
In
Major Barbara
(1905), Undershaft, a wealthy armaments manufacturer, admits that he would rather be a thief than a pauper, a murderer rather than a slave, because in doing so he would be
taking action, and would retain his self-respect. When Cussins, engaged to Barbara, a major in the Salvation Army, asks him innocently what power it is that drives his munitions plant, Undershaft replies enigmatically: “A will of which I am part,” adding, “I am a millionaire. That is my religion.”

This conformed to Shaw’s desire to see an end to the notion that we live for reason instead of for the fulfillment of our will to live. But what emerges from the play is that power and a sense of purpose need each other. If people want a better world, he is saying, they have to create it themselves, not sit back and wait for God to achieve it. “The end of human existence is not to be ‘good’ and be rewarded in heaven, but to create Heaven on earth.” As he wrote to Lady Gregory: “My doctrine is that God proceeds by the method of ‘trial and error.’ . . . To me the sole hope of human salvation lies in teaching Man to regard himself as an experiment in the realization of God.”
39

In
Androcles and the Lion
, Shaw pits religion against no religion, airing his view that the major form of sin is the status quo, because, as he asserts in the Preface (Shaw was a great one for writing explicatory and often didactic prefaces to his plays), “the fundamental condition of evolution . . . is, that life, including human life, is continually evolving and must therefore be continually ashamed of itself and its present and past.”
40
Christianity, he believes, is but a stage in moral evolution. And this evolution can happen only via the passionate impulses of life—curiosity, daring, resistance, the “effort of seeking something better,” to be contrasted with what he considered “the impulses of death,” the desire for comfort and happiness, cynical self-serving and “dreams of ease.”
41

For Shaw, vitality, a realistic vision and “the will to steer” are the trinity we need so as to achieve ever higher organization and “completer self-consciousness.” The fact that the life force was evolving longer life spans meant we could achieve even more. “It is enough that there is a beyond,” says Lilith in
Methuselah.
42
But Shaw is very quotable. “The future is to those who prefer surprise and wonder to security.” “Wrestle with life as it comes. And it never comes as we expect it to come.” “A faith in life rather than men, in the effort rather than the result, in the process rather than in a utopian vision of The Good.”
43

In almost all of Shaw’s plays the change that comes over the main char
acters is threefold, and in the direction of “more.” In one sense “more” means broader, richer, more complete, more adjusted to reality (more “adapted” in a Darwinian sense). The second sense is that the characters become more aware that their fulfillment, their salvation, lies outward rather than inside themselves. Third, and allied to this, is the development of
reciprocal enlightenment
, in which each character discovers him- or herself in his opposite.
44
Shaw, like many modernists, saw that, if God was dead, if there was no afterlife of bliss, the only alternative was to live this life more intensely. His plays were more didactic than most, more so than Ibsen’s, certainly. From the best motives, he wanted to help his public enrich the quality of their lives by nudging them—step by stumbling step—onto an evolutionary road upward and toward a wider consciousness and a more intense life.

DO NOT LOOK INTO THE DISTANCE

At first sight, there may not seem much of an overlap between Shaw and his Russian contemporary, Anton Chekhov (1860–1904). Chekhov’s plays and short stories, his themes, are “quieter” than Shaw’s. But this is deceptive—the Russian was thoroughly immersed in Russian culture and history but his concerns were not at all dissimilar.

Unlike many Russian writers of his generation, Chekhov was not an aristocrat and, in his case, that was important. His father had a small grocery shop in the provincial town of Taganrog. Of his early years Chekhov said: “In my childhood, I had no childhood.” He was made to work hour upon hour in the grocery shop and was often beaten by his excessively religious father. The young Chekhov particularly objected to being forced to serve as a chorister. Things got worse before they got better. In 1875 the family business virtually went under, his father moved with most of the family to Moscow, and Chekhov—barely fifteen—was left in charge in Taganrog. Yet soon he came to relish the increased freedom (and the lack of beatings and choir work). He found he enjoyed the responsibilities that had been thrust upon him, and the changed circumstances became altogether emancipating.
45

Not that the experience was the education he craved. There was a large Greek community in Taganrog, and at the school he attended all subjects were taught in Greek. But this did at least have the effect of making him a conscientious autodidact. Eventually he moved on to medical school in Moscow, a choice that he saw as a means of satisfying his humanitarian feelings and that also offered a sense of personal dignity.
46

Scientific literature always occupied him as much as imaginative writing, but it was from the likes of Tolstoy, Zola, Flaubert and Maupassant that he learned the primacy of a moral dimension in life, his loathing of the philistine world and in particular his view of the colorlessness of everyday life. It was this, as much as anything else, that gave him his notorious pessimism.

Only when he moved to St. Petersburg in 1885 and met a number of famous writers, who all glimpsed the talent beneath the hack work that was all he had until then allowed himself, did he begin to assert his qualities. His real name appeared for the first time under a short story called “The Requiem” (1886). Gradually his views coalesced, and “Ward 6” (1892) marks something of a turning point. He came to accept that art—life in general—was without a unifying core idea, without purpose, was in that sense ultimately trivial; but he also believed that facing the objective truth, describing it in his work, was the first step toward inspiring in the reader or the audience the hope of a better life. In fulfilling this task, hard work, he maintained, was as necessary as talent.
47
For him, the artist was no more than a highly skilled craftsman, not a prophet or a high priest. He was frequently attacked for his failure to depict heroic characters, to which he retorted that he would gladly depict them “if they existed in reality.”

In some ways Chekhov’s style and oeuvre are to be understood as a reply to Dostoevsky’s apocalyptic view of life without God. We are not in an “abyss,” according to Chekhov; rather, we, or at least the provincial Russians, face a world of
poshlost
—mediocrity, colorlessness and philistinism—and for the most part a lack of ambition and heroism. Tolstoy’s form of Christianity, Chekhov thought, avoided the issues facing his fellow Russians, specifically the human misery of many in the evolving industrial sphere. This is made clear throughout his work, for example in “A Boring Story” (1889), “Ward 6,” “My Life” (1896) and “A Doctor’s Visit” (1898).
Chekhov was in particular conscious of “how far life falls short of ideal life,” that philistinism destroyed the hope that it was the purpose of art to create, and that “no one is very obviously to blame for what is happening, except that they are all to blame for being so weak.” These are the culminating themes in his last two plays,
Three Sisters
and
The Cherry Orchard.
48

Chekhov’s turning away from Dostoevsky’s “high temperature” vision, the “dull prose” of his plays that “had the precise intention of reproducing the dull prose of everyday life,” his apparent obsession with the futility of life, the criticism that “everything ends up seeming the same” and that his plays are unfocused—all this underlined his view that grand all-encompassing solutions to life are not to be found, but that instead we should look for “rather small-scale and, above all,
practical
answers.” It was people’s needs that counted, and those needs could not be fulfilled by great abstract ideas. For him, in marked contrast to Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, the absence of God did not lead to moral decline or a moral vacuum: individuals must find the answer for themselves, evolving their morality as they go along.

In fact, Chekhov helped initiate the great change that took place after Nietzsche, which would echo down the twentieth century: namely, he was less interested in philosophical (to include religious) or sociological questions than in the interplay between morality and (individual) psychology.
49

Being an autodidact, he was naturally interested in self-improvement and education, and had along the way acquired the view that little could be accomplished without hard work. None of this, however, gave him
direction
. That happened as a result of his visit to the penal colony on the island of Sakhalin in the North Pacific. To him, the penal colony was not just an isolated eyesore, but typified the shortcomings and corruption of the whole Russian Empire. In a seeming instant, his sense of purposelessness evaporated, and throughout the rest of his life his writings were devoted to the eradication of the terrible conditions he had seen there. In the early 1890s he extended his activities, forming the view that
practical
innovations, not just art, and however small-scale, were the only way to change Russian society. He sent more than two thousand books to Sakhalin, while directing his critical barbs at his fellow intellectuals who, despite their campaigning words, did little that was practical to improve matters.
50

He abhorred the religious revival that took place in Russia at the turn of the century, again because he was convinced that “there were no great solutions to be had” and because, like capitalism, religion produced a senseless waste of human potential. Like the characters in his plays, people under the sway of religion and/or capitalism “are too weak and afraid to improve their lot.” “In his last four plays the only happy characters are those who are smug, self-satisfied or complacent, while the more intelligent, such as Uncle Vanya and Sonya or the three sisters, remain without fulfillment.” Korney Chukovsky, the Russian journalist and poet, summed up Chekhov’s belief thus: “Compassion for the concrete individual was his cult.”