Man and Superman

Book: George Bernard Shaw Review: Satyendra Nath Dwivedi

The Author says: The lesson intended by an author is hardly the lesson the world learns from his book. [The reviewer has picked up the lessons that he could learn from this book and can only hope that it may to some extent tally with authors intended lesson.] Philosophically, Don Juan is a man who, though gifted enough to be capable of distinguishing between good and evil, follows his own instincts without regard to the common statute, or common law; and therefore, whilst gaining the ardent sympathy of our rebellious instincts (which are flattered by the brilliancies with which Don Juan associates them) finds himself in mortal conflict with existing institutions, and defends himself by fraud and farce as unscrupulously as a farmer defends his crops by same means against vermin. Man is no longer, like Don Juan, victor in the duel of sex. Whether he has ever really been may be doubted: at all events the enormous superiority of Womans natural position in this matter is telling with greater and greater force. In modern London life, the ordinary mans business is to keep up his position and habits of a gentleman, and the ordinary womans business is to get married. On the whole this is a sensible and satisfactory position for society. Money means nourishment and marriage means children; and that men should put nourishment first and women children first is, broadly speaking, the law of Nature and not the dictate of personal ambition. The secret of prosaic mans success, such as it is, is the simplicity with which he pursues these ends: the secret of the artistic mans failure, such as it is, is the versatility with which he strays in all directions after secondary ideals. The vitality which places nourishment and children first, heaven and hell somewhat remote second, and the health of society as an organic whole nowhere, may muddle successfully through the comparatively tribal stages gregariousness; but in the nineteenth century nations and twentieth century empires the determination of every man to be rich at all costs, and of every woman to be married at all costs, must, without a highly social organization produce a ridiculous development of poverty, celibacy, prostitution, infant mortality, adult degeneracy, and everything that wise men most dread.

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What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real. Fortunately for us, whose minds have not been so overwhelmingly sophisticated by literature, what produces most of the treatises and poems and structures of one sort or another is the struggle of Life to become divinely conscious of itself of blindly stumbling hither and thither in the line of least resistance. Any pamphleteer can show the way to better things; but when there is no will there is no way. We must either breed political capacity or be ruined by Democracy, which was forced on us by the failure of the older alternatives. Yet if despotism failed only for want of a capable benevolent despot, what chance has Democracy, which requires a whole population of capable voters: that is, of political critics who, if they cannot govern in person for lack of spare energy or specific talent for administration, can at least recognize and appreciate capacity and benevolence in others, and so govern through capably benevolent representatives? Where are such voters to be found today? Nowhere! This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. It may seem a long step from Banyan to Nietzsche, but the difference between their conclusions is purely formal. Bunyans perception that righteousness is filthy rags, his scorn for Mr. Legality in the village of Morality, his defiance of the Church as the supplanter of religion, his insistence on courage as the virtue of virtues, his estimate of the career of the conventionally respectable and sensible Worldly Wiseman as no better at bottom than the life and death of Mr. Badman: all this, expressed by Bunyan in the terms of a tinkers theology, is what Nietzsche has expressed in terms of postDarwinian, post-Schopenhauerian philosophy; Wagner in terms of polytheistic mythology, and Ibsen in terms of mid-nineteenth century Parisian dramaturgy. Effectiveness of assertation is Alpha and Omega of style. Who has nothing to assert has no style and can have none: he who has something to assert will go as far in power of style as its momentousness and his conviction will carry him. I never dream of reforming, knowing that I must take himself as I am and get what work I can out of himself. To the artistic lover the beloved is an enchantingly beautiful woman, in whose presence the world becomes transfigured, and the puny limits of individual consciousness are
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suddenly made infinite by a mystic memory of the whole life of the race to its beginning in the East, or even back to the paradise from which it fell. She is to him the reality of romance, the leaner good-sense of non-sense, the unveiling of his eyes, the freeing of his soul, the abolition of time, place and circumstances, the etherealization of his blood into rapturous rivers of the very water of life itself, the revelation of all the mysteries and the sanctification of all the dogmas. Vitality in a woman is a blind fury of creation. The true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art. The artists work is to show us ourselves as we really are. Our minds are nothing but this knowledge of ourselves; and he who adds a jot to such knowledge creates new mind as surely as any woman creates new men. Construction cumbers the ground with institutions made by busybodies. Destruction clears it and gives us breathing space and liberty. It is a womans business to get married as soon as possible, and a mans to keep unmarried as long as possible. There is nothing like Love: there is nothing else but Love: without it the world would be a dream of sordid horror. Precisely the same qualities that made the educated gentleman an artist may make an uneducated manual laborer an able-bodied pauper. We mistreat our laborers horribly; and when a man refuses to be misused, we have no right to say that he is refusing honest work. One or two of them, perhaps, it would be wiser to kill without malice in a friendly and frank manner; for these are bipeds, just as there are quadrupeds, who are too dangerous to be left unchained and un-muzzled; and these cannot fairly expect to have other mens lives wasted in the work of watching them. But as society has not the courage to kill them, and, when it catches them, simply wreaks on them some superstitious expiatory rites of torture and degradation, and then lets them lose with heightened capacity for mischief. I am a brigand: I live by robbing the rich. I am a gentleman: I live by robbing the poor. Lets shake hands. A movement which is confined to philosophers and honest men can never exercise any real political influence: there are too few of them. Until a movement shows itself capable of spreading among brigands, it can never hope for a political majority.
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Brigandage is abnormal. Abnormal professions attract two classes: those who are not good enough for ordinary bourgeois life and those who are too good for it. Hell is the home of honour, duty, justice, and the rest of the seven deadly virtues. All the wickedness on earth is done in their name: where else but in hell should they have their reward. A mere physical gulf could be bridged; but the gulf of dislike is impassable and eternal. On the earth people persuade themselves that what is done can be undone by repentance; that what is spoken can be unspoken by withdrawing it; that what is true can be annihilated by a general agreement to give it the lie. The earth is a nursery in which men and women play at being heroes and heroines, saints and sinners; but they are dragged down from their fools paradise by their bodies: hunger and cold and thirst, age and decay and disease, death above all, make them slaves of reality. There is the work of helping Life in its struggle upward. Think of how it wastes and scatters itself in its ignorance and blindness. It needs a brain, this irresistible force, lest in its ignorance it should resist itself. What a piece of work is man! says the poet. Yes: but what a blunderer! Here is the highest miracle of organization yet attained by life, the most intensely alive thing that exists, the most conscious of all the organisms; and yet, how wretched are his brains! Stupidity made sordid and cruel by the realities learnt from toil and poverty: Imagination resolved to starve sooner than face these realities, piling up illusions to hide them, and calling itself cleverness, genius! And each accusing the other at its own defect: Stupidity accusing Imagination of folly, and Imagination accusing Stupidity of ignorance: whereas, alas! Stupidity has all the knowledge and Imagination all the intelligence. In the arts of life man invents nothing; but in the arts of death he outdoes Nature herself, and produces by chemistry and machinery all the slaughter of plague, pestilence and famine. Man measures his strength by his destructiveness. The power that governs the earth is not the power of Life but of Death; and the inner need that has nerved Life to the effort of organizing itself into the human being is not the need for higher life but for a more efficient engine of destruction. The plague, the earthquake, the tempest were too spasmodic in their action; the tiger and the crocodile were too easily satiated and not cruel enough: something more constantly, more ruthlessly, more ingeniously destructive was needed; and that something was Man, the inventor of the rack, the stake, the gallows, and the electrocutor; of the sword and gun [add nuclear warheads]; above all, of justice, duty, patriotism and all other isms [add communism, terrorism, extremism] by which even those who are clever enough to be humanely disposed are persuaded to become the most destructive of all destroyers.
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Man gives every reason for his conduct save one, every excuse for his crime except one, every plea for his safety except one; and that one is cowardice: Yet all his civilization is founded on his cowardice, on his abject tameness, which he calls his respectability. You can make any of these cowards brave by simply putting an idea into his head. Men never really overcome fear until they imagine they are fighting to further a universal purpose fighting for an idea, as they call it. This creature man, who in his own selfish affairs is a coward to the backbone, will fight for an idea like a hero. He may be abject as a citizen; but he is dangerous as a fanatic. He can only be enslaved whilst he is spiritually weak enough to listen to reason. Men will die for human perfection, to which they will sacrifice all their liberty gladly. To Life, the force behind the Man, intellect is a necessity, because without it he blunders into death. Just as Life, after ages of struggle, evolved that wonderful bodily organ the eye, so that the living organism could see where it was going and what was coming to help or threaten it, and thus avoid a thousand dangers that formerly slew it, so it is evolving today a minds eye that shall see, not the physical world, but the purpose of Life, and thereby enable the individual to work for that purpose instead of thwarting and baffling it by setting up short-sighted personal aims as at present. Even as it is, only one sort of man has ever been happy, has ever been universally respected among all the conflicts of interest and illusions. He is the philosophical man, who seeks in contemplation to discover the inner will of the world, in invention to discover the means of fulfilling that will, and in action, and in action by the so-discovered means. [The ancient Rishis of India were such happy persons. The Upanishad says:

They enter into blinding darkness who worship Avidya (worldly knowledge); into still greater darkness, as it were, do they enter who delight in Vidya (knowledge of the Self). He, who knows both Vidya and Avidya together, overcomes death through Avidya and experiences immortality by means of Vidya. [Isha Upanishad 9, 11]]

The philosopher is in the grip of life force. This life force says to him, I have done a thousand things unconsciously by merely willing to live and following the line of least
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resistance: now I want to know myself and my destination, and choose my paths; so I have made a special brain a philosophers brain - to grasp this knowledge for me as the herdsmans hand grasps the plough for me. And this, says the Life Force to the philosopher, must thou strive to do for me until thou diest, when I will make another brain and another philosopher to carry on the work. [The ancient Rishis of India maintain that all human brains are made such that with right efforts they can reach the final destination, i. e. the God, or the Almighty, or the Atman, or the Brahman, that is the only One. The Shrimad-Bhagavata says:

The Divine One, having projected (evolved) with his own inherent power various forms such as trees, reptiles, cattle, birds, insects and fish, was dissatisfied at heart with all these; He then projected the human form endowed with the capacity to realize Brahman (the universal divine Self of all), and became extremely pleased. [Shrimad-Bhagavat 11.9.28]

Having obtained, at the end of many births, this human form which is difficult to obtain, and, though perishable, is capable of conferring on man, in this very life, the highest spiritual freedom, which is his highest excellence. Sensual delights can be had in all other bodies; (hence the human body need not be dedicated to them). [ShrimadBhagavat 11.9.28]]

Review: Satyendra Nath Dwivedi

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