Remember George Bernard Shaw, and G.K. Chesterton? During his lifetime, Shaw was one of the most famous men on earth and hobnobbed with everybody else who was famous. He was a recognizable character with his long white beard and his britches. His plays were performed everywhere, and he became very wealthy. But he has been on a steady decline since then, whereas Chesterton’s star continues to rise. The reason is pretty simple. Shaw was a reactionary, intent on rejecting traditional truths and trying to shock his audiences and upend their expectations. He started a dangerous trend, dangerous, that is, to itself. It has gotten harder and harder to shock an audience. It has gotten increasingly difficult to mock a truth that no one remembers. More and more Shaw looks stuck in his time, while Chesterton appears to be timeless. A new generation, with no help from the educational establishment, is now discovering Chesterton’s books and finding them fresh and fascinating, while students are still being forced to read Shaw’s plays and wondering what all the fuss is about. There may be a few Shaw fans left out there. They may even still like his plays. But they don’t like to think about the dark and troubling aspects to Shaw’s ideas: his utter grimness, his mockery of marriage and other good things, and worst of all, his embrace of Nietzsche. Chesterton says – prophetically – that Nietzsche succeeded in putting into Shaw’s head a new superstition “which bids fair to be the chief superstitions of the dark ages which are possibly in front of us…the superstition of what is called the Superman.” The dark ages came indeed, when less than three decades later Hitler enflamed an entire nation with this same superstition. Shaw didn’t see it coming. Chesterton did.
Posted on: Sun, 02 Feb 2014 07:54:43 +0000
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