Mrs. Warren’s Profession: George Shaw was a Bad Man and Shavianism a Fraud

Mrs. Warren’s Profession: George Shaw was a Bad Man and Shavianism a Fraud October 28, 2016

Shaw: a degenerate with the right enemies.
Shaw: a degenerate with the right enemies.

George Bernard Shaw, a workmanlike writer who offended all the right people, had a play open in New York City on this day in 1905 that dealt with prostitution “frankly.” If the play had not been closed the next day, nobody would recall this mediocrity, but banned it was.

Why?

It offended public morals.

Note that it was banned for commercial production to which the general public was seduced into paying for an amoral sermon with the lie that is was “frank.” And the bigger lie that it was entertaining. Mr. Shaw and his friends were free to produce any play they wished in their own homes, but frankly Shaw and his partners wanted to change the morals of the general public to find a right to their vices while making bank doing so. They used liberty as an excuse to advance libertine morals.

Of course, anybody who wanted to know about the exploitation of girls and women for money only needed to go down the street and take a look. People who wished to do so did. Some of those people, like the Salvation Army, wanted to help. Other people wanted to exploit and Shaw was content to use these women in a new way for money miking and left nobody with more information on prostitution, just a night’s titillating entertainment.

Good luck finding a defense of New York’s modest defense of their moral order. Lazy intellects declare Shaw the hero and New Yorkers boors. Nothing is so unpopular in the United States just now as obscenity laws unless it is Donald Trump. There is no use wasting political time arguing for them and I shall not. It is worth asking, however: “Why are we sure that censoring the arts is so bad?” We are not talking about political speech.

If Shaw wanted to write a play arguing that present laws about the arts and obscenity were bad, he could have done so. Americans rarely have argued for censoring political speech, but then Shaw would not have made money on a political argument.

There is a long tradition that says that a city will have to censor the arts to maintain adequate public morality. Plato argues for censorship in his “city in words” in Republic and every country, even the most liberal, censors something. There are things that cannot be published in the United States of America right now and few people would wish them to be published. The question is not whether to censor for public morality, but what to censor.

If you want a society where sex is reserved for marriage, then popular money making entertainments that undermine this public virtue are bad. Why shouldn’t they be banned?

Our experiment with nearly unfettered Internet porn certainly has had an impact on public morality. What if Americans don’t like what it has done to us? Is it wonderful that fifth graders have access to what they have access to? Is it good for grownups? These are hard questions to even ask, because the assumption is always that the questioner is for oppression. Of course, in 1905 most Americans thought the libertines were for pollution of the public mind (which would change the public mind). They were willing to ban a play (and then dismiss the case) in order to uphold a standard.

Few have any sympathy for the people of Boston or New York who wished to live as they lived and essentially none of those people are in positions of public influence. Public morals have changed, but I doubt “arguments” have changed them. What has? I would suggest widespread consumption of entertainments that condone those behaviors are plausibly connected.

Suppose one thinks (based on reason, revelation, and experience) that many of the changes are bad. Doesn’t that make the people of New York in 1905 seem a bit more reasonable? I think so, but if you want to be banned in a New York school now try making those arguments! You will not make it a day.

The best argument, and the one that persuades me, against censorship of the arts is my distrust of “big government.” I would not trust federal censors at all. I am, however, very sympathetic to local or regional arguments for censorship. Should France be able to keep the French language from being overwhelmed by English language entertainment products? Should Nigeria be able to protect her way of life against cultural imperialism?

I am not sure, but I do know this. Making heroes of men like Shaw is bad history, bad reasoning, and bad morals. If a Christian defended Hitler, we would all rightly condemn him, but Shaw defended Stalin and papered over his mass killings. Shaw was a moral degenerate, but Shaw wrote a “frank play” on prostitution that got banned in New York so his defense of mass murder by a leftist does not remove him from hero status. Arguing for sexual freedom will (in intellectual America) produce a pass on defending a mass murderer. So is the rest of the world to be swamped in our dreck as we head into decadence?

What can the rest of the word do to protect against a dying culture that still owns the broadest broadcast ever known?

This is a hard problem. How can India protect herself from Hollywood morality if India wishes to do so?

On the whole, liberty works, but then certain forms of immorality undermine liberty making women and men less capable of managing their own affairs. Letting a man choose to become a meth addict is letting him make one choice that will prevent him from making most other choices. Letting people make money peddling immortality (as a culture defines immorality) will change the morals of the consumers.

I suggest no answers, just this: Christians should, at the very least, recognize that we (as individuals) are not going at deciding what is good for us. Somethings once consumed change us. If there exists wild eyed censors (Harry Potter will fill us with demons!), then I have met bizarre Christians who have the opposite mission. Said one Christian educator to me: “My goal is to show every Christian young adult attending my program that it is ok to say b- .”

Jesus evidently died so he could teach kids to indulge in crudities.

Shaw wrote some very good plays, but managed to also produce a great many bad plays. He wrote and wrote with an unerring instinct to love dictators as long as they loved him. His moral influence was awful, but nobody has a good word to say for his critics if they are not named Chesterton. Maybe it is time somebody said a good word for the plain people of New York in 1905 who looked at the rogue and said: “No, thank you.”

Let’s at least think about it.

——————-

Read it here. Good luck.

For fun read this line aloud:

PRAED. Well, you must have observed, Miss Warren, that people who are dissatisfied with their own bringing-up generally think that the world would be all right if everybody were to be brought up quite differently. Now your mother’s life has been—er—I suppose you know—

Well, as Reagan famously began an amusing quip, you will observe that people who think that playwrights who put “er” in their scripts are second only to Shakespeare are people who think Stalin a fine fellow.

 


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