The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's RingShaw, Bernard
Philosophy
The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring
Shaw, Bernard
Opera; Wagner, Richard, 1813-1883. Ring des Nibelungen
Nowadays the supernatural element in Protestantism has perished;
and if every man's private judgment is still to be justified as the most
trustworthy interpreter of the will of Humanity (which is not a
more extreme proposition than the old one about the will of God)
Protestantism must take a fresh step in advance, and become Anarchism.
Which it has accordingly done, Anarchism being one of the notable new
creeds of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The weak place which experience finds out in the Anarchist theory is
its reliance on the progress already achieved by "Man." There is no such
thing as Man in the world: what we have to deal with is a multitude of
men, some of them great rascals, some of them great statesmen, others
both, with a vast majority capable of managing their personal affairs,
but not of comprehending social organization, or grappling with the
problems created by their association in enormous numbers. If "Man"
means this majority, then "Man" has made no progress: he has, on
the contrary, resisted it. He will not even pay the cost of existing
institutions: the requisite money has to be filched from him by
"indirect taxation." Such people, like Wagner's giants, must be
governed by laws; and their assent to such government must be secured
by deliberately filling them with prejudices and practicing on their
imaginations by pageantry and artificial eminences and dignities.
The government is of course established by the few who are capable of
government, though its mechanism once complete, it may be, and generally
is, carried on unintelligently by people who are incapable of it the
capable people repairing it from time to time when it gets too far
behind the continuous advance or decay of civilization. All these
capable people are thus in the position of Wotan, forced to maintain as
sacred, and themselves submit to, laws which they privately know to be
obsolescent makeshifts, and to affect the deepest veneration for creeds
and ideals which they ridicule among themselves with cynical scepticism.
No individual Siegfried can rescue them from this bondage and hypocrisy;
in fact, the individual Siegfried has come often enough, only to find
himself confronted with the alternative of governing those who are not
Siegfrieds or risking destruction at their hands. And this dilemma will
persist until Wotan's inspiration comes to our governors, and they see
that their business is not the devising of laws and institutions to prop
up the weaknesses of mobs and secure the survival of the unfittest, but
the breeding of men whose wills and intelligences may be depended on to
produce spontaneously the social well-being our clumsy laws now aim at
and miss. The majority of men at present in Europe have no business
to be alive; and no serious progress will be made until we address
ourselves earnestly and scientifically to the task of producing
trustworthy human material for society. In short, it is necessary to
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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