George Bernard Shaw a penn State Electronic Classics Series Publication

The Wicked Half Century
It is difficult to say whether indifference and neglect are worse
than false doctrine; but Heartbreak House and Horseback
Hall unfortunately suffered from both. For half a century
before the war civilization had been going to the devil very
precipitately under the influence of a pseudo-science as di-
sastrous as the blackest Calvinism. Calvinism taught that as
we are predestinately saved or damned, nothing that we can
do can alter our destiny. Still, as Calvinism gave the indi-
vidual no clue as to whether he had drawn a lucky number
or an unlucky one, it left him a fairly strong interest in en-
couraging his hopes of salvation and allaying his fear of dam-
nation by behaving as one of the elect might be expected to
behave rather than as one of the reprobate. But in the middle
of the nineteenth century naturalists and physicists assured
the world, in the name of Science, that salvation and dam-
nation are all nonsense, and that predestination is the cen-
tral truth of religion, inasmuch as human beings are pro-
duced by their environment, their sins and good deeds be-
ing only a series of chemical and mechanical reactions over
which they have no control. Such figments as mind, choice,
purpose, conscience, will, and so forth, are, they taught, mere
illusions, produced because they are useful in the continual
struggle of the human machine to maintain its environment
in a favorable condition, a process incidentally involving the
ruthless destruction or subjection of its competitors for the
supply (assumed to be limited) of subsistence available. We

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GB Shaw
taught Prussia this religion; and Prussia bettered our instruc-
tion so effectively that we presently found ourselves confronted
with the necessity of destroying Prussia to prevent Prussia de-
stroying us. And that has just ended in each destroying the
other to an extent doubtfully reparable in our time.
It may be asked how so imbecile and dangerous a creed
ever came to be accepted by intelligent beings. I will answer
that question more fully in my next volume of plays, which
will be entirely devoted to the subject. For the present I will
only say that there were better reasons than the obvious one
that such sham science as this opened a scientific career to
very stupid men, and all the other careers to shameless ras-
cals, provided they were industrious enough. It is true that
this motive operated very powerfully; but when the new de-