CONTEMPORARY BARBARISM

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 547, 27 December 1928, Page 8

CONTEMPORARY BARBARISM

lINCOMPROMISING and iconoclastic, George Bernard Shaw has devoted his life to the stripping of hypocritical fripperies from the character of the English nation. How much personal enjoyment lie obtains from this Shaw himself can say, but the fact remains that there is always a germ of philosophic truth in his most sweeping utterances. At times he is enigmatic, and at others paradoxical, but he is always sane and penetrating. In the annual interview which Shaw gives to his German translator, Herr Seigfried Trebitsch, he was asked whether he thought things had taken a turn for the better in-England since the war, and with characteristic frankness he replied that England had fared in just the same way as any other belligerent State. Englishmen had simply discovered that they were barbarians in spite of their imagined civilisation. It is unpleasant to reflect on the contemporary barbarity of nations; but still the veneer of civilisation is so thin that some thought should be given to that which lies beneath. A few angry words, and nations, like individuals, lose reason. In the hot moments that follow, passions held long in subjection break loose, and the amenities of leisure and peace are forgotten. It may be nothing more than natural frailty, but perhaps Shaw is right when he diagnoses it as a lingering trace of barbarism. During the last war the people were told that from the desolating miseries of conflict would come a new world in the same way that green grass springs from burnt lands. Now. with 10 years gone by, we look about us in vain for contented States and individuals. The economic consequences of strife were readily apparent, but there was a hope that some change might be wrought in individuals. In a decade there has been no indication of a change to normal state of mind. The generation that has grown up has inherited the cynicism and disillusionment of the men who had to go out to the fields of death. Possibly a healthy symptom is the taste for “thriller” novels and plays, and even this is an answer to appetites demanding excitement. Still, it is a tendency which may, at times, help to divorce individuals from wretched introspection. There is far too much morbid thought of self, and not enough of the community as a whole. Selfishness is really a barbaric relic: for it was only through that unpleasant quality that men were once able to preserve life; but now there should not be the same bitter necessity for it. Not until man hffs grown to think more of those about him than he does of himself, can the world, or any nation, consider ijself civilised. This is the lesson Shaw has attempted to communicate, and although it is much more comfortable to regard him as an amiable buffoon, it. must be remembered that his is one of the keenest philosophic minds ,in England. He is the self-appointed chastener of England's pride, and the things he says are generally true.