Don't You Ever Read Anything But Serious Books?

By Richard Lung

This collection is a personal record of writers observations that aroused my curiosity, mainly in the 1970s and early 1980s. This was a period of about a decade, when I was a young man, forty to fifty years ago.
There are some contemporary allusions, in my role as editor. For, the problems then, inequality, tyranny, secrecy, the lack of liberty, and so forth are problems still. indeed, they help drive climate instability, which is another extinction danger, besides nuclear weapons and their fission energy off-shoot "nuclear power."
Of the dangerous places, in which humanity has put itself, many scientists believe that the biggest threat to human survival is not nuclear-weapons but pandemics.
Humanity is actually doing its worst to breed pandemics, by the atrocious conditions of factory farming, in which it keeps its helpless fellow creatures. Humanity is not humane. (‘Gigantic’ power of meat industry blocking green alternatives, study finds.html) Hence the intolerable pressures on domesticated animals. It would, of course be better not to have to run survival races between good and evil human behavior (such as, the fallible researchers into anti-pandemic vaccines, to offset the ill consequences of doped factory-farmed meat).
The issue is complicated by the fact that mass meat-eating diverts the feeding of humanity to the feeding of slaughtered cattle and fowls. The production of methane is also highly productive of greenhouse gases, on top of its potential release from the melting tundra, which would be a potent contributor to the greenhouse effect, and a subsequent extinction of human, indeed mammalian and other life on earth.
Climate instability is obvious for all to see, in the floods and fires and droughts which were already, in 2023, ravaging this planet. While those in power seem to think that the climate was God-given for their own personal benefit.
The climate is more complicated than scientists know or pretend to know.
The climate consequences could be worse than the usual disaster movie. There is one feature about that modern classic, “The Day After Tomorrow” which should concern especially Europeans and the United States eastern sea-board, however. That is the ending of the flow of the warm Gulf Stream into northern Europe. A report, with which all scientists are not agreed, says Europe could lose the Gulf Stream by as early as 2025.
The projected increase in population, already consuming resources at a greater rate than the earth can sustain, is the familiar prelude in ecology, to a population crash. The resulting striving to survive will automatically intensify human strife and destructive aggression. Wars are accompanied by an intransigent spirit of reckless fanaticism; brinkmanship, which defeat our human ingenuity in problem-solving. This takes time to think and design, that the human species may not have. Mankind is parasite and host, the consciousless and conscientious locked in a suicidal struggle.
Unheeded early warnings were already being raised half a century ago. Indeed waste of resources, pollution, extinction of wild animals, renewable energy beginnings were discussed by HG Wells, from the 1920s to 1930s, as well as democratic reform, an old cause, also discussed in this anthology.
By the end of the 1960s an influential group calling itself the Club of Rome published The Limits to Growth, arguing that natural resources, at the current rates of exploitation, would fairly soon run-out, leaving only pollution. In the 1950s, The Outer Limits science fiction tv series, did a tale on a resource-exhausted Earth, over 30 years after Wells warned of the prospect.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, in his Letter to Soviet Leaders, advocated free speech, along with the saving Club of Rome message of conservation.
The message could not be faulted but it missed the extinction danger of the Greenhouse effect, known since the 1950s (Kornbluth and Pohl mention it in their SF sat

• Language: English
• Publisher: Richard Lung
• Release date: Aug 20, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215515907

Richard Lung

My later years acknowledge the decisive benefit of the internet and the web in allowing me the possibility of publication, therefore giving the incentive to learn subjects to write about them.While, from my youth, I acknowledge the intellectual debt that I owed a social science degree, while coming to radically disagree, even as a student, with its out-look and aims.Whereas from middle age, I acknowledge how much I owed to the friendship of Dorothy Cowlin, largely the subject of my e-book, Dates and Dorothy. This is the second in a series of five books of my collected verse. Her letters to me, and my comments came out, in: Echoes of a Friend.....Authors have played a big part in my life.Years ago, two women independently asked me: Richard, don't you ever read anything but serious books?But Dorothy was an author who influenced me personally, as well as from the written page. And that makes all the difference.I was the author of the Democracy Science website since 1999. This combined scientific research with democratic reform. It is now mainly used as an archive. Since 2014, I have written e-books.I have only become a book author myself, on retiring age, starting at stopping time!2014, slightly modified 2022.

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Table of Contents

Don't You Ever Read Anything But Serious Books?

Preface

Equality

Shaw – The Chucker-Out. Alan Chappelow. 1969.

On how to become a model parent; Religion and the theatre; Christian economics; Democracy; Marx and socialism.

Barbara Smoker on Shaw Spelling Reform.

[Bernard Shaw, equal incomes and a basic income. Editor.]

The Case for Spelling Reform. Mont Follick, 1965.

[Abolishing digrafs. Editor] Spelling reform debates in Parliament. [Single-stroke English. Ed.]

Spelling. GH Vallins, 1965.

Music In London. 1890–94. Bernard Shaw.

[Shaw letters. Editor]

A Short History of Music. Alfred Einstein, 1952.

Pen Portraits and Reviews. Bernard Shaw, 1932.

Beethoven.

Bernard Shaw. His Life, Work and Friends. St John Ervine.

Max. [Beerbohm] David Cecil, 1964.

Bernard Shaw Platform and Pulpit. Edited by Dan H Laurence. 1961.

Everybody’s Political What’s What? GB Shaw. 1944.

The Spice of Life. GK Chesterton, edited by Dorothy Collins, 1964.

Charles Dickens; How to write a detective story.

GK Chesterton, selected by WH Auden, 1970.

Of the optimism of Dickens; St Thomas Aquinas; Shaw the Philosopher.

The Acquisitive Society. RH Tawney, 1921.

The Radical Tradition. RH Tawney, edited by Rita Hinden, 1964.

Equality. RH Tawney, 1929, 1931, 1952.

Life and Struggles of William Lovett, 1876.

Do What You Will. Aldous Huxley, 1929.

Adonis and the Alphabet. Aldous Huxley, 1956.

The education of an amphibian; Censorship and spoken literature; Sanitation; Identities and Relations.

Brave New Worlds Revisited. Aldous Huxley, 1959.

Literature and Science. Aldous Huxley, 1963.

A Concise History of Modern Painting. Herbert Read, 1968.

Mae West on Sex, Health and ESP. 1975.

The Art of WC Fields. William K Everson, 1968.

Hancock. Freddie Hancock and David Nathan, 1969.

Poems and Essays. Edgar Allan Poe.

Liberty

Freedom from tyranny

Voltaire. Theodore Besterman, 1969.

On Life and Essays on Religion. Leo Tolstoy.

On Education. Leo Tolstoy. (c. 1967 essay collection).

Michael Glenny introduction to We by Yevgeny Zamyatin.

August 1914 (etc), Alexander Isayevich Solzhenitsyn.

Solzhenitsyn. A century in his life. DM Thomas. 1998.

The Gulag Archipelago. Alexander Solzhenitsyn. 1974. Volume 1.

Part I: The Prison Industry. The history of our sewage disposal system; The interrogation; The engine room; The law as a child; The law becomes a man. Part II: Perpetual Motion.

The Gulag Archipelago. Volume II. Solzhenitsyn. 1974.

Part III: The destructive labor camps. Hand over your second skin too! The kids; The zeks as a nation; We are building. Part IV: The Soul and Barbed Wire.

Epistle to my parents. Alexander Zinoviev.

Collected writings of George Orwell, volume IV.

-- The Theory of Catastophic Gradualism; The Prevention of Literature; -- Politics and the English Language; Four-letter words; The decline of writers (HG Wells and others); -- Such such were the joys.

The African Predicament. Stanislav Andreski.

1. Towards starvation. 2. Exploitation parasitism and strife. 3. Urban jungles. 4. Still-born nationalisms. 5. Moral disorientation. 6. Television without sanitation. 7. Kleptocracy or corruption as a system of government 8. From colonial to post-colonial authoritarianism. 9. The emergent class structures. 10. Circulation of elites. 11, Economic and political consequences of polygamy. 12. The hidden aspects of foreign aid. 13. Neo-colonialism. 14. African socialism. 15. The shibboleth of education. 16. Is there a way out?

Military Organisation and Society. Stanislav Andreski, 1954 & 1968.

Parasitism and Subversion. The Case of Latin America. Stanislav Andreski, 1966.

Original sin of conquest. Forms of government. Cures and incantations.

Social Sciences as Sorcery. Stanislav Andreski, 1972.

Freedom of Information

Day by Day. A dose of my own hemlock. Robin Day. 1975.

Inside Right. Ian Gilmour, 1977.

The Body Politic. Ian Gilmour, 1969.

Centre Forward. A Radical Conservative Program. Rhodes Boyson, 1978.

The Diaries of a Cabinet Minister 1964-66. Richard Crossman. 1974.

Your Disobedient Servant. Leslie C Chapman, 1978.

The Politics of Secrecy. Confidential government and the public right to know. James Michael. 1982.

Waste Away. Leslie Chapman. 1982.

Secrecy, or the Right to Know? A study of the feasibility of freedom of information for the UK. The Library Association. 1980.

Free To Choose. Rose and Milton Friedman. 1980.

Integrating the economic with the political system; Socialised medicine; For the reform of welfare; Public and private schools; Regulatory capture; Monetarism; Big government; Constitutional Amendments.

General Theory of Employment. JM Keynes. etc.

Industrial Partnership. Cyril Smith, 1978.

[Why has Friedman liberalism failed? Editor.]

Writing by Candlelight. EP Thompson. 1980.

Freedom of Election

A Short History of Electoral Systems in Western Europe. Andrew McLaren Carstairs.

[The Harmonic Mean quota. Editor.]

Parliament for the People. A handbook of electoral reform. Joe Rogaly, 1976

The Dilemma of Democracy. Diagnosis and prescription. Lord Hailsham, 1978.

Parliamentary Representation. JFS Ross. 2nd ed. 1948.

Electoral Reform in War and Peace. Martin Pugh. 1978.

The People and the Party System. The referendum and electoral reform in British politics. Vernon Bogdanor. 1981.

Research

Computer programming made simple. J Maynard, 1972.

Children’s Rights. 1971.

The New Maths. Barker and others.

Ideas and Opinions. Albert Einstein, c 1954.

What is the Theory of Relativity? Mechanics of Newton.

Catastrophe Theory. Alexander Woodcock and Monte Davis. 1978.

The Living Cell. Oliver Gillie, 1971.

A Blueprint for Survival. E Goldsmith, R Allen, M Allaby, J Davull, S Laurence. 1972.

Interpretive Psychology

Thoughts for the times on War and Death. 1915;

Civilisation and its Discontents. 1929. Sigmund Freud.

[Censorship. Editor.]

An Outline of Psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud. 1939.

William Archer review of Major Barbara.

A general selection from the works of Sigmund Freud.

Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud. 1915-17.

Part I. The psychology of errors. Part II. Dreams. Part III. General theory of the Neuroses.

The Future of an Illusion. Sigmund Freud. 1927.

[Psychology of Psychologists. Editor]

Interpretive Sociology

Auguste Comte, inventor of sociology.

The Golden Bough. A study in magic and religion. Sir James Frazer.

[Conditioned reflexes. Editor.]

Eysenck personality theory

They Studied Man. Kardiner and Preble.

The enlarged Devils Dictionary. Ambrose Bierce.

The Higher Learning in America. A Memorandum on the conduct of Universities by Businessmen. Thorstein Veblen, 1918.

Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution. Thorstein Veblen, 1915.

The old order. The Dynastic State. The case of England. The Industrial Revolution in Germany.

Absentee Ownership and Business Enterprise in Recent Times. The case of America. Thorstein Veblen. 1923.

The Theory of Business Enterprise. Thorstein Veblen. 1904.

The Vested Interests and the Common Man. The Modern Point of View and the New Order. Thorstein Veblen. 1919.

The Place of Science in Modern Civilisation. Thorstein Veblen. 1919.

Socialism. Socialism of Karl Marx (1906).

The Engineers and the Price System. On the Nature and Uses of Sabotage. Thorstein Veblen. 1921.

Sabot. Circumstances which make for change [friction in the system].

The Theory of the Leisure Class; The Nature of Peace.

Thorstein Veblen and His America. Joseph Dorfman. 1935.

The Pentagon of Power. Lewis Mumford, 1971.

Philosophy

Dear Bertrand Russell.

Beyond The Outsider. The philosophy of the future. Colin Wilson, 1965.

My Philosophical Development. Bertrand Russell, 1959.

[Identity Logic and Relational Logic Voting Methods. Editor.]

Introduction to The New Existentialism. Colin Wilson, 1966.

Human Society In Ethics And Politics. Bertrand Russell, 1954.

Authority and the Individual, by Bertrand Russell, 1948-9.

Language, Truth and Logic. A J Ayer. (1936-46).

An Essay on Philosophical Method. RG Collingwood, 1933.

An Essay on Metaphysics. RG Collingwood (1940).

The Idea of Nature. RG Collingwood, 1945.

An Autobiography. RG Collingwood, 1938.

A Homage To Catalonia, by George Orwell.

Historical propositions.

Roman Britain archaeology.

The New Leviathan. RG Collingwood, 1942.

Religion and Philosophy, by RG Collingwood, 1916.

Wisdom of the West. Bertrand Russell, 1959.

[Benedetto] Croce. Philosophy Poetry History. An anthology of essays, 1966.

Croce and Collingwood on Art. Croce and Wells on History as liberty in unity for adaptive stability

What I Believe. Bertrand Russell, 1925.

Speculum Mentis. RG Collingwood. 1924.

Art; Religion; Science, the life of thought.

The Idea of History. RG Collingwood, 1946.

The contribution to philosophy of history.

Philosophers of history.

The Lost Gospel: The Book of Q and Christian Origins by Burton L Mack.

Apocryphal Gospels

The Didache or The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles.

The Bible Of The World. Ed. Robert Ballou et al., 1940.

Hindu. Gotama Buddha. Analects of Confucius. Mencius. Taoist Scriptures. The Middle Course.

The Spirit of Chinese Philosophy. Fung Yu-Lan. 1944.

The Tao. Confucius. Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu. Buddhism. A New System of Metaphysic.

The Sir Winston Churchill Birthday Book.

---

Don't You Ever Read Anything But Serious Books?

Preface

Table of Contents

This collection is a personal record of writers observations that aroused my curiosity, mainly in the 1970s and early 1980s. This was a period of about a decade, when I was a young man, forty to fifty years ago.

There are some contemporary allusions, in my role as editor. For, the problems then, inequality, tyranny, secrecy, the lack of liberty, and so forth are problems still. indeed, they help drive climate instability, which is another extinction danger, besides nuclear weapons and their fission energy off-shoot nuclear power.

Of the dangerous places, in which humanity has put itself, many scientists believe that the biggest threat to human survival is not nuclear-weapons but pandemics. In the Middle Ages, the bubonic plague was the only serious reverse to the steady increase in human population. The plague still is not understood and and therefore could not be withstood if it re-occurred. For all we know, it might. It is not something anyone would want to endure or have to combat.

Humanity is actually doing its worst to breed pandemics, by the atrocious conditions of factory farming, in which it keeps its helpless fellow creatures. Humanity is not humane. People are omnivorous creatures. They have gradually become more vegetarian. But with the increase in prosperity, they have also become more meat-eating, which is entrenched by state favor. (‘Gigantic’ power of meat industry blocking green alternatives, study finds.html) Hence the intolerable pressures on domesticated animals. It would, of course be better not to have to run survival races between good and evil human behavior (such as, the fallible researchers into anti-pandemic vaccines, to offset the ill consequences of doped factory-farmed meat).

The issue is complicated by the fact that mass meat-eating diverts the feeding of humanity to the feeding of slaughtered cattle and fowls. The production of methane is also highly productive of greenhouse gases, on top of its potential release from the melting tundra, which would be a potent contributor to the greenhouse effect, and a subsequent extinction of human, indeed mammalian and other life on earth.

Climate instability is obvious for all to see, in the floods and fires and droughts which were already, in 2023, ravaging this planet. While those in power seem to think that the climate was God-given for their own personal benefit.

The climate is more complicated than scientists know or pretend to know.

The climate consequences could be worse than the usual disaster movie. There is one feature about that modern classic, The Day After Tomorrow which should concern especially Europeans and the United States eastern sea-board, however. That is the ending of the flow of the warm Gulf Stream into northern Europe. A report, with which all scientists are not agreed, says Europe could lose the Gulf Stream by as early as 2025. The consequences of this particular scenario might not be as drastic as the movie drama, but we are thinking in terms of countries as far north as the British Isles, suffering great reverses, and becoming cold as Canada (until its terrible wildfires, along with so many other countries).

The projected increase in population, already consuming resources at a greater rate than the earth can sustain, is the familiar prelude in ecology, to a population crash. The resulting striving to survive will automatically intensify human strife and destructive aggression. Wars are accompanied by an intransigent spirit of reckless fanaticism; brinkmanship, which defeat our human ingenuity in problem-solving. This takes time to think and design, that the human species may not have. Mankind is parasite and host, the consciousless and conscientious locked in a suicidal struggle.

Unheeded early warnings were already being raised half a century ago. Indeed waste of resources, pollution, extinction of wild animals, renewable energy beginnings were discussed by HG Wells, from the 1920s to 1930s, as well as democratic reform, an old cause, also discussed in this anthology.

By the end of the 1960s an influential group calling itself the Club of Rome published The Limits to Growth, arguing that natural resources, at the current rates of exploitation, would fairly soon run-out, leaving only pollution. In the 1950s, The Outer Limits science fiction tv series, did a tale on a resource-exhausted Earth, over 30 years after Wells warned of the prospect.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, in his Letter to Soviet Leaders, advocated free speech, along with the saving Club of Rome message of conservation.

The message could not be faulted but it missed the extinction danger of the Greenhouse effect, known since the 1950s (Kornbluth and Pohl mention it in their SF satire The Space Merchants).

I almost named this collection of thinkers, The Others after the film starring Nicole Kidman, with comedian Eric Sykes, in a supporting role, as a mere actor. But I thought that might mislead people familiar with the story. Then, I opted for a slight change in title, after those unnamed scholars: et al or and others, mentioned (or not mentioned) after all the personal naming of contributors, to a book or article, is done.

And Others would have refered to my personal background reading, which may or may not have been implicit in my various writings. In any case, they are worth remembering, in their own right. Hence, this compilation of authors for the reading public.

After all that, I recalled the coincidence of two women friends, not in contact with each other, who spontaneously asked me: Richard, Don't You Ever Read Anything But Serious Books? I just left out my first name, and had my title. (I never found-out, for sure, whether there had been no communication between these two women, but not so far as I know.)

I intended to retain something like the order, in which I read the following books. This is still a social history of one intellect. I have not classified, too much, to avoid monotony. (The topics defy neat classification.) It is true that there are several authors, whose works I indulged, one after the other, but taken, as a whole, my reading is a miscellany or variety.

These books, being reviewed over forty years ago, impressed me with my youthful energy. I was even more impressed by how much more pressing, now, are the concerns of half a century ago.

The book, I have chosen to start with, was I think the first book I read and studied, shortly after leaving college, borrowing it from the local public library, which was a toy or token building, compared to the cavernous Manchester Central Reference Library, much more missed, now that, at last, I wasn't under educational compulsion.

---

Shaw – The Chucker-Out

a biographical exposition and critique by Alan Chappelow. 1969.

Table of Contents

Alan Chappelow had a tragic end, in his old age. As an inspired young man, he took some professional photographs of Shaw in various poses, including one where he is showing someone out the door, with walking stick out-stretched. Shaw approved its vitality, and labeled it The Chucker-Out. That started things off, and a substantial volume of cuttings resulted, from the journalist.

At first, not all went smoothly:

Mr Bernard Shaw does not regard unsportsmanlike requests by strangers to forge his own signature for their benefit legitimate collecting…

On temperance, Shaw said: We must first get rid of poverty, and make reasonable happiness possible without anaesthetics.

In 1915 he said that: War like love created a whole range of illusions. As soon as war started there sprang up a tremendous amount of sentimental raving which was really funk and founded on illusions.

On how to become a model parent.

Father "He taught me to regard him as an unsuccessful man with many undesirable habits, as a warning and not a model. In fact he did himself less than justice lest I should grow up like him; and I now perceive this anxiety on his part was altogether admirable and lovable, and he was really just what he so carefully strove not to be: that is, a model father.

Many of us who are parents go thru agonies of hypocrisy to win a respect from our children which we do not deserve. In our virtuous resolution to do our duty as parents we become humbugs and when our children are old enough to find us out, as they do at a very early age, they become cynical and lose the affectionate respect which we have destroyed ourselves morally to gain. Be advised by me: do as my parents did. Live your lives frankly in the face of your children according to your own real natures and give your sons a fair chance of becoming Bernard Shaws."

Religion and the theatre.

Letter to The Times, 1913.

Now a Bishop who goes into a theatre and declares that the performances there must not suggest sexual emotion is in the position of a playwright going into a church and declaring that the services there must not suggest religious emotion. The suggestion, gratification and education of sexual emotion is one of the main uses and glories of the theatre. It shares that function with all the fine arts.

Of the English and Scottish sex morality that is produced by this starvation and blasphemous vilification of vital emotions I will say only this that it is so morbid and abominable, so hatefully obsessed by the things that tempt it, so merciless in its persecution of all the divine grace which grows in the soil of our sex instincts when they are not deliberately perverted and poisoned, that if it could be imposed, as some people would impose it if they could, on the whole community for a single generation, the Bishop, even at the risk of martyrdom, would reopen the Palace Theatre with his Episcopal benediction, and implore the lady to whose performances he now objects to return to the stage even at the sacrifice of the last rag of her clothing.

We all need to be reminded of the need for temperance and toleration in religious emotion and in political emotion, as well as in sexual emotion.

As long as I am not compelled to attend revival meetings, or party meetings, or theatres at which the sexual emotions are ignored or reviled, I am prepared to tolerate them on reciprocal terms; for although I am unable to conceive any good coming to any human being as a set-off to their hysteria, their rancorous bigotry, and their dullness and falsehood, I know that those who like them are equally unable to conceive any good coming of the sort of assemblies I frequent; so I mind my own business… And obeys the live and let live righteousness or unrighteousness.

For none of us can feel quite sure in which category the final judgement may place us;

Further letter: Our souls are to have no adventures because adventures are dangerous… The coward in all of us will seek security at any price.

Christian Economics

Shaw opposed the Atonement, because moral responsibility cannot be shifted onto sacrifices.

[Sacrifices have to be made all the time, like doctors and nurses devoting their lives to save others; like soldiers sacrificing their lives to deliver others from tyranny. Ed.]

The Middle Ages proved that the greatest art comes religiously. Its higher form is chivalry, which however caused a great deal of slaughter and persecution in the process. It was still tainted with the idea of sacrifice. Nor did it overcome the fear of death – as threats of Hell or reward of Heaven show.

Regarding the man who wanted to see God. But he had gone mad:

The matter is that God in you, and in most of us, is mad and wicked; that is just what it comes to. In some way, to reach the genuine Christian doctrine, the God that is within you will have to be a sane God, and will have to be a more intelligent God; you will have to bear all the consequences, and know that you are responsible for the consequences of His mistakes.

Christianity?

1) You will have to give up revenge, and you will have to give up punishment completely and entirely: that is to say you will have to scrap your entire criminal and judicial system. You will have to Judge not, that ye be not judged. (Applause.) You will have to stop putting people in prison who rob you. You will have to stop hanging people who murder you. (Applause.) You will have to give up the whole thing.… "Well, I am glad you take it in such a light-hearted way.

2) Then you will have to take, in a sense, no thought for the morrow: that is to say you will have to go in for Communism. Communism, in a word, a supply without demand; it requires incomes. From the Christian point of view, equality of incomes. Never argue it abstractly but always to the individuals.

The present system works on stratified equality. Economically, inequality means a disastrous squalor living with luxury because the priorities are not seen to. The essentials being food, clothing and shelter.

It also bars people falling in love from different income groups. Falling in love is the one tried and trustworthy enough way. Eugenic claims cannot stand against it.

Class-biased judges and rich politicians are out of touch with the ordinary economic needs of the British people.

On the need for incentives [in incomes]. Externalities could not have kept humanity alive. You need not be afraid – things which are needed to be done in this world will be done by man because they are needed to be done.

Shaw notes that the worst jobs are usually the worst paid. People risking their necks to fly (in October 1913).

Democracy

Democracy is ruinous without Enlightenment. Shaw refers to Gilbert Murray on Athens in his book Euripides and his age.

Imperial tyranny persisted since votes introduced in England, after the forced feeding of the suffragettes.

Democracy is not a delusion when it means the provision of some means by which a dissatisfied people can change its rulers. It is a delusion and a very mischievous one, when it means that the people must govern themselves. The latter requires qualities of leadership, and is an art not all are willing to learn. It is normally left to ambitious or merely domineering people.

1911. "What is a Democrat?

He is one who would have the majority of people judge their laws and elect and remove their lawgivers according to their favorable or unfavorable judgments of them and their work. Opposed to them you have aristocrats, plutocrats oligarchs, priests, kings, judges, schoolmasters, and so forth; but at bottom you will find that on this point there are only two systems before you, the system of democracy and the system of idolatry, and only two sorts of advocates the Protestant and the priest, the Democrat and the organiser of Idolatry.

On the one side it is said that subordination and obedience are necessary to society and that men are so constituted that they will not obey or respect their equals, and that it is therefore necessary to set their rulers apart from them as creatures of another species, decorating them…forbidding their children to intermarry with the children of the vulger, paying them huge sums to maintain palaces and equippages: in short, idolising them.

…the Democrat concedes political equality and religious equality; and if he denies economic equality, he can have no other motive than to secure a bigger dividend than his political and religious equals, and to set his own personal welfare before that of his fellow-workers.… – a cad.

In Western democracy, the plutocrats had only to master the easy art of stampeding elections by their newspapers, to do anything they liked in the name of the people.

"Votes for everybody (called for short, democracy) ended in government neither of the best nor of the worst, but in an official government which could do nothing but talk, and an actual government of landlords, employers, and financiers at war with an opposition of trade unionists, strikers, pickets, and – occasionally – rioters.

The resultant disorder, indiscipline, and breakdown of distribution, produced a reaction of pure disappointment and distress in which the people looked wildly round for a Savior, and were ready to give a helpful trial to anyone bold enough to assume dictatorship and kick aside the impotent official government until he had completely muzzled and subjugated it." [And the general public. Ed.]

1917. Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few. [As democracy is at present conceived. Ed.]

Fascism is a sort of post-Marxian Bonapartism.

Shaw defended the dictators versus the abuses by spokesmen of the pseudo-democracy. But on the race question, a team of expert psychiatrists internationally appointed by the League of Nations should determine whether they were making legitimate legislation or a pathological phobia. If the latter, they should be certified as lunatics – not something a leader can afford.

Shaw would be politically damned before he’d allow the conventionally called democratic countries to find excuse for complacency over all their plutocratic evils. [He was, and they do. Ed.]

[According to this editor, Shaw underestimated, on occasion, the absolute corruption of absolute power.] The dictators had their ideals or creeds, they believed in, however perverted their religion by one monstrosity or another.

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Marx and Socialism

…the real secret of Marx’s fascination was his appeal to an unnamed, unrecognised passion…the passion of hatred in the more generous souls among the respectable and educated sections for the curse of middle-class institutions that had starved, thwarted, misled, and corrupted them from their cradles. Marx’s Capital" is not a treatise on socialism, it is a general hatred against the bourgeoisie, supported by such a mass of evidence and such a relentless Jewish genius for denunciation as had never been brought to bear before.

It was supposed to be written for the working classes; but the working-man respects the bourgeoisie, and wants to be a bourgeois; Marx never got hold of him for a moment. It was the revolting sons of the bourgeoisie itself – Lassales, Marx, Liebtnecht, Morris, Hyndman, Bax, all, like myself, bourgeois crossed with squirarchy – that painted the red flag. Bakunin and Kropotkin, of the military and noble caste (like Napoleon), were our extreme left.

The middle and upper classes are the revolutionary element in society: the proletariat is the conservative element, as Disraeli well knew. Hyndman and his Marxists, Bakunin and his Anarchists, would not accept this situation; they persisted in believing that this proletariat was an irresistible mass of unawakened Felix Pyats and Ouidas. I did not accept the situation, helped, perhaps, by my inherited instinct for anti-climax." I threw Hyndman over, and got to work with Sidney Webb and the rest to place Socialism on a respectable footing: hence Fabianism.

Shaw points out how Swift, Ibsen, Strindberg despised [bourgeois] ideals. How Rousseau and Butler exposed its essential infidelity and its degradation of Christianity…

"I defy any navvy, or any Duke, to maul the middle-class as Dickens mauled it, or as it is mauled today by Wells, Chesterton, Belloc, and Pinero, Granville-Barker, Galsworthy, Bennett, the young lions of the provincial repertory theatres, or G Bernard Shaw. (Letter to Daily Citizen, 1912.)

1913. At the National Liberal Club:

"…it is quite true that Labour is now getting more and more political power; and the important fact you have to face is that the Labour men are not gentlemen; that is to say, that they have been trained up for generations in the idea and habit of each man selling himself for as much as he can get. The consequence is they are thoroughly against the idea of equal distribution. Every man of them thinks that he should have more than somebody else…

These are the men into whose hands, by exploiting them, by selling them in the market, you have hammered from their very birth this abominable idea that men should be bought and sold according to what can be got out of them. These are the men who are gradually waking up to the fact that political power is within their reach as soon as they make up their minds to give up idolising the upper classes…"

Idolatry by inequality of income had been the way of achieving subordination in feudal society. But Edward VII and George V were popular more as good fellows much like ourselves, the opposite to the supernatural belief or attitude.

… The fact is that you cannot equalise anything about human beings except their incomes.

Without socialism, capitalism and trade unionism between them will destroy us.

Trade-unionism is the capitalism of the working classes; its method is to get as much out of the employer and give as little in return as possible, the precise vice versa.

The Shaw solution is compulsory labor for everyone. To make anarchy as impossible as independent incomes. He would abolish property ending the Civil War between a proletariat and a proprietariat.

[Compulsion, involves state tyranny. To abolish property means property monopolised by the state or totalitarianism. Ed.]

1917. The problem of liberty is a paradox: it is the question of what we must do in order to do what we like.

Circa 1948: … All the coercive systems aim at the establishment of a police system as ubiquitous as gravitation or the need for air to breathe, and the total elimination of conscience as a factor in human conduct and the substitution of terror. As this is as impossible in fact as it is horrible in conception, sensible and decent people will have nothing to do with it, and aim at the cultivation of conscience and responsibility.

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Barbara Smoker on Shaw spelling reform

Shaw called for Freedom of Spelling in junior schools, advocating a phonetic alphabet, against a Johnsonese one, in a context of survival of the fittest.

[HG Wells had previously called for a general freedom of spelling in one of his earliest essays.]

Shaw was refering to Samuel Johnson, whose landmark dictionary, adopted printers usage, rather than a consistent spelling system.

What he actually wanted was a one-sound one-letter alphabet comprising simple, shorthand-like signs, to be launched in competition with the existing alphabet for use as an alternative system of writing until one or the other proved the fitter to survive. In that way, the acquired visual memory of the existing adult generation would not be sacrificed, for only young children would have to learn both systems – and for them the easier phonetic system would actually be (as experiments have proved) a helpful stepping-stone to the more difficult traditional one.

Maths and the machine age benefited from Arabic instead of Roman numerals. Arabic numerals dated from the sixth century A.D. For 900 years, the Roman tradition continued because change was found too troublesome.

Barbara Smoker: Unphonetic spelling not only makes it harder for children to learn to read and spell; it also perverts the natural tendency of children to perceive relationships – a fact deplored by educational psychologists. In addition, it leads to distortion of the spoken language… And it is a break on English becoming a universal second language for international communication.

… Inefficiency of using silent letters and digraphs.

Most of the inconsistencies of English spelling could be eliminated by mere spelling reform, but it would require a reform of the alphabet itself to eliminate the digraphs. As Shaw has pointed out, one has only to consider the two words ‘mishap’ and ‘bishop’ to realise that no more than a partial reform could otherwise be affected. Thorough reform of spelling is not possible with a deficient alphabet.

[Bernard Shaw, equal incomes and a basic income. Editor.]

Writings by Bernard Shaw are often a breath of fresh air. This may be because Shaw gave countless talks in the open-air. His radical insights can be a revelation. The very limitations of his thinking are an invitation to investigate the Shavian logic. The progressive parties are the pretentiously progressive parties. Politics is not progressive, it is mainly a dog-fight of vested interests. There is an opportunity here to study the radical ideas, seeing where they lead, after meeting their short-comings. In other words, to put the science, in political science, before the politics.

A prime instance of this is Shaw advocacy of equal incomes. This was a once fashionable belief. My elderly friend, Dorothy Cowlin, who flourished in that period, still kept the faith.

Nowadays, influential opinion doesn’t seem to believe clearly in anything much. Whether or not that is true, I think it is fair to say that the principle of equal incomes is thoroughly discarded and neglected now. But no clear case has been made for this apparent mere change in fashions of thought.

So let us look at what Shaw said about equal incomes. What, if anything, is right about it,