Topic > Ethical Assumptions and Attitudes About Western Culture

In Major Barbara (1907), George Bernard Shaw questions the prevailing ethical assumptions and attitudes of Western culture regarding social engineering and poverty. Like Nietzsche, he calls for a reevaluation of values, since the meaning of concepts such as “good”, “evil” and “truth”, without any eternal, rigid, absolute and objective meaning, depends on an ever-changing context of the world. will to power and the practical world. Written with a sense of perspectivism, it challenges the audience to wrestle with their own prejudices, forcing them into internal reflection. For Shaw, Christian values ​​no longer fit the context, the world situation: “God is dead; but given the nature of men, there may still be caves in which his shadow shows itself for millennia” (Nietzsche 108), God is dead and Christianity has survived his death. The Salvation Army center where Barbara works is the cave where the shadow persists; “I see no darkness here [Perivale St. Andrews], no horror. In your Salvation Center I saw poverty, misery, cold and hunger. You gave them bread and molasses dreams of heaven” (Shaw 155). A god has “escaped”, his light has gone out, closing off a past world of understanding, without any useful purpose for reality (his ways are nothing more than mere illusions); Cusins, after accepting UnderShaft's offer, explains it aptly, "the world can never truly be touched by a dead language and a dead civilization" (Shaw 158). The values ​​of the past have failed, “Poverty and slavery have been your sermons and leading articles for centuries” (156), why continue to pursue them? Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Sir Andrew Under Shaft, the great European arms industrialist, gives Barbara this advice about value systems: "You've created something for yourself that you call a morality or a religion or what not. It doesn't fit the facts. Well , discard it. Discard it and get a suitable one. This is what is wrong with the world today” (155). beliefs, giving the illusion of permanence, only demolishing the technology – “[The West] scraps its steam engines and its obsolete dynamos but will not erase its old prejudices and its old morals and its old religions and its old political constitutions” (155). What is the result? Undertree observes: “In machinery it works very well; but in morality, in religion and in politics it works at a loss” (155). Marxist, materialist dialectic, contrast between the infrastructure, the economic sphere of productivity, and the superstructure, the social sphere of ideology, including morality, religion, politics and all “traditional” attitudes. The superstructure evolves more slowly and is more resistant to change than the economic infrastructure, especially in the modern industrial age. Undertree believes that for society to function smoothly, for real solutions to social problems, the superstructure must progress like the economic infrastructure: “If your religion collapsed yesterday, get a new and better one for tomorrow” (155). What is the proposed “solution,” the new understanding and logic? If Shaw wrote in Nietzchean perspectivism, then, like a sculpture, the phenomenon of poverty and its possible solutions must be looked at in various perspectives. Through UnderShaft, Shaw offers a “solution” opposed to what is standard, familiar and taken for granted, in a sort of deconstructive act. For, 1994. 121-160.