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Confronted with these facts our sentimental hearthstone vaporing about parental care and me sacredness of the family as the inviolable unit of human society is only an excuse for doing nothing. Elementary civilization is impossible without a moral code like the Ten Commandments, a technique of language, writing, and arithmetic, and a legal code of compulsory behavior completely abolishing individual liberty and free will within its scope. Unless people can be depended on to behave in an expected manner they cannot live in society, and must be either corrected or, if incorrigible, killed. Their life must be mostly dictated and institutional, and mere activities determined and predicable. And somebody must teach me codes to the children. They must be imposed on the child dogmatically until it is old enough to understand them. They can be imposed in various ways, by merciless whippings of children and cruel punishments of adults as well as by less savage and mischievous methods ; but they must be imposed somehow, or me human world will be an Alsatian madhouse. The necessity is fundamental; and the statesman who imagines that a formula of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, will solve all his problems will discover, if he is capable of learning from experience, that liberty must give way to equality and that fraternity may mean either the fraternity of Cain and Abel or the friendship of David and Jonathan. Children, if they are to grow up as citizens, must learn a good deal that their parents could not teach them even if they had the necessary time. The statesman must make provision for this teaching or he will presently find himself faced with the impossible task of maintaining civilization witl1 savages instead of citizens.… (más)
This discussion is rather informal and not particularly systematic; as Shaw says, he has ‘omitted much that has been dealt with by other writers” and aimed “rather at reminders of the overloooked, and views from new or neglected angles.” The result is something unexpectedly close, for Shaw, to such ancient and garrulous works as Montaigne’s Essays and Burton’s Anatomy...
Political What’s What? is one of the new books that are worth reading this year. Shaw s faculties still remain active to a perfectly amazing degree. There are stretches—such as the chapter on Pavlov and the sections that immediately follow—in which he writes with an incisive directness that seems hardly to have been dulled by age. And it is fascinating to see into the mind of a man who can look back over so long a life and who retains his capacity to compare and judge.
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
Is Human Nature Incurably Deprived?
If it is, reading this book will be a waste of time, and it should be exchanged at once for a detective story or some pleasant classic, according to your taste. For though the book is in a sense a detective story inasmuch as it is an attempt to track down some of the mistakes that have landed us in a gross misdistribution of domestic income and in two world wars in twentyfive years, yet if we have neither the political capacity nor the goodwill to remedy them, we had better not torment ourselves uselessly by making ourselves conscious of them. Better to cling to our delusions and keep our hope and selfrespect, making the most of our vices and follies before they destroy us.
Citas
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
Parentage is a very important profession, but no test of fitness for it is ever imposed in the interest of the children.
A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.
Besides, when all the land has been appropriated, the subsequently born will have no land, and will become a new helot class called the proletariat, living by the sale of their labor to the cultivators, or, as tenant farmers or craftsmen, paying rent for the land they occupy. When more proletarians are born than the cultivators can profitably employ, the price of proletarian labor falls to a point at which it will barely support a life shortened by slow starvation.
William the Conqueror is interesting even eight centuries after his death, as an example of the advantage of cross breeding between the classes. He was not an inbred nobleman: he was a duke's bastard and the grandson of a vulgar tanner. And he was able enough to collect an army of Norman adventurers and conquer England.
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Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
As to the future, beginning with the year 1944 - (to be continued by them that can)
Confronted with these facts our sentimental hearthstone vaporing about parental care and me sacredness of the family as the inviolable unit of human society is only an excuse for doing nothing. Elementary civilization is impossible without a moral code like the Ten Commandments, a technique of language, writing, and arithmetic, and a legal code of compulsory behavior completely abolishing individual liberty and free will within its scope. Unless people can be depended on to behave in an expected manner they cannot live in society, and must be either corrected or, if incorrigible, killed. Their life must be mostly dictated and institutional, and mere activities determined and predicable. And somebody must teach me codes to the children. They must be imposed on the child dogmatically until it is old enough to understand them. They can be imposed in various ways, by merciless whippings of children and cruel punishments of adults as well as by less savage and mischievous methods ; but they must be imposed somehow, or me human world will be an Alsatian madhouse. The necessity is fundamental; and the statesman who imagines that a formula of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, will solve all his problems will discover, if he is capable of learning from experience, that liberty must give way to equality and that fraternity may mean either the fraternity of Cain and Abel or the friendship of David and Jonathan. Children, if they are to grow up as citizens, must learn a good deal that their parents could not teach them even if they had the necessary time. The statesman must make provision for this teaching or he will presently find himself faced with the impossible task of maintaining civilization witl1 savages instead of citizens.
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Political What’s What? is one of the new books that are worth reading this year. Shaw s faculties still remain active to a perfectly amazing degree. There are stretches—such as the chapter on Pavlov and the sections that immediately follow—in which he writes with an incisive directness that seems hardly to have been dulled by age. And it is fascinating to see into the mind of a man who can look back over so long a life and who retains his capacity to compare and judge.