The Devil's Disciple: GB Shaw Speaks to the 21st Century

I don't know why I decided to read The Devil's Disciple, after all these years. It was published in 1897 and set in New Hampshire in 1777--maybe it was the New Hampshire connection. I don't know.

I am glad I did.  It is really thrilling. There is a certain conceit in science fiction, where a man from the future comes back to inform current residents of earth about where they are going, and this is sort of the flip side of that coin--you as the 21st century reader are going back to look at these people living in the 18th century and thinking, "I know where that sort of thinking got them."  Except, of course, the moral component is very contemporary; Shaw was speaking to beliefs current to the late 19th century and early 20th--his own time, and our time.

First, there is the role of religious orthodoxy as it played out in 1777 America, but this looks very familiar today, given our Christian fundamentalists, the Islamic extremists, all of the misery still with us visited upon us by religious know it alls who think they alone have heard God talking to them. And it makes them and us miserable.

The orthodox, self righteous exemplar is the mother, who is oh so right, and her orthodoxy makes for a very mean and vicious life--the sort of person like that father in Afghanistan who beheaded his own daughter for her lack of virtue in his eyes. 

Then there is the man who sees the evil done by organized religion and proclaims himself  a disciple of The Devil. His reasoning is, if God really says what these devout fundamentalists say, then he wants to align himself with whoever opposes that. It is not quite Billy Joel's "I'd rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints." It goes beyond that. It is to say, "If this is where piety brings you, then let me go in the opposite direction."  So if you would condemn a pregnant woman to be stoned to death, then I will oppose that.

And the bigger point is ideology leads to action, eventually. So, the disciple of the Devil, who has rejected all the "moral" people, when faced with a decision to take action does the most moral thing he can do. He is faced with being arrested by mistake and being hanged or he can reveal the arresting officers are making a mistake and he is not the man they are looking for, but if he reveals this, the man they are looking for will be found and put to death. He cannot abide to being part of this murder, so he simply does not correct the mistake, says nothing and heads off to the gallows. 

The woman, who had vilified him for the words of rebellion he had spoken sees the nobility of his action and is brought low--very much like Jarvert in Les Miserables, who has justified his own cruelty toward the "criminals" he pursues by thinking these criminals as evil and deserving of the cruelty they suffer. So she now faces this latter day Sidney Carton, from A Tale of Two Cities.  But unlike Sidney, who looks forward to his heavenly redemption by doing a far, far better thing in going to his death, Shaw's hero is saddened and angry at the prospect of his impending death. He will not back off, however, because he simply cannot bring himself to cause the death of another man, even to save his own life.

Along the way, we see the epitome of the organization man, General Burgoyne, an aristocratic Englishman, who is perfectly willing to put a man to death because it is convenient and because it serves the purpose of "sending a message" to the community about who is in charge. He is pleasant, urbane, funny, attractive and evil.  He is the Mitt Romney of 1777. He could destroy the lives of a hundred employees and not lose a wink of sleep, because he is simply doing his job and maintaining his income. The only thing which upsets him is when the system becomes dysfunctional. 

So there are lessons echoing through time from Shaw in 1897 to New Hampshire in 2012.  If there is a Heaven up above, from which Shaw could look down and see us talk about him today, then he is smiling now.