Anatomy of an Unlikely Political Friendship
Chesterton’s Book on Shaw Reveals Why Their Friendship Bridged the Ideological Divide
Imagine you have a friend whose politics couldn’t be further apart from yours; in fact, you find his positions retrograde, if not ridiculous. Imagine that same friend, despite his politics, is a brilliant debater, wordsmith and wit — not to mention a well-known and well-regarded public figure. And now imagine that friend decides to write an entire book about you, in which he subjects your persona, your thinking, and your most cherished opinions to some very rigorous, very funny criticism. Could you handle it? Would your friendship remain intact?
At least one friendship survived that kind of challenge: that of George Bernard Shaw and G.K. Chesterton.
Now, I am by no means an expert on either of these men — not by a long shot. I knew Shaw was a playwright and critic who championed socialist and feminist causes; he was influenced by Nietszche and believed secular humanism could spur on a new age of progress (including via eugenics). I knew G.K. Chesterton was a writer and Christian apologist who believed that, as humans, we are Children of God. He defended traditional institutions like the family and eschewed progress for its own sake as silly at best, destructive and dangerous at worst. But other than viewing the 1938 film version of Shaw’s Pygmalion and reading one or two Chesterton essays over the years, that was the extent of my knowledge.
Then I discovered these two men enjoyed a remarkably warm friendship, despite their differences. They met in 1901 when Chesterton visited the Paris studio of Rodin and found Shaw, naked to the waist, posing to be sculpted. The friendship that ensued lasted the next thirty-five years, during which the two frequently debated publicly, both in person and in print. In fact, in 1909, Chesterton even went so far as to publish George Bernard Shaw — a biography or, more fairly, a critical appraisal of Shaw as a thinker and dramatist.
You’d think that kind of public criticism would be enough to put the stake in the heart of any friendship. Yet the Shaw/Chesterton buddydom persisted, with Chesterton writing in his autobiography (completed shortly before his death): “I have argued with him on almost every subject in the world, and we have always been on opposite sides, without affectation or animosity.”
How? How did these two pull it off? How especially, given that today I see not only friendships but family and community ties being severed over differences in politics?
I was curious, so I read Chesterton’s George Bernard Shaw (“GBS”) with the aim of finding some clues. Not going to lie: a lot of it referenced people, literary works, and currents of English and Irish history and culture that went completely over my head. But despite this, I think (I hope!) I still discovered in GBS a few key reasons why this Unlikely Political Friendship worked:
Admiration (and Enjoyment) of a Novel Intellect
Chesterton found progressive thinking to be wrongheaded, including Shaw’s. However, Shaw’s thinking had the saving grace of being surprisingly, inventively wrongheaded. Throughout GBS, Chesterton derides the conventional modern wisdom of his day on everything from religion, to feminism, to the very idea of what amounts to “progress.” And why not? He’s doing the easy work of dismantling empty slogans and tired old sawhorses of opinion, all without breaking a sweat.
But when it comes to Shaw? According to Chesterton, there’s nothing empty, tired, or old about his friend’s mind. On the contrary: He praises Shaw for his novel intellect, his “ability to brighten even our modern movements with original and suggestive thoughts.” It’s these flashes of ingenuity that give Chesterton pause during debate with Shaw — and make him like the guy all the more for it, of course.
Here’s how Chesterton describes Shaw’s talent for the unexpected take, in the context of feminism:
The dreary thing about most new causes is that they are praised in such very old terms. Every new religion bores us with the same stale rhetoric about closer fellowship and the higher life. No one ever approximately equaled Bernard Shaw in the power of finding really fresh and personal arguments for these recent schemes and creeds. No one ever came within a mile of him in the knack of actually producing a new argument for a new philosophy.
. . . [Bernard Shaw] put himself on the side of what is called the feminist movement; the proposal to give the two sexes not merely equal social privileges, but identical. To this it is often answered that women cannot be soldiers; and to this again the sensible feminists answer that women run their own kind of physical risk, while the silly feminists answer that war is an outworn barbaric thing which women would abolish. But Bernard Shaw took the line of saying that women had been soldiers, in all occasions of natural and unofficial war, as in the French Revolution. That has the great fighting value of being an unexpected argument; it takes the other pugilist’s breath away for one important instant.
Quite simply, this is Chesterton commending a fellow intellectual athlete for his nimble and original moves. He’s admiring the skill of the argument over its thrust, but this kind of admiration builds friendships across political lines — or at least used to, before we decided that any degree of respect for those with conflicting viewpoints was tantamount to admitting you’re either a Nazi or Maoist scumbag.
Expectation of and Preference for Argument — Not Validation
Chesterton wrote:
Bernard Shaw never said an indefensible thing; that is, he never said a thing that he was not prepared brilliantly to defend . . .
. . . He provokes; he will not let people alone. One might even say that he bullies, only that this would be unfair, because he always wishes the other man to hit back.
Note that word “wishes”. Shaw didn’t just anticipate pushback, he desired it. Here, I think, is the guts of why these two men could remain steadfast friends even through some very fierce — and very public! — debate: they loved the tussle of argument, the mental sport of it. And that attitude, I contend, is only possible if you engage in argument to explore, clarify and improve your positions — not to validate your very self.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg understood this and it enabled her to enjoy a close and life-enriching friendship with Antonin Scalia. In her eulogy to Scalia, she recounted how he delivered an advance copy of one of his dissenting opinions to her. True to form, it was full of “zingers” and, as Ginsburg put it, “took me to task on things large and small . . . Thinking about fitting responses consumed my weekend, but I was glad to have the extra days to adjust the Court’s opinion. My final draft was much improved thanks to Justice Scalia’s searing criticism.” She didn’t take his critique as a personal affront, but as an opportunity to correct, allowing her to “hit back” — as Chesterton might have said — with harder and better aim.
Now granted, this was a specialized, legal context; Ginsburg wouldn’t have survived a day on the bench if she had taken every attack on her reasoning as an attack on her. Still, though, the rest of us who aren’t on the Supreme Court would do well to remember: A challenge to your opinion — even when it’s a real “zinger” — is a chance to reflect, ask questions and, if warranted, recalibrate and respond. It’s not a judgment on your value as a human being.
That seems a ridiculous thought to articulate, right? I mean, if argument was a judgment on our very selves, we’d only associate with people who validate our own belief-systems because our egos would freak at the first threat of challenge. Moreover, we’d treat opposing views as dangerous — almost as contaminants that need eradicating lest they infect the pristine space of our personal beliefs, rather than ideas to be examined and contested. Who the hell does that? Who thinks like that?
Judging from social media, plenty of people. What passes for debate online is hardly the stuff of Chesterton and Shaw. And from what I’ve observed, women, in particular, are more inclined to seek out and build communities of same-think than men. As of this writing, I can think of a few male Unlikely Political Friendships in addition to Chesterton/Shaw: Ronald Reagan/Tip O’Neill; Hunter S. Thompson/Pat Buchanon — hell, even Sean Penn/Kid Rock. And Ginsburg, at least, was great pals with Scalia. But I can’t name a single example of a famous friendship between females that crossed the political divide in a serious way (if anyone reading knows of one, please tell me. I’d like some hope).
Perhaps something in the female psyche is hardwired to crave support and validation, as opposed to confrontation, from other females. Or perhaps women took that dried-out chestnut, “the personal is political”, a little too much to heart and conflated the adherence to certain politics with their own worth and authenticity as women. Either way, the end result is a narrowing of the range of possible friendships for women, which is depressing as it’s a limit that’s entirely self-imposed.
Ability to Agree Once in A While, for God’s Sake
There’s several instances in GBS where Chesterton basically says (in his far more jovial, witty, and Chesterton-y way): You know what? This George Bernard Shaw fella has a point. This was one of my favorite such instances, in which Chesterston agrees with Shaw that a certain type of individualism is cold, bloodless, and a blot on humanity. It’s the type of individualism that treats compassion as weakness; Chesterton praises Shaw for turning that idea on its head with Shaw’s brand of tough-as-nails satire:
Every vulgar anti-humanitarian, every snob who wants monkeys vivisected or beggars flogged has always fallen back upon stereotyped phrases like “maudlin” and “sentimental,” which indicated the humanitarian as a man in a weak condition of tears . . . Shaw has shattered those foolish phrases forever. Shaw the humanitarian was like Voltaire the humanitarian, a man whose satire was like steel, the hardest and coolest of fighters, upon whose piercing point the wretched defenders of a masculine brutality wriggled like worms.
Some foolish fellow . . . wrote that if we were to be conquerors we must be less tender and more ruthless. Shaw answered with really avenging irony, “What a light this principle throws on the defeat of the tender Dervish, the compassionate Zulu, and the morbidly humane Boxer at the hands of the hardy savages of England, France and Germany.” In that sentence an idiot is obliterated and the whole story of Europe told; but it is immensely stiffened by its ironic form.
I don’t find it remarkable that Chesterton found common ground with Shaw on subjects like the brutality of empire; there, his Christian faith was aligned with Shaw’s secular humanist one. But in this day and age, I do find it a bit remarkable that Chesterton could publicly admit that common ground. Our politics has become like religious warfare. Not only is consorting with the enemy forbidden, but also agreeing with the enemy on even non-doctrinal, frivolous matters (You liked that libtard’s tweet about coffee? You hearted that Rethuglican’s fundraising post on Facebook? You’re now dead to us.). It’s a terrible predicament, since there are many issues (wage stagnation, say, or crony capitalism) where the left and right could not only find common ground but mobilize upon it.
Capacity to Detect the Beating Human Heart Behind the Politics
Chesterton may have thought Shaw’s politics misguided — crazy, even. But somehow he never lost sight of the intentions behind the politics, which Chesterton recognized as good intentions, however misplaced. For instance, Chesterton loved to poke fun at Shaw’s vegetarianism. In one of the funniest passages in GBS, he lambastes Shaw’s advocacy for animals as being rooted more in an opposition to cruelty as opposed to any love, or even like, for the animals themselves:
He would waste himself to a white-haired shadow to save a shark in an aquarium from inconvenience or to add any little comforts to the life of a carrion-crow. He would defy any laws or lose any friends to show mercy to the humblest beast or the most hidden bird. Yet I cannot recall in the whole of his works or in the whole of his conversation a single word of any tenderness or intimacy with any bird or beast . . .
. . . Bernard Shaw is a vegetarian more because he dislikes dead beasts than because he likes live ones.
Chesterton could have made these jabs, scored his points, and left it at that. Instead, he emphasizes that, all joking aside, “there is no doubt about the essential manhood and decency of Bernard Shaw’s instincts in such matters.” Chesterton stares into Shaw’s heart and tells the world he likes what he sees:
When [Shaw] was lying sick and near to death . . . he wrote a fine fantastic article, declaring that his hearse ought to be drawn by all the animals that he had not eaten. Whenever that evil day comes there will be no need to fall back on the ranks of the brute creation; there will be no lack of men and women who owe him so much as to be glad to take the place of the animals; and the present writer for one will be glad to express his gratitude as an elephant.
This isn’t just Chesterton making a self-deprecating remark about his corpulence. This is Chesterton stating that, no matter their differences, he’s willing to humble himself to honor Shaw’s decency. It reminds me very much of an anecdote that Christopher Buckley related in his memoir of his parents’ deaths, Losing Mum and Pup: that of Christopher Hitchens — an avowed atheist if there ever was one — grabbing a hymnal and singing at William Buckley’s memorial service at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
Disagreement Versus Domination
I think the best explanation for Chesterton and Shaw’s friendship is that neither man ever presumed to think he could or should impose his worldview upon the other. To put it in a modern context, Chesterton would never have tried to use their personal relationship to exert shame and leverage against Shaw for expressing an opinion on Twitter (as a former friend of Blake Masters’ recently did). And Shaw would never have stood idly by while venues cancelled Chesterton’s speeches or refused to publish him for articulating an unpopular stance. It’s a matter of common sense: You can’t be friends with the one you want to silence, to conform to your will. You can only aspire to be their master.
Again in his autobiography, Chesterton wrote of Shaw: “It is necessary to disagree with him as much as I do, in order to admire him as I do; and I am proud of him as a foe even more than as a friend.” At present I’m not optimistic about the chances for many future Chesterton/Shaw-style friendships. Instead, I’m choosing to focus on what I can control: myself. And I’m praying that, with God’s grace and a little (or a lot of) self-discipline, I can learn to be a true and constant friend, even when politics makes me an adversary.
