George Bernard Shaw on Einstein

I read Shaw's toast to Einstein probably a good 50 years ago or more, but lacking a reference as well as the appropriate memory, I was not certain where to find a certain passage I remembered. Now I have located the text of the whole speech:

Toast to Albert Einstein, by Bernard Shaw, edited by Fred D. Crawford, Shaw, Vol. 15 (1995), pp. 231-241.

This is more or less the passage I remembered:

As an Englishman, Newton was able to combine mental power so extraordinary that if I were speaking fifty years ago, as I am old enough to have done, I should have said that his was the greatest mind that any man had ever been endowed with. And he contrived to combine the exercise of that wonderful mind with credulity, with superstition, with delusion which would not have imposed on a moderately intelligent rabbit. (Laughter) 

As an Englishman also, he knew his people, he knew his language, he knew his own soul. And knowing that language, he knew that an honest thing was a square thing; an honest bargain was a square deal; an honest man was a square man, who acted on the square. That is to say, the universe that he created had above everything to be a rectilinear universe. (Laughter)

Now, see the dilemma in which this placed Newton. universe; He knew his universe, he knew that it consisted of heavenly bodies all in motion; and he also knew that the one thing that you cannot do to any body in motion whatsoever is to make it move in a straight line. You may fire it out of a cannon with the strongest charge that you can put into it. You may have the cannon contrived to have, as they say, the flattest trajectory that a cannon can have. It is no use. The projectile will not go in a straight line. If you take a poor man - the poorer the better - if you blindfold that man, and if you say, "I will give you a thousand pounds if you, blindfolded, will walk a thousand yards in a straight line," he will do his best for the sake of the thousand pounds to walk in a straight line, but he will walk in an elliptical orbit and come back to exactly the same place.

Now, what was Newton to do? How was he to make the universe English? (Laughter) Well, mere facts will never daunt an Englishman. They never have stopped one yet, and they did not stop Newton. Newton invented - invented, mind you; some people would say discovered, I advisedly say he invented - a force, which would make the straight line, take the straight lines of his universe and bend them. And that was the force of gravitation. And when he had invented this force, he had created a universe which was wonderful and consistent in itself, and which was thoroughly British. (Laughter)

I remembered the association of cultural and physical rectilinearity, and I also remembered that Shaw failed to understand the nature of scientific idealization and physical explanation. Perhaps by this time I was aware of Shaw's penchant for the crackpot mysticism that vitiated his rational diagnosis of society's flaws. 

However, I have just learned that Shaw's anti-science was more extensive and preposterous, but was mitigated somewhat, partially due to his friendship with Einstein:

Shaw, Einstein and Physics, by Desmond J. McRory, Shaw, Vol. 6 (1986), pp. 33-67.

Shaw's animosity towards (astro)physics was mitigated and in any case overshadowed by his persistent contempt for biology. Einstein's relativity (and to a lesser extent quantum mechanics) shows up in many of Shaw's later works. Einstein is likened to a great artist. The revolution in physics is favorably contrasted with what came before.

What Newtonianism was

The thinkers of the scientific revolution, including the scientific geniuses who spearheaded it, had one foot in modernity, one foot in the pre-modern past. We would scarcely recognize their conception of scientific argument as it existed then. Case in point, here are a couple of paragraphs I wrote some years ago about Newtonianism in Newton's time.

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Written 19 November 2003:

A few days ago I read Newton and the Culture of Newtonianism by Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs and Margaret C. Jacob. I once had quite an interest in Newton, circa 1979, when I was interested in the dynamics of the totality of his thought (which includes alchemy and theology) in the cultural-philosophical-ideological complex of his time. This little book shows how archaic Newton was in his overall perspective—he was no mechanist that we would recognize. Aside from his vitalistic conceptions of matter outside of the realm for which he is famous, his aversion to materialism with the ever-present atheistic tendencies attributed to or associated with it reveal a Newton not fully modern and a society caught in irresolvable ideological contradictions. Newtonianism was ideologically tinged with non-scientific political preoccupations: it could be an apology for order or a call to revolution. Newton was of the party of order and moderation, favoring neither revolution nor absolute monarchy.

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Written 17 October 2007, extract from my post on another of my blogs:

For 400 years innovations in the special sciences have yielded master metaphors for organizing an explanation of the entire world and filling in gaps in specific knowledge of all its facets with ideology. From Newtonian physics to Darwinism to relativity to quantum mechanics to information theory to computer science to chaos theory to complexity, the process has never stopped. But in Newton’s time this phenomenon was far worse in that obscurantism per se was not the main issue, but rather the inability to separate scientific theory from metaphysics and theology. (See Newton and the Culture of Newtonianism by Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs and Margaret C. Jacob.) We would not even recognize the arguments over Newtonianism as scientific ones today, as both political and theological positions were staked out with respect to it, and it seems that neither its architects nor its popularizers had an adequate epistemological understanding of the basis of scientific abstraction and how it related to the rest of the world-picture. However, there was some place to go, from astronomy to physics, and finally to chemistry, and the Romantic era coincided with the question as to whether physio-chemical processes alone could account for life. Yet an organismic, vitalistic sense of living matter could not jibe with progress in scientific research, and however mysterious life and consciousness still felt with the progress of " mechanistic" science, vitalism could only lead to mysticism, obscurantism, and regression, and there are no more prospects for it today than there were 200 years ago, when lack of knowledge allowed it a respectable existence. Yet Goldner thinks he can finesse the objective problems of scientific research and its incorporation into a general world-picture by spouting nonsense about cosmobiology, an outmoded basis for world-comprehension.

From: Stephen Eric Bronner (3): Bronner vs. Goldner on science & the Enlightenment

Martin Gardner vs. Wilhelm Reich & Orgonomy (2)

There have been numerous attacks on Paul Kurtz's organizations, all now falling on the singular Center for Free Inquiry, from several directions. One is from advocates of parapsychology, who have expressed numerous complaints. I'm not to deal with them now. Wilhelm Reich's orgonomy does not belong to parapsychology, but it is fringe science nonetheless. Here is the second article I've found attacking Martin Gardner, and now Kurtz, Corliss Lamont, and the Amazing Randi along with him:

CSICOP, Time Magazine, and Wilhelm Reich by John Wilder, Pulse of the Planet #5, 2002, pp. 55-67.

Wilder links Time magazine and the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal in the scurrilous trashing of Reich's reputation. He reviews the attacks on Reich by the Freudians and the Stalinists.  Wilder accuses Einstein's secretary of sabotaging Reich's attempts to continue correspondence with Einstein. Historians of philosophy and ideas have not been kind to Reich, not Peter Gay, at least. Paul Edwards is claimed to have treated Reich favorably, except for his dismissing Reich's later orgonomy as crank pseudoscience. Edwards alleged Reich's American acolytes to be right-wingers:

Interestingly, Edwards now decries what he calls the ‘right-wing’ politics of [Elsworth] Baker and others of Reich’s students in America, as he believes they have missed the contributions of Reich’s ‘Marxist’ period. The reader should recall that Reich, himself, dismissed this part of his work as a ‘biological miscalculation,’ as immature, as being insufficiently aware of the of the extreme stubbornness of the Emotional Plague.

Wilder asserts that the Kurtz's skeptic organization is wedded to mind-body dualism:

Despite Edwards lukewarm admiration of Reich, CSICOP seems to be populated with men who adhere to modern civilization’s mind-body split, a split which underlies the mechanistic-mystical dichotomy that fuels CSICOP’s engines.

Wilder further complains:

The membership, organization, and style of CSICOP reveal its traditional patriarchal, ‘top-down’ authoritarian character. Its membership, according to Hansen, is 95% composed of ‘white’ males; and nearly 100% of its members are intellectuals, mostly drawn from the non-scientific disciplines, despite CSICOP claiming ‘science’ as its patron. Few active research scientists belong. The membership at large, the ‘Fellows,’ has little, if any, power to formulate or change policy.

Wilder likens Paul Kurtz to the Kurtz of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, who faces irrationalism with a psychological regression:

Facing these unexpected outbreaks of apparently irrational behavior in the masses [in the late 1960s], facing what Reich had faced in the early 1930s (due to what Reich termed the biological miscalculation), Kurtz struggles to reforge his Marxist-Humanism into a weapon of control and repression. While Reich had turned away from politics to supporting changes in child rearing, to advocating sexual reform, and to studying biophysics, Kurtz, still at his core a political man, seeks elitist political and social solutions to suppress these uncontrolled, ‘unscientifically’ emotional horrors emanating from the masses.

Kurtz is painted as a control freak—espousing one-world government, praising the behaviorist B. F. Skinner, engaging in scurrilous character assassination of scientific claims he disdains.

I need to point out a streak of anti-communist paranoia that runs through the article, not all instances of which I cite here. Corliss Lamont is excoriated for his pro-Stalinist position, for example.

Wilder moves on to attack Kurtz's skeptical colleagues, among them Wilder's arch-villain Martin Gardner. Gardner was apparently in his youth a fundamentalist and a radical socialist, later became a magician and eventually "the foremost advocate of atheistic scientific orthodoxy, of the science of his patriarchy." Wilder outlines Gardner's five symptomatic criteria for judging pseudoscience: according to those criteria, Reich and Einstein would be judged alike. Wilder finds these demarcation criteria (citing Popper for the term) unusable in practice.

Wilder also finds the presence of erstwhile and practicing magicians in the skeptical movement suspect. He deems magicians to be "cynical, nasty people" as someone else puts it. An illustration of this is the Amazing Randi's participation in Alice Cooper's sadistic spectacles.

I now skip to the author's Postscript of August 1, 2010. Here is the most telling statement of Wilder's position:

I want to clarify that I see Communism as a particularly vicious head of the Emotional Plague, a social pathology described by Reich. This Plague is a hydra that has many heads, like the Inquisition, the KKK, the NAZIs, and Al Qaeda. Cutting off these heads has not and will not permanently end the Emotional Plague, anymore than removing cancerous tumors, while necessary and important, ends an underlying cancer biopathy. There are right wing and left wing variants of the Emotional Plague. There are even middle-of-the-road and non-political variants. Read the studies of pathological mass action and inaction.

In judging all this I am not going to address any of Wilder's factual claims. Nor will I address his evaluation of magicians. I question his analogy of Reich and Einstein, but I have always had a problem with Gardner's demarcation criteria myself, so I will refrain from taking apart Wilder's ridiculous argument. I also don't think there is an infallible formal criteriology for labeling someone a paranoid, and in any case, sometimes real paranoia and real persecution overlap in the same suffering individuals. It is not the mere eccentricity of Wilder's argument that I criticize. It is his underlying metaphysical perspective, and the characteristically paranoiac way in which his systematizing reasoning proceeds. His copious historical references notwithstanding, historical reasoning is excised from his world view, recapitulating the late Reich's retreat to metaphysics. If everything is a result of the Emotional Plague, which is an ahistorical psychobiological category, then the real historical development of society and its ideologies is eclipsed by a metaphysics, and one which bears all the characteristics of a right-wing world view, and hence of right-wing paranoia, regardless of Wilder's actual apolitical politics. This bizarre indiscriminate linkage of communism with Kurtz, a Time editor, Einstein's secretary, Lamont, and Gardner is characteristic of a paranaoic world view, however one might rationally analyze possible deficiencies of any of these individuals.

Finally I must mention the Editor James DeMeo’s 2002 Postscript. DeMeo wrote the article I analyzed in my previous blog post on this subject. Here DeMeo attempts to link Prometheus Books with pornography and pedophilia. If this is not the paranoid mind in action, what is?

I imagine some readers will think I'm overly generous in even bothering to analyze a manifestly crackpot view as seriously as I do. But this is not a randomly generated piece of craziness: there is a conceptual structure underlying it which needs to be analyzed. The more astute and acute our analytical capability becomes, the better will be be able to distinguish the merely eccentric and marginal from the fundamentally distorted framework of a wrongheaded world view, whether or not there are partial truths in it.

Renewal of Materialism (1)

"The Renewal of Materialism": Special issue of Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal [New School for Social Research], vol. 22, no. 1, 2000.

I first wrote about this on 4 August 2004, so I will cannibalize that material and in another entry add some comments based on my recent (re-)reading of this issue.

Here we find a critical review of the philosophical positions of the French Enlightenment and related issues of that time and ours, including the philosophical reaction to the birth of modern chemistry, debates surrounding the nature of life from a materialist perspective, the mind-body problem, the germs of emergent materialism, Spinoza, La Mettrie, Diderot, and more. Here is the table of contents:

VOLUME 22, NUMBER 1. THE RENEWAL OF MATERIALISM

François Dagognet Materialism: A Philosophy of Multiple Revivals

Annie Bitbol-Hespériès Descartes, Reader of Harvey: The Discovery of the Circulation of Blood in Context

Yves Charles Zarka Being and Action in the Thought of Ralph Cudworth

Meriam Korichi Defining Spinoza's Possible Materialism

Ann Thomson La Mettrie, Machines, and the Denial of Liberty

Amor Cherni Brute Matter and Organic Matter in Buffon

Annie Ibrahim The Life Principle and the Doctrine of Living Being in Diderot

A. Suratteau-Iberraken Medical Vitalism and Philosophical Materialism in the Eighteenth-Century Debate on Monsters

Roselyne Rey Diderot and the Medicine of the Mind

Alexandre Métraux The Emergent Materialism in French Clinical Brain Research (1820-1850)

Pierre Kerszberg The Mental Chemistry of Speculative Philosophy

Didier Gil Is Consciousness a Brain Process?

Guillaume le Blanc From Matter to Materiality According to Canguilhem

Jean-Claude Bourdin The Uncertain Materialism of Louis Althusser

Antonio Negri Alma Venus. Prolegomena to the Common

Miguel Vatter Phenomenology in Kant's Idealism: Review of Pierre Kerszberg's Critique and Totality

Canguilhem, Althusser, and Negri belong to the 20th century. The latter two are still in fashion, and while I do not recommend them, you can read Negri's article on the web:

Antonio Negri, "Alma Venus. Prolegomena to the common," trans. Patricia Dailey & Constantino Costantini.

The editor's introduction to this issue cites a study showing that Marx and Engels got French materialism wrong in The Holy Family. As it happens, part of said article has been translated into English:

Marx, Renouvier and the History of Materialism

By Olivier-Rene Bloch

[Excerpts translated by Tom Weston from "Marx, Renouvier, et l'histoire du materialisme." This work originally appeared in La Pensee, numero 191, fevrier, 1977, pp. 3 - 42. It has been reprinted in Olivier Bloch, Matieres a histoires, Librarie Philosophique J. Vrin, 6, Place de la Sorbonne, 75005 Paris. This translation is in the public domain, October, 1997.]

Gil, Didier. "Is Consciousness a Brain Process?", Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, vol. 22, no. 1, 2000, pp. 227-253.

This is one of the finest dissections of the competing philosophies underlying artificial intelligence I've seen.

(To be continued)

Martin Gardner vs. Wilhelm Reich & Orgonomy

"Response to Martin Gardner's Attack on Reich and Orgone Research in the Skeptical Inquirer" (1989)
by James DeMeo, Ph.D.; Director, Orgone Biophysical Research Lab; Ashland, Oregon, USA.

Wilhelm Reich's orgonomy was an object of attack in Gardner's (Fads and Fallacies) in the Name of Science. This is one illustration of the demarcation problem, i.e. distinguishing criteria between science and pseudoscience, a problem about which Gardner attempted to generalize, though I don't think that this can be adequately accomplished as a formal matter. As I recall, Gardner speculated whether the early Reich--the Marxist psychoanalyst and author of such notable works as The Mass Psychology of Fascism--was as discreditable as the later Reich who initiated orgonomy as a research programme. This particular twist is symptomatic of the inadequate treatment of the demarcation problem, as the field of psychoanalysis was doubly politicized as a putative science--in its orthodox Freudian and various heterodox incarnations. The earlier Reich was emphatically not a crackpot, but the criteria for judging the validity of his theories at that time may not be so straightforward as what is taken to be scientific method in the physical sciences. What constitutes deviant professional behavior in the cases of psychoanalysis and orgonomy may not be the same sort of thing. There are two dimensions to such evaluation: (1) how seriously the theory in question can be taken, given our background of scientific knowledge at some historical moment; (2) whether the pursuit of research outside accepted channels is an indicator of a pseudoscientific enterprise. We can attempt to formulate some general criteria as to what constitutes crank science, but actually, we have to approach specific cases from the standpoint not of formal criteria but of specific real-world knowledge.

For my own take on Reich, see my essay:

The Late Vitalism of Wilhelm Reich: Commentary

We may also ask now whether James DeMeo has a valid complaint or whether he is a crackpot. The author claims he rigorously follows the scientific method, and that the body of research he cites has been marginalized by the scientific community in a politicized context. DeMeo writes more or less in the style of a rational person, but whether he exhibits paranoia or a persecution complex (another reasonable interpretation) demands that we have a prior sense of both legitimate science and the scientific community.

DeMeo has a bone to pick with both the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP, later absorbed into the Center for Free Inquiry) and Martin Gardner. DeMeo complains about smear tactics and censorship for being denied a forum. He complains that CSICOP violates its own stated principles. He establishes that he has scientific credentials but emphasizes that Gardner has none. The immediate occasion for irritation with Gardner is Gardner's article:

"Reich the Rainmaker: the Orgone Obsession", Skeptical Inquirer, 13 (1): 26-30, Fall 1988.

There is a history that begins with Gardner's article:

"The Hermit Scientist", Antioch Review, Winter 1950-1951, pp. 447-457.

There is one charge that is more serious:

Gardner's first attack against Reich appeared in the Antioch Review of 1950, though he was then more restrained in his linguistic distortions and vituperation. In 1952 he attacked Reich, with similar clever wit and fervor, in a chapter in Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science. His articles helped fuel the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) pseudo-investigation, which has since been demonstrated, through at least three different Freedom-Of-Information-Act searches of FDA files, to have been conducted in a most shabby, antiscientific "get Reich" manner.

One would have to look over the FDA files to ascertain whether in fact Gardner effectively contributed to the persecution of Reich, which led not only to his imprisonment but to an unprecedent government-instigated book-burning.

Whether or not Gardner in any way distorted Reich's claims, there are additional issues raised here. In addition to the nutty alternative science, there are philosophical arguments. DeMeo denies that orgonomy is a religion and reiterates Reich's war on all "mysticism," in which natural science as we know it is also implicated. DeMeo purports to find the root of Gardner's hostility in his own dualistic world view, in which Gardner affirms, sans attempt to justify himself rationally, his own theism. Now while this is indeed a noteworthy point upon which to dwell, DeMeo, following Reich, claims to have surmounted the dualism that plagues the modern world.

Here's a fragment of the metaphysical justification for Reichian science:

[. . .] Reich's functional, bioenergetic works stand in clear opposition to both a dead, machine-like universe, and a dualistic, "spirit-versus-flesh" anthropomorphic deity. Indeed, Reich argued persuasively that the mechanistic-mystical world view was the result of a perceptive splitting-off of organic sense functions, caused by the chronic damming-up of emotional-sexual energy within the body of the observer. For these reasons, he argued, animistic peoples, who lived a more vibrant and uninhibited emotional and sexual life, and who consequently remained relatively free of neuroses, could feel, with their sense organs, the tangible energetic forces which shaped and created the universe.

It gets worse. See for yourself.

Now before I add my own generalizations, I must point out that others have accused the orgonomy advocates themselves of falsifying Reich's legacy by altering his earlier Marxist psychoanalytical writings in accord with his later orgonomy.

A few conclusions of my own, some of which are explicated in my essay noted above:

(1) Taken all together, this is a nutcase alternate "scientific" world-picture, false not only in theoretical or empirical particulars but false as a total package in light of accumulated scientific knowledge, not to mention the tacit background assumptions of methodological naturalism and experimental replicability.

(2) Part of DeMeo's essay reads like scientific experimental empiricism, but if you read some of Reich's own reflections on experimental research, there is indeed a regression to animism in violation of the canons of experimental procedure. (I.e. a certain kind of personal vibe skews results.)

(3) Furthermore, in spite of the eschewing of "mysticism" and affirmation of naturalism, all of Reich's late writings are imbued with a metaphysics which indeed reads like mysticism. Reich's quest to overcome the alienated, fragmented experience of life in the modern world is derailed by a pseudoscientific, illegitimate holism.

(4) While accusing Gardner of harboring an implicit dualism, DeMeo himself vacillates between empiricism and metaphysics in his characterization of his own scientific claims and of the scientific community allegedly engaged in a conspiracy of silence against him.

Gardner, whether wearing the hat of methodological naturalist or theist-in-hiding, was simply not up to the philosophical task of analyzing the tragic turn in Reich's intellectual preoccupations. He was as incapable of profound analysis of ideology as the rest of the secular humanist/skeptical movement, which of course never sees itself as ideological. These folks can spot what's obviously pseudoscientific (unless it concerns memes, evolutionary economics, human sociobiology or some other pet non-paranormal pseudoscience of their own) in fringe science, but to delve beneath the surface, that's not their forte.

Trotsky on religion (2): literature, idealism, vitalism

Trotsky, like some of his peers, could exhibit an acute and subtle philosophical dissection of ideological issues. Note this extract, for example.

Leon Trotsky, The Social Roots and the Social Function of Literature (1923)

To a materialist, religion, law, morals and art represent separate aspects of one and the same process of social development. Though they differentiate themselves from their industrial basis, become complex, strengthen and develop their special characteristics in detail, politics, religion, law, ethics and aesthetics remain, nonetheless, functions of social man and obey the laws of his social organisation. The idealist, on the other hand, does not see a unified process of historic development which evolves the necessary organs and functions from within itself, but a crossing or combining and interacting of certain independent principles-the religious, political, juridical, aesthetic and ethical substances, which find their origin and explanation in themselves.
The (dialectic) idealism of Hegel arranges these substances (which are the eternal categories) in some sequence by reducing them to a genetic unity. Regardless of the fact that this unity with Hegel is the absolute spirit, which divides itself in the process of its dialectic manifestation into various “factors,” Hegel’s system, because of its dialectic character, not because of its idealism, gives an idea of historic reality which is just as good as the idea of a man’s hand that a glove gives when turned inside out.
But the formalists (and their greatest genius was Kant) do not look at the dynamics of development, but at a cross section of it, on the day and at the hour of their own philosophic revelation. At the crossing of the line they reveal the complexity and multiplicity of the object (not of the process, because they do not think of processes). This complexity they analyse and classify. They give names to the elements, which are at once transformed into essences, into sub-absolutes, without father or mother; to wit, religion, politics, morals, law, art. Here we no longer have a glove of history turned inside out, but the skin torn from the separate fingers, dried out to a degree of complete abstraction, and this hand of history turns out to be the product of the “interaction” of the thumb, the index, the middle finger, and all the other “factors.” The aesthetic “factor” is the little finger, the smallest, but not the least beloved.
In biology, vitalism is a variation of the same fetish of presenting the separate aspects of the world process, without understanding its inner relation. A creator is all that is lacking for a supersocial, absolute morality or aesthetics, or for a superphysical absolute “vital force.” The multiplicity of independent factors, “factors” without beginning or end, is nothing but a masked polytheism. Just as Kantian idealism represents historically a translation of Christianity into the language of rationalistic philosophy, so all the varieties of idealistic formalisation, either openly or secretly, lead to a god, as the cause of all causes. In comparison with the oligarchy of a dozen sub-absolutes of the idealistic philosophy, a single personal creator is already an element of order. Herein lies the deeper connection between the formalist refutations of Marxism and the theological refutations of Darwinism.

This text is essentially reproduced in chapter 5 of Trotsky's Literature and Revolution (1924). Note also the references to religion and mysticism in Chapter 1: Pre-Revolutionary Art.

George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950): from realism to mysticism

In my post on Gary Sloan, I linked to his interesting article:

George Bernard Shaw: Mystic or Atheist?

At the same time I discovered this book review by a leading ideologue of the Communist Party of Great Britain:

Dutt, R. Palme. "Back to Plotinus," Labour Monthly, July 1921, Vol. I, No. 1.
Review of: Back to Methusela: A Metaphysical Pentateuch, by Bernard Shaw.

Both of these articles deal with Shaw's regression to mysticism. For a general critical study of Shaw's weaknesses, see:

Caudwell, Christopher (pseudonym of Christopher St. John Sprigg). "George Bernard Shaw: A Study of the Bourgeois Superman," Chapter 1 of Studies (1938), in Studies and Further Studies in a Dying Culture, introduction by Sol Yurick. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971. [Reprint of Studies in a Dying Culture (1938) & Further Studies in a Dying Culture (1949)]

One can get a usable snapshot of Shaw's life, work, and development from Wikipedia.

Several decades ago I noted discrepancies between and in Shaw's works. The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891) was soberly down-to-earth, puncturing the illusions of ideals and idealists. Man and Superman (1903), perhaps the summa of Shaw's philosophy, manifests Shaw's characteristic intermixing of nonsense about the life force into otherwise harshly realistic, often cynical, exposes of social reality.

I lack the patience to enumerate Shaw's crackpot views on various subjects. A couple years ago I stumbled on to his piece on Lysenkoism, in which Shaw shows his regret that Lysenko gave vitalism a bad name:

Shaw, George Bernard. "The Lysenko Muddle," Labour Monthly, January 1949.