Farfetched Fables/Fifth Fable

Fourth Fable

Farfetched Fables Fifth Fable written by George Bernard Shaw

Sixth and Last Fable

THE scene is unchanged; but the building is now labelled GENETIC INSTITUTE. On the terrace, seated round a table loaded with old books, are four persons of uncertain age, apparently in the prime of life. Two of them are male, one female, the fourth a hermaphrodite. They wear white sleeveless tunics like heralds' tabards on which are embroidered different flower designs, the two men being distinguished by a thistle and a shamrock respectively, the woman by a rose, and the hermaphrodite by an elm with a vine round its trunk. The sleeves of the men are red, of the woman green, of the hermaphrodite the two colors in a chequered harlequin pattern. The men are close-cropped and clean-shaven: the woman's hair is dressed like that of the Milo Venus. They are in animated discussion, each with an open book on which they occasionally thump to emphasize their points.

SHAMROCK. I cannot make head or tail of this nineteenth century stuff. They seem to have considered our business unmentionable, and tried to write books about it in which it was not mentioned. [He shuts the book impatiently.]

ROSE. That seems hardly possible. Our business is the very first business of any human society: the reproduction of the human race, the most mentionable subject in the world and the most important.

SHAMROCK. Well, Ive been through every scrap of nineteenth century writing that remains; and I tell you that their textbooks on physiology dont mention the reproductive organs nor hint at such a thing as sex. You would not guess from them that it existed.

HERM. To say nothing of hermaphrodites. Being myself a hermaphrodite I have looked myself up in the nineteenth century books; and I simply wasnt there.

THISTLE. Oh, they were the damnedest fools: it is impossible to understand how they kept going for a week, much less for years. They had not brains enough to make an alphabet capable of spelling their language. They counted their goods in twelves but could not count their money in more than tens because they had only ten fingers and could not invent the two missing figures. They could not change their working hours by the sun oftener than twice a year; and it took one of the worst of the killing matches they called wars to make them go even that far. Their calendar is incomprehensible: they could not fix their festivals nor make their months tally with the moon. In music their keyboards had only twelve notes in the octave instead of our sixty-four. One would think they might at least have managed nineteen to play their babyish thirds and sixths bearably in tune. They wasted millions of hours every day because they could not or would not do the simplest things; and when their five per cent of geniuses made wonderful machines for them: big machines that could rise from the ground and fly, and little ones that could think and calculate, they accepted them as gifts from some imaginary paradise they called heaven. When one of their bodily organs went wrong they did not set it right: they just cut it out, and left the patient to recover from the shock or die. When the patient was ill all over and could not be cut to pieces they dosed him with poisons: I hunted out a case of a well-known woman who was given nine different poisons for some trouble they called typhoid. The amazing thing is that she survived it. She must have had the constitution of a bear. It was in the nineteenth century that they gave up believing in idols and priests, and took to believing in medicine men and surgeons. Let us drop digging into this past that is unconceivable, and start from what we really know of the present. He shuts his book and throws it away.

SHAMROCK [shutting his book] Agreed. But why did they consider sex unmentionable?

ROSE. Simply because their methods were so disgusting that they had no decent language for them. You think their methods were like ours, and their passions like ours. You could not make a greater mistake. The seminal fluids which our chemists make in the laboratory, and which it is our business to experiment with, were unknown to them: they had to use glandular excretions from the living body to perpetuate the race. To initiate births they had to practise personal contacts which I would rather not describe. Strangest of all, they seem to have experienced in such contacts the ecstasies which are normal with us in our pursuit of knowledge and power, and culminate in our explorations and discoveries. The religions they believed in were so wildly absurd that one would suppose they could believe anything.

SHAMROCK. Oh, come! They must have had some common sense or they couldnt have lived.

ROSE. They had gleams of it. In spite of their sensual ecstasies, they had decency enough to reserve their highest veneration for persons who abstained from them, exalting them under the special titles of saints, nuns, priests, angels, gods and the like.

HERM. Not always. There were people called Greeks who had dozens of gods whose adventures were scandalously sensual. They poisoned an old man for trying to teach their young men to reason. Serve him right, too; for some of his reasonings were sheer logomachies: in England called puns.

ROSE. True. Another set of them, called Jews or Israelites, tortured a young man to death for trying to persuade them that the divinity they worshipped was in themselves, and promising that if they killed him he would rise from the dead and establish a kingdom of righteousness not among angels in the clouds but on earth among human men and women.

HERM. That was not why they killed him: they believed anyone who promised that much. They killed him because he made a riot in their temple and drove out the money changers, whom he mistook for thieves, being too young and not enough of a financier to know how useful and necessary they were to pilgrims. His name was Hitler, poor chap!

ROSE. All the same, utterly as we are unlike these primitive savages, we are descended from them; and though we manufacture ourselves scientifically, we are not yet agreed as to the sort of mankind we ought to make, nor how many at a time, nor how long they ought to last. We all want the Just Man Made Perfect; but when our chemists ask us for an exact prescription of the necessary protoplasms, hormones, vitamins, enzymes and the rest, we never agree on the last milligram of each ingredient; and it is that milligram that determines whether the resulting product will be a poet or a mathematician.

HERM. I'm against all that. It revolts me. I tell you again and again we shall never make decent human beings out of chemical salts. We must get rid of our physical bodies altogether, except for stuffed specimens in the Natural History Museum. I dont want to be a body: I want to be a mind and nothing but a mind. In the sixteenth century men made it their first article of religion to worship a god who had neither body, parts, nor passions: sensual passions. Even in the dark ages of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries there was a man who aspired to be a vortex in thought, and a woman who declared that the mind made the body and not the body the mind. Demolish all the laboratories. Build temples in which we can pray and pray and pray for deliverance from our bodies until the change occurs naturally as all real changes do.

ROSE. My child, how much farther would that take us? We should still be unable to agree on what sort of mind we needed. Prayer, we know, is a great creative power; but to pray effectively you must know what to pray for. In the sixteenth century there was a famous mathematician who declared that our utmost knowledge was no more than a grain of sand picked up on the margin of the ocean of our ignorance. He was a silly fellow who thought that the world was only forty centuries old and that straight lines were ethically right; but the utmost that we know is still no more than his grain of sand. I would like to be a mind without a body; but that has not happened to me yet; and meanwhile, as another sixteenth sage said, the world must be peopled; and as we can no longer endure the old unmentionable methods we must make material citizens out of material substances in biochemical laboratories. I was manufactured that way myself; and so were you, my boy.

HERM. My body was, and my mind such as it is. But my desire to get rid of my body was not. Where did that come from? Can you tell me?

ROSE. No; but when we know even that, it will be only another grain of sand on the seashore. But it will be worth picking up; and so will all the other grains.

SHAMROCK. In the infinity of time, when the oceans dry up and make no more sand, we shall pick them all up. What then?

ROSE. The pursuit of knowledge and power will never end.