Thursday
Tobias Wilson-Bates, my English professor son, and reader Letitia Grimes have both alerted me to E. M. Forster’s The Machine Stops (1909), a science fiction novella that perfectly captures our world in the age of Zoom, Skype, and Facetime. Because humanity has lost its connection with nature, it is no longer able to live on the earth’s surface and retreats to underground bunkers, where people communicate thanks to “the Machine.” Anticipating Facebook, Forster notes that one might have thousands of “friends” without ever meeting anyone face to face.
Early in the story, Vashti’s son Kuno, living on the other side of the world, requests a visit, which makes no sense to her given the way the world works. Those who have just experienced a Zoom Thanksgiving and anticipate a Zoom Christmas will understand why the following passage is circulating on social media:
“I have called you before, mother, but you were always busy or isolated. I have something particular to say.”
“What is it, dearest boy? Be quick. Why could you not send it by pneumatic post?”
“Because I prefer saying such a thing. I want——”
“Well?”
“I want you to come and see me.”
Vashti watched his face in the blue plate.
“But I can see you!” she exclaimed. “What more do you want?”
“I want to see you not through the Machine,” said Kuno. “I want to speak to you not through the wearisome Machine.”
Kuno desires secrecy because he has violated the Machine’s rules by entering the outside world, meaning that he almost surely faces expulsion. Unlike his mother, he longs for a connection with nature:
“Oh, hush!” said his mother, vaguely shocked. “You mustn’t say anything against the Machine.”
“Why not?”
“One mustn’t.”
“You talk as if a god had made the Machine,” cried the other.”I believe that you pray to it when you are unhappy. Men made it, do not forget that. Great men, but men. The Machine is much, but it is not everything. I see something like you in this plate, but I do not see you. I hear something like you through this telephone, but I do not hear you. That is why I want you to come. Pay me a visit, so that we can meet face to face, and talk about the hopes that are in my mind.”
Many teachers and professors will relate to Vashti’s interactions with her students. Note especially the short attention span:
The clumsy system of public gatherings had been long since abandoned; neither Vashti nor her audience stirred from their rooms. Seated in her armchair she spoke, while they in their armchairs heard her, fairly well, and saw her, fairly well. She opened with a humorous account of music in the pre-Mongolian epoch, and went on to describe the great outburst of song that followed the Chinese conquest. Remote and primæval as were the methods of I-San-So and the Brisbane school, she yet felt (she said) that study of them might repay the musicians of today: they had freshness; they had, above all, ideas. Her lecture, which lasted ten minutes, was well received, and at its conclusion she and many of her audience listened to a lecture on the sea; there were ideas to be got from the sea; the speaker had donned a respirator and visited it lately. Then she fed, talked to many friends, had a bath, talked again, and summoned her bed.
As the story unfolds, even respirators are abandoned so that no one has firsthand experience with the real world. Although this cuts scholars off from nature and the actual sites where history has happened, they find ways to rationalize, asserting that first-hand contact with reality is overrated. Although they remind me of those Republicans who have their own set of “alternate facts” (to quote Kellyanne Conway), it’s also true that intellectuals have a way of spinning their disciplines to make up for things they don’t know:
“Beware of first- hand ideas!” exclaimed one of the most advanced of them. “First-hand ideas do not really exist. They are but the physical impressions produced by love and fear, and on this gross foundation who could erect a philosophy? Let your ideas be second-hand, and if possible tenth-hand, for then they will be far removed from that disturbing element –direct observation.
Because of her son’s urgency, Vashti visits him and hears his assessment of the Machine. Through Kumo’s critique, Forster all but predicts the Internet:
Cannot you see, cannot all you lecturers see, that it is we that are dying, and that down here the only thing that really lives in the Machine? We created the Machine, to do our will, but we cannot make it do our will now. It has robbed us of the sense of space and of the sense of touch, it has blurred every human relation and narrowed down love to a carnal act, it has paralyzed our bodies and our wills, and now it compels us to worship it. The Machine develops—but not on our lives. The Machine proceeds –but not to our goal. We only exist as the blood corpuscles that course through its arteries, and if it could work without us, it would let us die.
By the end of the story, the Machine is starting to fail. Rather than question it, however, people adjust, a testimony to humanity’s ability to normalize whatever is happening. Over the past four years, we too have been lowering the bar as to what we expect from our leaders:
Time passed, and they resented the defects no longer. The defects had not been remedied, but the human tissues in that latter day had become so subservient, that they readily adapted themselves to every caprice of the Machine. The sigh at the crises of the Brisbane symphony no longer irritated Vashti; she accepted it as part of the melody. The jarring noise, whether in the head or in the wall, was no longer resented by her friend. And so with the moldy artificial fruit, so with the bath water that began to stink, so with the defective rhymes that the poetry machine had taken to emit. All were bitterly complained of at first, and then acquiesced in and forgotten. Things went from bad to worse unchallenged.
The entire society collapses by the end of the story, but Vashti’s son, who has seen the upper world, holds out hope that humans will reconnect with nature. In Kumo’s sense of wonder, we see the world as it might appear to someone who has spent far too much time in front of a computer screen. The only remedy to their Machine-governed existence, he tells his mother, is
to tell men again and again that I have seen the hills of Wessex as Ælfrid saw them when he overthrew the Danes.
So the sun set. I forgot to mention that a belt of mist lay between my hill and other hills, and that it was the color of pearl.
In short, tear yourselves away from your devices and go take a walk in nature. Also, once it’s safe, spend time in the company of others.
Further thought: Forster’s novella reminds me of neurobiologist Darcia Navaez’s book Neurobiology and the Development of Human Morality, which I’ve written about here. Navaez talks about the toll that being separated nature takes on us–physically, psychologically, and spiritually–and of the healing that comes from reconnecting. In other words, he advocates Zumo’s searching.
Navaez looks at some of America’s great nature writers as he makes his case, including Emerson, Thoreau, Wendell Berry, and Mary Oliver. The following passage sums up his book:
When I try to take into account humanity’s fullest capacities, it leads me to an alternate view of the current human condition, and it reveals a pathway out of our predicament. We can learn to restore our balance when we find ourselves falling into a bracing self-protection yet again. We can re-enter a circle of inclusion with one another and with our companions in the natural world. Humanity’s telos or fulfillment is in companionship with the natural world. It is our nature to be engaged and communally imaginative with Life. How we set ourselves up to support our human essence is vital. How we transform ourselves is the story to tell.