‘The machine’
Dear Friends
Today’s offering for our Companionship email comes from one of our Quaker Honorary Chaplains, Leslie Stevenson:
Earlier in this lockdown, I read a story by E. M. Forster entitled “The Machine Stops”. Written before the first world war, over a century ago, it is published in his Collected Short Stories (Penguin Modern Classics, 1954). Perhaps it is a prescient secular parable for our times? Not many of you may have it on your bookshelves, but I don’t think it will spoil it for you if I offer some reflections.
The story starts with an imagined state of future civilization in which individual people live their lives in underground rooms (like cells of bees), with their material needs provided by the all-encompassing “Machine”. They can communicate with others by devices that convey both sound and pictures – like our phones and computers! (In our present plight most us have more than one person in the household, and for families with young children – who do not figure in Forster’s fable – the lockdown may be especially taxing.)
The worldwide “Machine” is always dignified with capital letters. Nothing must be said against it, and people can pray to it when unhappy. There is even a “Book of the Machine” published by the Central Committee in every room, which Vashti (the woman in the story) raises to her lips to kiss.
It seems to me that Forster was satirizing three targets at once – organized religion, totalitarian regimes (anticipating George Orwell’s 1984), and especially our reliance on technology and worldwide systems of supply, all of which he foresaw in the era of railways.
Forster also imagined that increasing reliance on the “Machine” cut people off from experience of the natural world. The Committee of the Machine forbad anyone from venturing outside, but they were permitted occasionally to summon an airship to take them to visit other people, as Vashti’s grown up son Kuno persuaded her to do. (Airships were an expensive survival from a previous era, as aeroplanes may become in ours.)
Kuno confesses that he had defied the Central Committee and had ventured into the open air (for which he needed a respirator!). Meanwhile the Machine begins to break down, and even the Committee of the Mending Apparatus needs mending itself. The whole system crashes, and the only hope at the end of the story is that Kuno has seen people hiding in the mist and the ferns “until civilization stops”.
Well, the biological world has come back to bite us, and our technology alone will not save us. Have we too become too reliant on the “Machine”?
Notes from your Chaplaincy:
Compline – Please note that tomorrow’s Companionship email will contain the link for the Zoom Meeting to our Compline Service being streamed at 9pm, Thursday 23rd April. The service will be led by Professor Reverend Ian Bradley, our Church of Scotland Honorary Chaplain. All are welcome.
Evening Prayer – Evening Prayer continues at 5pm with Pray with Sam and this week we are using the prayers for the day from Taizé https://www.taize.fr/en_article5806.html. If you want someone or some situation remembered in prayer, please email me [email protected].
Pastoral Care – All are welcome at the Chaplaincy and we are here to support any member of staff or student, regardless of religion, creed, denomination or philosophy of life. Please remember that our Honorary Chaplains along with Donald and myself are here to listen and care for you. We are available for a phone conversation or a team meeting so just email us direct or contact the Chaplaincy [email protected].
Keep well, blessings
Samantha