While first starting E.M Forster’s “The Machine Stops,” I found the narrative somewhat strange. The more I read however, the more fascinating the premise of the story became. In Forster’s imaginary world, civilization does not resemble humanity as we know it today. Instead, all in the world is all alike and is totally run and controlled by the Machine. Instead of human contact, emotion, and connection, the people of this world are entirely focused on ideas as the main point in life. The machine seems to take away all elements of humanity that we know today and leads people to worship the machine, treating The Book like a bible of sorts. Any deviation from the Machine’s goals was punished by “Homelessness,” which was banishment to the surface, where people couldn’t survive. This attitude is shown in the mother’s reaction to her son’s admission of his self-exploration to the surface. “There was not room for such a person in the world. And with her pity disgust mingled. She was ashamed at having borne such a son, she who had always been so respectable and so full of ideas. Was he really the little boy to whom
she had taught the use of his stops and buttons, and to whom she had given his first lessons in the Book? The very hair that disfigured his lip showed that he was reverting to some savage type. On atavism the Machine can have no mercy.” This quote clearly shows how society values unquestionable loyalty to the Machine, and how any exemplification of human uniqueness is in conflict with that loyalty. This attitude toward her son struck me in that she does not seem to care at all for her son on a personal, familial level, instead she can only feel proud of him when he is participating in the system of the Machine.
In Section 3, “The Homeless”, there are two developments in the Machine. “The second great development was the re-establishment of religion.” In this section, the author describes how the Machine has now actually become a religion, further solidifying the control the Machine has on all the people in the world. Lecturers of the world discuss how the Machine is omnipotent, implying the God-like nature of the system, and the utter lack of control people have over their own lives and basic needs. I found this concept to be very ironic, as the Machine seemed to have been originally created to be useful for humans and was not indented to control them. In our real world today of increasing reliance on advancing technology, this narrative seems to be a cautionary tale that while technology can be put to good use by humans, there may be a point where it is taken too far and gets beyond our control, permanently altering who we are as a civilization. This story is, of course, and extreme hyperbole of such a scenario, however when I consider how much we, and our daily habits, have changed over the last fifty years due to technology, such a concept does not seem so far stretched.