Two Views of Technology: Forster & Rand

Two Views of Technology: Forster & Rand1

By Nikita Shpilberg, The University of Connecticut

It has been said that philosophy is the obstinate pursuit of unanswerable questions. People who think so point out that we never will reach definitive answers—that it is a waste of an afternoon to sit in front of a computer and transcribe one’s own thoughts on a philosophical matter. The most pointed questions they ask is “Is Philosophy going to get us anywhere? And if so, how?” The reply is “yes.”

Philosophy, at the least, gets us thinking, exploring possibilities, and feeling out the limits of knowledge. It is the conducting of thought-experiments. An author compiles a list of assumptions, sketches a universe, and introduces a cast of characters—reactants who are about to be transformed in believable ways according to the assumptions. The results can be admirable or repulsive. The author, after detecting a trend in society, shows what can happen if it keeps going unchecked. When the results are repulsive, this type of fiction is commonly referred to as “dis-utopian.”

When an author presents a dis-utopian vision, the method of argument is employed is indirect. And it is visibly exemplified in well-known dis-utopian stories such as 1984 or Brave New World. These novels concentrate on the long-term results of political changes in society on the lives of people. It is hardly controversial that political changes determine the course of history. But it is another matter whether technological changes play an equal or greater role. In two somewhat less known stories, “The Machine Stops” and Anthem, two authors explore the link between technological progress and societal progress. Although they disagree whether in a presumably perfect society people would be dependent on technology a lot or a little, they at least agree that abuse of technological advancements can prevent actualizing Man’s potential in civilization-building.

In “The Machine Stops,” published in 1928, E. M. Forster reacts to the glorious “beneficial” powers of machines, praised by H. G. Wells. Forster imagines a world, far into the future, where all people have come to depend on technology to satisfy every need from basic physical needs to spiritual ones as well. All that happens in the lives of people happens through a technological communication link, similar to videophone. Real physical contact is not only discouraged but also abhorred as rude and inappropriate, even among family members. The family is non-existent in the modern sense. A child is conceived in a machine-assigned one-night stand and later on sent to another side of the planet to live in the same type of cubicle as everybody else.

The civilization of “The Machine Stops” moved underground long ago. These people wanted to avoid been subjected to the uncertainties of the elements—they were made uncomfortable by the vastness of the sunlit sky and coldness of night air. They retracted into their own society, concerned the least about the world outside of the Machine. And everybody lives in the machine. The continent-spanning underground complex is hi-tech, all-that-you-want-you-can-get hive of one-room one-occupant cells.

Nobody has to work. The Machine takes care of everything. If someone is hungry, a single depression of a button will summon a meal. A turning of a lever will fill a hot-bath or bring a new shirt. All troubles, from practical to personal, one may encounter are addressed in the Book of the Machine. This manual is the only book everyone has, and this book is revered as holiest of Holy Scripture. Man and Machine are in symbiosis. Machine envelops Man, and through it Man perceives the world, much like the shadows through which the prisoners of Plato’s cave perceive their world.

The bare sketch of Forster’s universe complete, it is time to engage his reasoning. In the story, people live like insects, except they never forage for food, and for all purposes, they remain in the larvae stage. All that the people of the future do is “produce ideas.” And they do it from their one-room cells, where the sole tools of their research are something like today’s Internet. They deem themselves successful in bringing about fresh ideas from history, such as “an account of music in the pre-Mongolian epoch,” or the sea, or French Revolution. Forster, however, never says what the ideas that his characters get are. What people busy themselves with is superficial knowledge compiled to make small talk.

All the millions of people living in the universe of “The Machine Stops” undoubtedly are interested in being mentally active. Their entire lives are all about communicating with their peers on academic topics. But all their learning is second hand. There is no contact with the outside world. It appears that we look at a society of pure intellectuals, who are at last freed from crude bodily worries by clever gadgets and now they can concentrate on the truly important.

But is this society viable?

No. The machine stops.

If the progress of civilization is defined by a portion of society that is intellectually active, then the progress will reach a point, hover a bit, and then come crushing down into atavism because when so many people are living the life of the mind, they neglect everything else. What they neglect are emotional drivers. It is exactly the lust for innovation that drives the scientist, the bone-crushing necessity that inspires the innovator, the craving for insight that drives the academic. But all of these are absent in the world of the machine. People are tethered to what is supposed to free them. Nobody innovates because innovation will endanger the present order of the machine. No one needs anything—so the most powerful impetus of creativity is out of the question. And academic insight is no good unless it confirms the artificial righteousness of the existing way of life. People rot from their sameness.

People closed themselves in the hexagonal cubicles for fear of real life. They traded risk for technological dependency. They traded the wind and the stars for ventilation tubes and pale screen images. They traded the danger and exhilaration of living for smothered existence as swaddled babies.

The cerebral emphasis wears itself out. If living the life of the mind means forgetting why one chose to live it, then it is not worth it, at the least because it becomes an endless mental whirlpool, churning about a fixed point of unexplained complacency. People become satisfied because it seems that such was always the case. And just because it was so, then it should be so in the future. This is a deathblow to progress. People must want things in order to get them. Sifting through the verbal regurgitation—for example—about marine life by a series of persons, each explaining another who came before him—is hardly indicative of the desire for new insight.

A society whose intellect is confined solely to the past will progress into the past. Or more appropriately regress. And it will do so if people forget that technology advanced hand in hand with the mind, both propelled by Wanting. In the universe of the machine people forgot why they wanted to know things to begin with—people forgot that technology is only an instrument, not an end in itself.

Before the seat of consciousness in the brain is unveiled, philosophers make-do with notions of a free (or not so) will, soul, or spirit—in short, the capacity of one individual to choose a unique (to him) course of action. Technological breakthroughs are meant for accommodating the course of action, whatever it may be. In a society where all people are alike in what they want, or in having their needs satisfied, the technology that serves them is alike, and the choices they make are alike. The uniqueness, the individual consciousness that distinguishes each person, is blurred. Diversity, the means by which one arm of society is aware of the distinctness of another, erodes. Therefore, a society suffers loss of consciousness.

It is the loss of consciousness that is so dangerous, not the technological dependency in itself. If excessive practice of the latter engenders the former, then society failed to recognize that the cerebral cortex, the problem-solving part of the brain, is too, an instrumentality, like the technology that it produces.

Not to strain my lungs blowing the loud horn of humanities and ”fuzzy” sciences, I do acknowledge that the exact sciences define my world in incalculable ways.

There is no advance of civilization without the advance of physical science, without improving our understanding of the universe. What I am saying is that however boastful science may be of a complete worldview, universal acceptance of it will always fall short in producing true progress for at least two reasons. First, because boasts are boasts. Science operates on the principle of provisionality. A theory is good as long as it corresponds to data. As in logic, one counterexample transforms a theory or an argument to rubbish. It may end up that for a long time nobody will come up with a refutation to a reductionist worldview. And the boasts shall slide from the shadow of provisionality to a spotlight of universal acceptance. Or it may be the case that indisputable evidence shall be presented. But nothing of the sort has happened yet.

The endless serviceability of science, at least in the applied sense, lies in its nature of utility. It is a means to an end. But what end? This seems to be exactly one of these stubborn questions that keep popping up in philosophy—a question to which a wide diversity of answers exist. When the question is lost, as in Forster’s story, all possibility of producing a diversity of opinion is lost as well. The limitless energy contained within an unanswerable question is lost. Without the energy of dissatisfaction that “big” questions bring, people will grow complacent and stop looking for answers, stop evolving. Technology too, will cease to evolve, and begin to stagnate.

The second reason a strictly scientific worldview will always fall short is people. People, in general, do not understand how complex things work. Some (as myself) truly never will, but others are either unwilling to put in the time to study, or it is simply impractical to do so even if they deem science’s explanatory powers worthy. Do people really want to know? Regardless of the answer, whenever people do not understand something, they invent a comforting rationale, such as magic, or gods. In other words, science to the nonprofessional can be as abstruse as religious mysticism. The indestructible questions cannot be put to rest as, for example, the question of falling bodies.

In today’s world, to paraphrase the author Frank Herbert, the scientist is the shaman of yesterday.

Science, then, cannot explain everything because everything is plainly too big an area of study—or it cannot effectively explain everything because most people will not listen—or choose not to believe. Most people agree that there is something quietly disheartening about the reduction of a human being to a biological machine, for example. Most of us are not scientists. Few of us can even fix a toaster by ourselves. But we do agree however reluctantly that someone can fix it, or a car, or the space shuttle. And someone can explain to me, relying on the atomic theory, optics, and neuroscience, why the sky looks blue. But what do we lose by losing all these explanations?

Ayn Rand in her short novel Anthem contends that we lose a lot—that by forgetting the insights into the workings of nature, civilization slips back into primitive existence. But most importantly, she creates a story where innovation is shunned unless it can be seamlessly added to the preexisting way of life. In other words, no major breakthroughs are allowed into her imaginary slow moving society because they are too new. In contrast to Forster in who’s story people claim that they are eager to produce new ideas when in fact they don’t, in Rand’s novel new ideas are abhorred—especially ideas about new technology.

Anthem begins as a wail of nostalgia but crescendos into a siren song for all that is familiar, broken in, and comfortable. The rooms of Anthem’s content civilization are lighted by candles—the process of advancing from torches took dozens of years. The protagonist’s hush-hush research culminates in the rediscovery electricity. After confessing his illicit research and findings, instead of being thanked, he is flogged and imprisoned. But the research he did is not as much illicit as shockingly unexpected because the goal of that civilization is maintaining placid existence—society is doing its utmost to avoid, as the Chinese saying goes, living in interesting times.

But such a way of life is hardly the realization of Man’s potential. It cannot be the attainment of advanced civilization. While the world is plodding along, stumbling over strife and cynicism and suffering, misguided well-wishers may try to steer the world to a future of placidness, regardless of the price that has to be paid. Such were the founders of Anthem’s civilization. They took complex science and threw it out of the window. Their descendants discouraged the cultivation of mental acuity superior to that of the average person. Schoolteachers dumbed down the material to reach the lowest common denominator, so that it may be accessible to all. The social norms denied the pursuit of whatever career one may choose. Instead, they arranged for Councils to tell people what they should do.

The price that the founders of this ultimate collectivistic society paid is the functional brain death of their civilization. To make people happy, they made them as equal as possible. In fact, though, people can be put on a spectrum of abilities, talents, doggedness, and so forth. There are people at each extreme. The strengths of one person may bring him or her higher status, respect, or even wealth in our society—because he understands complex things. For some reason, he chooses to invest time in acquiring knowledge. He reaps the payoff. And he is envied because that is in human nature. But because there are so many averagely talented people, the society seizes the highly talented ones and brings them down to serve the sluggish multitude—if not extinguishing their talents altogether by making them pick up brooms to sweep the streets. This is the gist of the story, incriminating the collectivistic society by painting its extreme form.

Society cannot advance without its brightest minds. Progress on all fronts is the underlying common element of all human activities. Progress is a process that does not end, because if it ends, creativity is exhausted, and an exhausted society dies. The Red Queen said that it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place. Progress is constant adaptation. Homo Sapiens are the dominant life form because they are the most adaptable creatures. People who can maintain that process are coincidentally the ones that can maintain technological progress.

In both Rand and Forster’s stories, progress stopped. It stopped at different steps of technological development but the production of innovation stopped similarly. In “The Machine Stops,” technology was too complex to understand, so it was deified. Therefore, no one except the protagonist thought that the quality of people’s lives may be improved. The excessive reliance on machines caused society’s death.

In Anthem, zero reliance on technology is concurrent with a state of vegetative contentedness. Technological development must not outrace people’s adaptation to it. And it must not come too short either. Both extremes although they satisfy bare physiological needs, do not go beyond to satisfy what Abraham Maslow called the “need for self-actualization.” Technology is the churning cement of the foundation of the pyramid of needs. To get stuck in the foundation is to forget why one builds the pyramid in the first place.◦

References

Rand, Ayn. Anthem. 50^th anniversary ed. Dutton. 1995

Forster, E. M. “The Machine Stops.” The Machine Stops and Other Stories. Ed. Rod Mengham. Andre Deutsch. Cambridge. 1997

Sternberg, Robert J. Psychology. 4^th ed. Thomson Wordsworth. 2004. p. 439

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