The dystopian society of “The Machine Stops” illustrate the dangers of valuing rationality too highly over human emotions. The people in this society live underground in isolated pods, and a complex technological system called the Machine provides all of their needs and facilitates all communication. Most people in this society, such as the main character, Vashti, value “ideas” but fail to recognize that ideas detached from experience and feelings become stagnant and lifeless. There is no room for human feelings in the Machine, because although this system allows people to communicate with one another, it is incapable of conveying emotional nuance through these communications.
Vashti, like most people in the society, values practicality and routine, incapable of understanding her son Kuno’s seemingly irrational desire to have adventures and see the aboveground world with his own eyes. Kuno is deeply moved by the simple sight of the hills of Wessex when he escapes to Earth’s surface. Vashti, on the other hand, is uninterested in the sublime landscapes of the Himalayas, the Caucasus Mountains, and Greece that she flies over as she goes to visit Kuno, simply because there are “no ideas” she can find in them. She, like most people in her society, doesn’t appreciate beauty or anything else that isn’t purely intellectual. Indeed, although Vashti loves music—which is, in essence, an expression of human emotion—even this is fixed into something wholly rational, as Vashti’s engagement with the music she listens to seems to stay entirely at the level of intellectual, never emotional.
But by the end of the story, when the Machine breaks down and everyone underground is dying, Kuno and Vashti both weep over how humanity has devalued their own senses and emotions. They recognize that their society—which has developed the human mind at the expense of the human heart, body, and spirit—has come at a great cost, creating an atrophied humanity that can only enjoy a fraction of what human beings were once capable of experiencing and feeling.
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Emotion vs. Rationality Quotes in The Machine Stops
“In the air-ship—” He broke off, and she fancied that he looked sad. She could not be sure, for the Machine did not transmit nuances of expression. It only gave a general idea of people—an idea that was good enough for all practical purposes, Vashti thought. The imponderable bloom, declared by a discredited philosophy to be the actual essence of intercourse, was rightly ignored by the Machine, just as the imponderable bloom of the grape was ignored by the manufacturers of artificial fruit. Something ‘good enough’ had long since been accepted by our race.
Few traveled in these days, for, thanks to the advance of science, the earth was exactly alike all over. Rapid intercourse, from which the previous civilization had hoped so much, had ended by defeating itself. What was the good of going to Peking when it was just like Shrewsbury? Why return to Shrewsbury when it would all be like Peking? Men seldom moved their bodies; all unrest was concentrated in the soul.
The air-ship service was a relic from the former age. It was kept up, because it was easier to keep it up than to stop it or to diminish it, but it now far exceeded the wants of the population.
She might well declare that the visit was superfluous. The buttons, the knobs, the reading-desk with the Book, the temperature, the atmosphere, the illumination—all were exactly the same. And if Kuno himself, flesh of her flesh, stood close beside her at last, what profit was there in that? She was too well-bred to shake him by the hand.
“The mortar had somehow rotted, and I soon pushed some more tiles in, and clambered after them into the darkness, and the spirits of the dead comforted me. I don’t know what I mean by that. I just say what I felt. I felt, for the first time, that a protest had been lodged against corruption, and that even as the dead were comforting me, so I was comforting the unborn. I felt that humanity existed, and that it existed without clothes. How can I possibly explain this? It was naked, humanity seemed naked, and all these tubes and buttons and machineries neither came into the world with us, nor will they follow us out, nor do they matter supremely while we are here. Had I been strong, I would have torn off every garment I had, and gone out into the outer air unswaddled. But this is not for me, nor perhaps for my generation. I climbed with my respirator and my hygienic clothes and my dietetic tabloids! Better thus than not at all.”
Tears gathered in his mother’s eyes. She knew that he was fated. If he did not die today he would die tomorrow. 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.
“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 is 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 corpuscules that course through its arteries, and if it could work without us, it would let us die. Oh, I have no remedy—or, at least, only one—to tell men again and again that I have seen the hills of Wessex as Aelfrid saw them when he overthrew the Danes.”
“The Machine,” they exclaimed, “feeds us and clothes us and houses us; through it we speak to one another, through it we see one another, in it we have our being. The Machine is the friend of ideas and the enemy of superstition: the Machine is omnipotent, eternal; blessed is the Machine.” And before long this allocution was printed on the first page of the Book, and in subsequent editions the ritual swelled into a complicated system of praise and prayer. The word “religion” was sedulously avoided, and in theory the Machine was still the creation and the implement of man. But in practice all, save a few retrogrades worshipped it as divine.
They wept for humanity, those two, not for themselves. […] Man, the flower of all flesh, the noblest of all creatures visible, man who had once made god in his image, and had mirrored his strength on the constellations, beautiful naked man was dying, strangled in the garments that he had woven. Century after century had he toiled, and here was his reward. Truly the garment had seemed heavenly at first, shot with the colours of culture, sewn with the threads of self-denial. And heavenly it had been so long as it was a garment and no more, so long as man could shed it at will and live by the essence that is his soul, and the essence, equally divine, that is his body. The sin against the body—it was for that they wept in chief; the centuries of wrong against the muscles and the nerves, and those five portals by which we can alone apprehend—glozing it over with talk of evolution, until the body was white pap, the home of ideas as colourless, last sloshy stirrings of a spirit that had grasped the stars.
“Is there any hope, Kuno?”
“None for us.”
“Where are you?”
She crawled towards him over the bodies of the dead. His blood spurted over her hands.
“Quicker,” he gasped, “I am dying—but we touch, we talk, not through the Machine.”
He kissed her.
“We have come back to our own. We die, but we have recaptured life, as it was in Wessex, when Aelfrid overthrew the Danes. We know what they know outside, they who dwelt in the cloud that is the colour of a pearl.”
“But, Kuno, is it true? Are there still men on the surface of the earth? Is this—this tunnel, this poisoned darkness—really not the end?”
He replied:
“I have seen them, spoken to them, loved them. They are hiding in the mist and the ferns until our civilization stops. To-day they are the Homeless—to-morrow—”
“Oh, to-morrow—some fool will start the Machine again, to-morrow.”
“Never,” said Kuno, “never. Humanity has learnt its lesson.”
