ESSAYS
The essays are designed to offer a basis for discussion of topical issues arising out of the Lockdown measures designed to control the Corvid-19 pandemic. Each essay relates to E.M. Forster's The Machine Stops and Understanding the Financial System by Frances Hutchinson (also available for purchase). An extensive Bibliography is also available.
(Note that page number references in all the EASY ESSAYS refer to The Machine Stops as here provided electronically)
EASY ESSAYS
Faith in Technology
Nobody knows how the Machine was made or who made it. It is just there to supply the everyday needs of a human race cut off from nature ... Read more ...
Mass Production Man
Are there no barbed words, poison-tipped,
Spat out with dynamite, to penetrate
Where the mind lurks within the work-machine? ... Read more ...
The Elephant
In The Machine Stops E.M. Forster foretells the demise of humanity if economic and technological "progress" is blindly pursued by people who are just doing the job they are paid to do. Then, as now, the elephant in the room is the world-wide financial system. ... Read more ...
Economics
As Kuno relates his quest to reach the surface of the earth without permission from the Machine, he relates that he was not frightened physically. "I feared something far more intangible - doing something that was not contemplated by the Machine". ... Read more ...
Unethical Consumerism
No work is done in The Machine Stops. Like a gigantic mother-figure, the Machine provides for the needs of humanity at the touch of a button.(p4). A moment's reflection ... Read more ...
Cashlessness
As the Machine starts to crumble we are told that humanity had sunk into decadence "quietly and complacently", as "progress had come to mean the progress of the Machine". Nobody, not even the Central Committee, had any idea ... Read more ...
Cooperative Communities of Households
It would appear that the world financial system, with the technological web that gives it life, is veering out of human control. Nobody knows how ... Read more ...
HARDER ESSAYS
The Win-Win Game 1913 to 2020
Once upon a time children played by the roadside, chanting traditional rhymes in a long-established pattern. Games flowed in a natural progression, one following another as the mood took the group. The question of who had 'won' and who had 'lost' in the playing ... Read more ...
Henry George (1839-1937)
Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth: The Remedy is an 1879 book by social theorist and economist Henry George. It is a treatise on the questions of why poverty accompanies economic and technological progress ... Read more...
Then and Now
In the high optimism of his youth, Owen Barfield published a long essay describing the political economy of the UK in the aftermath of the First World War. ... Read more ...
The Struggle for a Human Future Review
In the early years of the 20th century the use of electricity for communications systems, and within the political economy as a whole, was in its infancy. Although very few households and businesses used electronic devices, warnings of the dangers of uncritical expansion of their use ... Read more ...
The Economics of Love Story
The Economics of Love was to be a full-length book on the world economy in the 21st century. The chapters on 'matriarchy' and 'patriarchy' were already written when I came across Thomas Berry's ... Read more ...
Understanding Why the Machine IS Stopping
The good thing about Lockdown is that it brought home to many of us a fundamental fact of social life. Put simply, most of us haven't a clue what makes the social order tick. We cannot say with any certainty who decides policy, on what basis and ... Read more ...