In2-MeC
newly discovered entries of In2-DeepFreeze First Generation Animations
ISKCON Chowpatti, Mumbai, Maharastra, India
25 April 2004
A Sense of the Future
British author E. M. Forster (1879-1970) had a keen sense of the future. In his works of fiction eighty years ago, he pointed to the coming of things that would not make their presence felt in the Western world until much later, around the time of his death.
What things were these?
One was Krsna consciousness. . . as a spiritual value that would be sought by people of the West.
You see this in A Passage to India, a novel he wrote in the early 1920s. At the end of it he describes a Janmastami festival in India. We see the brahmana who conducts the puja preaching to some English visitors who are eager to know more about Sri Krsna. There is a suggestion that these Britishers are sincere enough to even become devotees of Krsna.
Forster died in 1970 in Coventry; by this time the fledgling ISKCON in London had been getting writeups in English newspapers for a couple of years. I wonder if, before he left his body, Forster read about the Western devotees of Krsna. (A Passage to India was reviewed in Back to Godhead magazine some years ago when a Hollywood movie based on Forster's book was released. )
In 1928 Forster wrote a story called "The Machine Stops. " In this, he sensed the coming of the cyber age. People will live sealed off from one another in rooms that are much like the cells in a beehive. A glowing blue vision-plate predominates in each cell; it is much like a television or a computer display, but it transmits images as well as receives them. It is only through the vision-plate that each individual knows about the world. People rarely if ever venture out of their rooms. They order food electronically and it is delivered to their doors. They communicate with friends electronically. They work their jobs electronically. At the end of Forster's story, The Machine--which is the name of the vast unity of apparatuses and systems that keeps the human hive in operation--breaks down, and everyone in the hive dies helplessly.
So far the cyber-revolution has not actually reduced people to living in hives, but the way some "techies" live, they might as well be sealed alone in individual cells packed with computerized gadgetry. Cyber-visionaries like those I quoted in yesterday's In2-MeC entry preach the desirability of humanity evolving into "the hive-mind. " People who are addicted to sitting in front of their PCs, surfing the Net, are susceptible to such preaching. In the year E. M. Forster died, the personal computer revolution had just begun. Most people of that time knew nothing about that revolution; probably Forster himself had no clue that primitive microcomputers were being designed in 1970. By 1974 money was being made from hardware and software aimed at the home user, and companies like Apple and Microsoft were in the process of being born.
Looking at the way computers now dominate our lives, we can appreciate the farsightedness of drama critic and naturalist Joseph Wood Krutch, who wrote The Twelve Seasons: A Perpetural Calendar for the Country in 1949. Here he stated:
Man's development takes him farther and farther away from his associations with his fellows, seems to condemn him more and more to live with what is dead than what is alive.
Around the same time as Krutch wrote those words, E. B. White predicted that man's technologies
will insist that we forget the primary and the near in favor of the secondary and the remote.
White foresaw the day when people will take artificial representations of ideas, sounds and images to be reality, and the original ideas, sounds and images to be artificial. He believed this would develop to a point when
the solid world becomes make-believe. . . when all is reversed and we shall be like the insane.
What was future to Forster, Krutch and White is our now. Our now is a choice between Krsna consciousness and a media-induced insanity of artificial imagery, or in one word: maya.
No Machines Without Soul!
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