Morlocks and Eloi

Posted on January 13, 2004 in Class Reading War

I grieved to think how brief the dream of the human intellect had been. It had committed suicide. It had set itself steadfastly towards comfort and ease, a balanced society with security and permanency as its watchword, it had attained its hopes—to come to this at last. Once, life and property must have reached almost absolute safety. The rich had been assured of his wealth and comfort, the toiler assured of his life and work. No doubt in that perfect world there had been no unemployed problem, no social question left unsolved. And a great quiet had followed.

The Time Machine

The recent decline of the dollar and the decision of many countries to use the Euro as their standard has struck very little fear in the hearts of the runaway shop champions. They call these developments “good news”. Some on IRC have said that we have a glorious lifestyle ahead of us where we can live in palatial comfort without the sight of the suffering masses to bother us.

Such reflections have led me to remember H.G. Wells classic science fiction novel The Time Machine. Wells, you must understand, set the standard for science fiction writers of the 20th century. His stories were not so much about technology as they were about the possible courses of history. The War of the Worlds, for example, was based on colonialist history with a decided twist: the world’s most powerful nation was invaded by hostile aliens who viewed them as cattle. Wells had mercy on his readers by allowing his Martians to die as the American Indians (a colonized people) had: by succumbing to diseases for which they had no resistance. Well’s conclusion to that book speaks of a horror that many had not yet known when the book was published in 1898:

I go to London and see the busy multitudes in Fleet Street and the Strand, and it comes across my mind that they are but the ghosts of the past, haunting the streets that I have seen silent and wretched, going to and fro, phantasms in a dead city, the mockery of life in a galvanised body. And strange, too, it is to stand on Primrose Hill, as I did but a day before writing this last chapter, to see the great province of houses, dim and blue through the haze of the smoke and mist, vanishing at last into the vague lower sky, to see the people walking to and fro among the flower beds on the hill, to see the sight-seers about the Martian machine that stands there still, to hear the tumult of playing children, and to recall the time when I saw it all bright and clear-cut, hard and silent, under the dawn of that last great day.…

And strangest of all is it to hold my wife’s hand again, and to think that I have counted her, and that she has counted me, among the dead.

It is not a far leap from Wells’ Martians to the wars waged by the Superpowers during the Twentieth and early Twenty-First Centuries. I have seen Vukovar with my own eyes. Herbert George Wells has been a looking-glass prophet. The destruction he describes as wreaked by the Martians came down many times in the course of the late expansion of Imperialism, the Cold War, and, most recently, as part of the so-called War on Terrorism. The World Trade Center attack not withstanding — the United States is the rare industrial nation which has not felt the shock and the despair of seeing whole cities reduced to rubble by weapons of mass destruction. We may not have the Black Smoke or the Death Ray, but we have high explosives, cruise missiles, landmines, nerve gas, anthrax, Q Fever, and The Bomb — to name just a few pieces of our arsenal. Like the Martians we invade countries for their resources. I do not doubt that if it were possible to reconstruct the political ideology of the fictional Martians, we would find plenty of references to freedom and security, not dissimilar to what is preached from the White House Bully Pulpit.

But what of The Time Machine?

We can also see that in Wells looking glass and many elements are here with us today.

The increasing stratification between the people of the United States and the rest of the world bodes ill. Science fiction blinks back at us. We see ourselves. Where Wells’ working class was driven underground to become the Morlocks, we have sent jobs overseas where we do not have to see the suffering of those who make our sneakers and our cell phones. Instead of cannibalism, the peoples of the third world engage in terrorism, the killing of the Eloi of our age and their agents.

As the seer observed in his novel, the world of the Morlocks was made by the ancestors of the Eloi. And it turned on their descendants. So, too, in this age — while the dreams of the human intellect still maintain their power to meet the challenges of maldistribution of resources and addiction to luxury — the economy the powerful among us have wrought attracts occasional bursts of death which are nothing, nothing like the horror that we keep out of sight.

The Morlock’s underground exists today, in the full light of the sun. If we Eloi want to survive, we must take steps to end the rift between us and our fellow human beings.

“Serbs live here”. A blasted and gutted convenience store in Vukovar, Croatia. Copyright 1992 by Joel Sax.