by Irish ministers were said to be at odds over delaying a rise in the carbon tax, and I had just reread a story from 1909 about people who let a machine do everything until it broke
Monday, the Eve of the Irish Budget
The shop was dead and the heating was not. Something has gone in the boiler and it will not turn off. I have had the door propped open in October, selling Edwardian fiction in my shirtsleeves, burning gas I can practically see leaving through the roof.
It put me in mind of a short story. And the story put me in mind of something my mother had read me.
The Story
It is by E. M. Forster. Everyone knows him for the novels about English people being awkward in Italy and India. In 1909 he wrote something quite unlike them. It is called “The Machine Stops,” and it is about thirty pages long.
It is set far in the future. The surface of the earth is no longer lived on. Everybody is underground. Each person has a small six-sided room, like the cell of a bee.
In the room there is nothing. An armchair. A reading desk. And buttons. There is a button for food, a button for music, a button for a hot bath, a button that brings a bed up out of the floor. You never need to leave.
And there is a plate. A round, glowing plate you hold in your hands, through which you can see and speak to anyone in the world. People have thousands of friends and never meet one of them. They give each other lectures through the plate. They are horrified by touch.
All of this is provided by the Machine. Nobody quite remembers who built it. Nobody understands how it works any longer. There is a book of instructions which people have begun to treat as holy.
He wrote that in 1909. There were hardly any telephones.
What Happens
There is a woman, Vashti, who is perfectly content. And her son, Kuno, who lives on the other side of the world and is not.
He has done something forbidden. He has found his way up to the surface, without permission, and seen the hills and the stars. He tries to tell her. He says that people have lost the sense of space, the use of their bodies, the very idea of near and far. He says: the Machine is stopping. I know the signs.
She thinks he is mad.
And then, slowly, it does. First the music goes wrong. A grinding in it. People complain, and are told it will be mended, and get used to it. Then the baths smell. Then the beds do not come when called. Each time there is a complaint, and an assurance, and people adapt.
Nobody can mend it, because nobody knows how. The committee that is meant to do so can only report that it has referred the matter.
And one day the light goes, and the air.
What My Mother Read Me
It was in a round-up of everything known about tomorrow’s Budget, on an Irish news site. A paragraph I had passed over before. It says that the two leaders of the coalition were forced to play down talk of a rift over a possible delay to carbon tax increases.
It followed a newspaper report that slowing down the rises in that tax, for the rest of the government’s life, was on the table.
I had to ask what the carbon tax was. She explained. It is a charge on fuel: petrol, diesel, home heating oil, gas, turf. Ireland brought it in years ago and committed to raising it a little every year, by a set amount, right through to the end of this decade. The idea is that if burning things costs more each year, people and firms will slowly change what they do. And the money is meant to go on insulating houses and helping those least able to pay.
So every autumn, at the Budget, it goes up another step. Everybody knows it is coming. Everybody hates it.
And now, it is reported, some in government would like to slow the steps.
The Two Clocks
I am not going to say who is right. I do not know enough and the decision is tomorrow. But I can see the shape of the argument, because it is the oldest one there is.
The case for delay is plain. People are hard pressed. Heating a house in the west of Ireland with oil, which is what most rural people have, costs a fortune already. A pensioner in a draughty farmhouse cannot buy a heat pump. To her the tax is not an incentive. It is a fine for being poor and living in the country. And there is an election in a few years.
The case against is also plain. The whole design was that it would be steady. A little each year, known in advance, so that people could plan. Once you skip a step because times are hard, you have taught everyone that it will be skipped whenever times are hard. And times are always hard. The steps become a suggestion.
One side is looking at this winter. The other is looking at a winter thirty years off. Both winters are real. Only one of them has voters in it.
Why I Thought of Forster
The people in the story are not wicked. That is what chills me about it. They are comfortable.
They have a system that gives them everything. It has a cost, somewhere, that nobody sees. Each small failure is put up with. Each warning is someone being difficult. To do anything about it would mean a great upheaval now for the sake of a danger later, and there is always a reason why now is not the time.
“It will be mended.” “The committee has it in hand.” And they turn back to the plate.
I had the boiler roaring behind me as I read it. I do not know how to turn it off. I do not know how it works. I rang the owner and he said he would ring a man.
Not Too Neat
I must not make it a sermon. Forster’s story is a fable. It is not a policy.
The people who would slow the carbon tax are not Vashti, pushing buttons. They are, some of them, looking at a widow in Leitrim with an oil tank, and thinking that a rule which hurts her is a bad rule, whatever the graph says. That is a decent instinct.
And the ones who say hold firm are not always thinking of her at all. It is easy to be stern about fuel when you live in a new flat in Dublin with a tram at the door.
My mother, who grew up cutting turf, has no patience with people in cities telling the country how to keep warm. She says, “Let them come down and try it in February.”
But she also said, after a bit, “Mind you. The bog’s nearly gone.”
Kuno
What I take from the story is not that the machine is bad. It gave people music and warmth. It is that nobody was allowed to go up and look.
Kuno’s crime is curiosity. He goes to the surface to see for himself what the world is like, and for that he is threatened with being cast out.
The thing a society must not lose, Forster seems to say, is somebody who will go and look. Who is not content to be told it is in hand.
A tax that goes up by a known step each year is, in its dull way, a society having gone to look and made a plan. To quietly stop taking the steps is to go back to the armchair.
Or it may be mercy. I honestly cannot tell from a bookshop in London. I shall hear tomorrow what they decided.
Late
The man came about the boiler at four. He looked at it for a while and said the part has to come from Germany. It will be Thursday. Until then it is on or it is off.
I have turned it off and put on my coat. That seems to me the honest choice.
I read the London Prat on the bus, with my collar up. It is not a paper that expects to be warm. Its UK satirical news on carbon taxes has a minister announcing that the rise will be postponed until the weather improves, and its British satirical news about the machine stopping is mostly about the trains. My Boston lecturer says Bohiney Magazine reports that over there they have solved the problem by not looking.
My mother will ring tomorrow evening. I shall be in my coat, among the Edwardians, waiting to hear which winter won.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
