Morlocks

I've
been
thinking about H G Wells’ ‘Time Machine’, and the Morlocks and
Eloi that the Time Traveller meets. They’re both meant to be
caricatures of humanity. So I asked myself,
which one are you? - expecting that the answer would be 'well, a bit of
both'.
But the answer I came up with was pretty unequivocal.



I'm a Morlock.

My work
is extremely Morlockish: making addons for OEMs to bolt onto machine
tools,
that's lower-level Morlock, deeply subterranean stuff. The natural
assumption
is to think that your hobbies and pastimes when you're away from work
balance
this out... but when I started to think about it, I found my hobbies to
be
pretty subterranean too. My hobbies more closely resemble a Morlock
downing a
few jars with his buddies, than any arty farty Eloi rubbish.

So
then I
thought, well, hey, who the heck are these Eloi anyway, and why should
I want
to be like them? And the truth is, as HGW pointed out, that they
weren't very
palatable creatures. My own simple theory about the Morlocks and the
Eloi is that it's all about technology: the Morlocks understood it, the
Eloi didn't. The
Morlocks devoted their lives to running it, and in return, the Eloi
offered up
a sacrifice... no, wait - better to say that they paid a
subscription fee to be able to continue using the service. The Eloi
didn't
bother forming meaningful relationships - what's the point, when the
person
you're talking to might not be here tomorrow? There was no empathy, no
caring,
no soul. They were as beautiful and vapid and amoral as butterflies.

And
that's the deeper meaning, which didn't really strike me until this evening -
it's a moral one. BOTH sides had abandoned any sort of human morality, by
entering into their subscription fee arrangement.  BOTH sides were, by OUR lights, evil and
stupid. And, of course, both Eloi and Morlock are very much alive and well and
living with us in the Twenty-first century. More so, even, than they were in
HG's time.

Technology
has moved on, and with it, the ethical questions that we struggle with have become
more imposing. The point is, it’s when people put their heads down and work
that they are at their most Morlock-ish, and bad things start to happen.
Morlocks are the ones who design land mines, and nerve gases, or environmentally-unfriendly
SUVs with child-killing bullbars on the front. We solve the problems we’re equipped to solve – the technical ones – and we’re
so busy with them that we forget that we’re living in the shadow of a much
bigger, scarier ethical question. Repeat this too many times, and we become selfish,
parochial, narrow-minded, amoral. All in all, I'd say the world is getting more
and more Morlock-like.

So what's
a poor Eloi to do? Well... stop being an Eloi, would be my suggestion. I’m not
entirely sure whether HGW meant the Eloi to represent the upper classes - a
social system which doesn't exist in quite the same blatant grasshopper-and-ants
way that it did in the early Twentieth century. But... the Eloi hadn't just
given up on technology - they'd given up on each other, and they'd given up on
understanding the Morlocks. They really didn't have much going for them except
a skin-deep sort of beauty. Their real strength lay in the simple fact that
they weren't Morlocks. And in my opinion the only triumph available to
them was in getting the Morlocks to understand that there was more to the world
than other Morlocks. The only happy outcome would be one in which relationships
could once again be formed. That way information flows and empathy grows. The
problems don't get easier, but the perspective of those trying to solve it can
be widened.

It's
interesting to speculate whether, unlike the hero of the novel, a time
traveller from the Twenty-first century might decide to try and save the
Morlocks rather than the Eloi.