Part I of ‘The Machine Stops’ ended with Vashti blocking out the view of Greece from the airship window — ‘no ideas here’. And Part II opens with her warning Kuno that going to the surface ‘is not the kind of thing that spiritually minded people do’. Spirituality now means the Machine, as Kuno realises: she is ‘beginning to worship the Machine'.
But Vashti becomes angry: 'I worship nothing!' she cried. 'I am most advanced.’ Kuno has hit a nerve, making her defensive. This worsens when he tells her the news he wanted her to visit him in person to hear: he’s been to the surface. No, it can’t be possible — the Book says so! ‘Well,’ Kuno replies, ‘the Book's wrong, for I have been out on my feet.’
How? ‘Kuno was possessed of a certain physical strength.’ This makes him unusual:
‘These days it was a demerit to be muscular. Each infant was examined at birth, and all who promised undue strength were destroyed…In the dawn of the world our weakly must be exposed on Mount Taygetus, in its twilight our strong will suffer euthanasia, that the Machine may progress, that the Machine may progress, that the Machine may progress eternally.’
Mount Taygetus is a reference to Sparta — a warrior culture of combat and conquest. But Vashti doesn’t even know what a sword is. And there is no longer even any need to conquer nature. Leviathan is harnessed. ‘Man must be adapted to his surroundings, must he not?’ With too much comfort, you become ‘a swaddled lump of flesh’, as Vashti was described at the beginning of the story. No pressure, no diamond.
But this is not the only reason: killing the strong is necessary ‘that the Machine may progress’. This is because the strong represent the threat of independence. The Machine weaponises its worshippers’ weakness. It wants them to sacrifice their souls for comfort. Thus Kuno correctly complains,
‘We have lost a part of ourselves. I determined to recover it, and I began by walking up and down the platform of the railway outside my room. Up and down, until I was tired, and so did recapture the meaning of "Near" and “Far”…Man is the measure. That was my first lesson. Man's feet are the measure for distance, his hands are the measure for ownership, his body is the measure for all that is lovable and desirable and strong.’
Imagine a Rocky training montage. As Kuno strengthens his body, he also strengthens his mind. Aristotle had his philosophy students train with the wrestlers. Man is neither angel nor animal but a rational animal — an embodied soul. And the body is the locus of ‘all that is lovable’.
This is a vision of incarnation, not Vashti’s vision of a disembodied dystopia where people have become too civilised to touch each other, where mothers refuse even to hug their own children.
Training his body for his journey to the surface, Kuno
‘seemed to hear the spirits of those dead workmen who had returned each evening to the starlight and to their wives, and all the generations who had lived in the open air called back to me, "You will do it yet, you are coming.”’
Note the emphasis on wives: in the Machine, there is no marriage. And although she thinks he is ‘absurd’, Vashti is moved because ‘Kuno had lately asked to be a father, and his request had been refused by the Committee. His was not a type that the Machine desired to hand on.’
But why? Because he won’t make a good slave. In ancient Greece, the slaves weren’t allowed to strength train. Strong bodies, strong minds.