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Technology
This
Perfect Day
Technology:
Good,
Bad,
Or...?
UIL
Spring 2001 LD debate topic: "Resolved: Increased reliance
on technology undermines the quality of life in America."
Or...
Ira Levin's
great dystopian novel This Perfect Day shows a society
overly dependent on technology. But the technology itself
in Levin's dystopia is no more evil than is innovative technology
in America today good. Technology, whether a gun, machine
or drug can be put to good ends or bad. A gun can be used
to defend a person from assault, or it can be used to assault
others. Drugs can be used to destroy parasites, or to turn
energetic young people into servile tools of the state. Technology
itself is amoral. People can use technological tools to create
wealth or to destroy it.
This
Perfect Hell by Ralph Raico
This Perfect Day belongs to the genre of "dystopian"
or anti-utopian novels, like Huxley's Brave New World
and Orwell's 1984. Yet it is more satisfying than either.
Not only is its futuristic technology more plausible (computers,
of course), but the extrapolation of the dominant ideology
of the end of the twentieth century is entirely convincing.
... [Click
to go to full text of article.]
Losing
our Souls to Technology?
See Daniel Chandler's online review on literature on concerns
about mankinds reliance on technology: Imagining
Futures, Dramatizing Fears
Christ, Marx, Wood and
Wei,
led us to this perfect day.
Marx, Wood, Wei
and Christ,
all but Wei were sacrificed.
Wood, Wei, Christ
and Marx,
gave us lovely schools and parks.
Wei, Christ, Marx
and Wood,
made us humble, made us good.
child's rhyme for
bouncing a ball
Ira Levin, this perfect day
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A
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South Broadway, Irvington-on-Hudson, New York, 10533
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