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 |
