Player Piano XX

"The main business of humanity is to do a good job of being human beings, not to serve as appendages to machines, institutions, and systems." (315)

"We'll rediscover the two greatest wonders of the world, the human mind and hand." (336)

Comments:

A double dose today. I think these two snippets do a nice job of summing up the central themes of Vonnegut's Player Piano. I have one more quote that I'll drop tomorrow sometime.

As an educator, I'm thinking to myself that Vonnegut's Player Piano holds a lot of challenging assertions, and that despite having been written in 1952, it speaks to our modern condition (which is the true test of a "great work"; it's why we still read the Iliad and Dante's Inferno). Now would seem a good time to re-introduce this classic American novel into our classrooms. We need more people asking critical questions of our "systems" (corporations and governments); we need more Pauls in our world.

Our very "progress" oriented and technologically oriented 21st century United States, has, I believe, put the cart before the horse. Instead of making decisions based on what's best for humans, we're doing what's best for the sake of efficiency (economic or otherwise), and we're driving a technological agenda without regard for how it's affecting human beings. If you want a good synopsis of the early findings on the result of prolonged interaction with technology on the human brain, read Nicholas Carr's The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains.