Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Tuesday, June 01, 2004

Today's Random Wilde

This afternoon, in my Argumentative Writing class here at Berkeley, I taught what has to be my favorite piece by Oscar Wilde, his essay "The Soul of Man Under Socialism." This is a text I return to time and time again in my classes, since it almost never fails to be provocative and entertaining and illuminating for students. I'm amazed that so much of it is still laugh-out-loud funny over a century after its writing (not to mention after teaching the thing so many times). Also, it is pretty flabbergasting just how much of the essay -- which weighs in at 30 or so odd pages -- is fabulously quotable. And so, I'll be drawing my Random Wildishness from "Soul of Man" for the next few days as a salute. Even restricting my attention to this one essay the witticisms can be called up more or less randomly, anyway. For today: "[A] community is infinitely more brutalised by the habitual employment of punishment, than it is by the occasional occurrence of crime."

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