Editor's Note: This podcast originally appeared as a Parallel Paper Presentation from CBHD's 2008 Annual Conference, Healthcare and the Common Good.

The three books under consideration in this paper are quite diverse. C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man is a transcription of three talks he gave for the University of Durham Riddell Memorial Lectures in 1942, defending the existence of objective value; Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, a dystopian novel published in 1932 about a future in which everybody is happy; and Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society, a long and painful sociological analysis of the effect of technique on just about everything, published in 1954. But all three books arrive by different routes at similar conclusions: as we employ technology/technique more and more in our attempt to conquer Nature and harness her to our will, the path we are on will ultimately lead to the enslavement and destruction of what we call humanity. This paper will examine and compare the arguments of these three books and draw out implications for the the use of technology/technique, especially by Christians and especially in the practice and future of medicine as a "common good."

Select Bibliography for the Presentation:

• Callahan, Daniel, “Science: Limits and Prohibitions.” In On moral Medicine, eds. Lammers and Verhey, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998) 283-6.
• Ellul, Jacques, The Technological Society. (New York: Knopf, 1964).
• Heschel, Abraham Joshua, The Sabbath. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1951).
• Huxley, Aldous, Brave New World. (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1932).
• Lewis, C. S., The Abolition of Man. (New York: Macmillan, 1947).