Fahrenheit 451

The outline of Bradbury’s story is widely known. Books have become illegal. A fireman whose job it is to burn them has a change of heart and begins to defy the government that once employed him and the society that encouraged his work.

The political and social situation is dire. The populace has become addicted to wall-size televisions and in-ear radios. Pleasure, or at least the impression of it, has become so important that books have become the enemy. Books, after all, offer far more arguments than answers. A reliance on the printed word and its contradictory ideals will never bring peace to a society. Obligingly, the government outlaws books and print-based education. The firemen become the enforcers of the policy.

Lover of books though he is, Bradbury is shrewd enough to realize that the printed word is no more coherent than the authors behind it. If authors argue, and they do, then the books they produce will hardly be a recipe for peace and harmony. Also shrewd is his understanding that people who buy into the anti-book, pro-pleasure mentality run a very real risk of depression or deep lack of fulfilment. The human brain tries to make sense of the world; a society that forbids that basic impulse will have deep structural problems.

That’s where the story runs aground. It’s one thing to posit a police state in which the citizenry are forced to espouse the party line. Overwhelming force will, for a time at least, maintain the illusion of peace (see North Korea). It’s another thing to outline a state in which only some lines of thought are off-limits, while excellence is often achieved in others. Political expression is limited in mainland China, but athletic, artistic, commerical, and scientific pursuits are praised. Even in contemporary America, which endures an administration that wages war without moral or political conscience, there is a broad marketplace of ideas. Bradbury’s world, however, rings untrue. A democracy in which thinkers are declared illegal across the board? Hmm.

That said, however, the real issue Bradbury raises is the connection between western civilization and the printed word. In academia, the connection is obvious: nearly all research intimately involves the reading or creation of the appropriate printed material. The legal and scientific professions, too, are tightly bound by published works. In the everyday life of many western citizens, however, print is less cruicial. What would happen if print went away? What if iconic, oral, or video presentations could provide the content we now get from the written word? Would people go gladly in that direction?

I think there’s less of a chance that printing would be outlawed as in Fahrenheit 451 than stratified along some sort of class boundary. If you grow up in the right family or political boundary, you would be eligible (perhaps economically or based on your country of origin) to pursue thinking and publication. Other children, however, would have a limited horizon, a future defined by oral, iconic, and video content. Faced with that dichotomy, Bradbury’s dystopia could be chillingly realized.

—February 19, 2008