Review: Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451

I recently reread Ray Bradbury's dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451  and was immediately struck by the parallels to our contemporary moment.  Bradbury's novel, first published in 1953, follows the personal  transformation of Guy Montag, a fireman whose job is to set fire to houses that contain books. Set in the not-so-distant American future, the novel depicts a society that "dreads the unfamiliar" and so bans books and makes "the word 'intellectual'" into "the swear word it deserved to be" (58).  Books were not initially banned because of state censorship, but by the effects of advancements in media technology and a waning public interest in critical thinking.  As the Fire Captain Beatty explains, the decline of a book reading public coincided with mass population booms, an accelerated sense of time, and the popularization of television and film.

"Picture it. Nineteenth century man with his horses, dogs, carts, slow motion. Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your cameras. Books cut shorter. Condensations. Digests. Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending.

Speed up the film, Montag, quick. Click, Pic, Look, Eye, Now, Flick, Here, There, Swift, Pace, Up, Down, In, Out, Why, How, Who, What, Where, Eh? Uh! Bang! Smack! Wallop, Bing, Bong, Boom! Digest-digests, digest-digest-digests. Politics? One column, two sentences, a headline! Then, in midair, all vanishes! Whirl man's mind around about so fast under the pumping hands of publishers, exploiters, broadcasters that the centrifuge flings off all unnecessary, time-wasting thought!" (55)

 The spread of quickly and easily digestible information, as Beatty sees it, causes this future American society to no longer value the long-form argument and the extended critique.

"School is shorted, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling gradually neglected, finally almost completely ignored. Life is immediate, the job counts, pleasure lies all about after work. Why learn anything save pressing buttons, pulling switches, fitting nuts and bolts?"

Instead, American culture in Fahrenheit 451 is preoccupied with fast pleasures (jet fast cars), interactive television programs which replace human social interaction, and never-ending wars against undefined enemies (an endless string of wars on terror). Brabury's descriptions of the media technologies of the future are quite striking as predictions.  Bradbury anticipates facial recognition software, handheld digital devices like IPhones, BlueTooth, earbud headphones, and interactive role-playing games. It is not these advanced technologies themselves that are the source of wrong in the novel. Rather it is the uncritical human relationship to these technologies that seems to worry Bradbury. If we take the "televisor" as "real" in the sense that we passively accept whatever "it tells you what to think and blasts it in," trusting that what we see televised "must be right. It seems so right," then we may lose the ability to critically discern between illusion and reality. And there are major political stakes in that discernment as this dystopian novel scarily shows.

In the age of the Internet and the spectacular consumer culture that supports it, we can see all too obvious parallels to Bradbury's nightmare in Fahrenheit 451. As Beatty forewarns,

"Cram them full of noncombustible data,  chock them damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely 'brilliant' with information. Then they'll feel they're thinking, they'll get a sense of motion without moving. And they'll be happy, because facts of that sort don't change. Don't give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy. Any man who can take a TV wall apart and put it back together again, and most men can, nowadays, is happier than any man who tries to slide-rule, measure, and equate the universe, which just won't be measured or equated without making man feel bestial and lonely. I know, I've tried it' to hell with it. So bring on your clubs and parties, your acrobats and magicians, your daredevils, jet cars, motorcycle helicopters, your sex and heroin, more of everything to do with automatic reflex" (61)

 I want to stress that it is not the media technologies themselves that are the cause of uncritical thinking, but our human relationship to these medias.  We are now in the culture of IPhones with Internet, live Tweet reactions from events, and interactive role playing games.  We are in some ways already in the world that Bradbury prophesied.  But, we can use these media technologies to develop the critical thought necessary for intellectually rich global communities and cultures, ones that can challenge the irrational forces of war, dehumanizing bureaucracy, and closed-minded personal ignorance. In the spirit of futurist Ray Bradbury, I challenge you to use your Facebook statuses and Tweets to "measure and equate the universe" in service of humanity's future.