Fahrenheit 451 is one of the most influential libertarian novels of the past century. But millions of its readers have not looked at Bradbury’s remarkable little novel since they were in their teens. It’s worth another look. FULL ARTICLE by Jeff Riggenbach
Source link: http://archive.mises.org/13697/revisit-bradburys-fahrenheit-451/
Revisit Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451
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“unquestionably might”
?
“Unquestionably, it can not be discounted.” Does that work for you, boss?
Excellent comments. The “So what?” is obvious. The idea that most Americans (of the USA) do not read and have not read a book since high school is well known (forgive my lack of references). What is less known is that many high school teachers, a majority in some schools, have not read a book since college. Yes, I’ve worked with some who never even read the textbooks they were using!
Is this so bad? Probably not, for most high school students that I encountered over my 19 years with a US inner-city school district either could not read or would not read. In my own classes, I would have the few “readers” read aloud to the others. This should have pleased the illiterates but it did not as they refused to hear anything that might provoke thought on their part. “I done wanna know,” shouted somet of them. “Leeme alone!” And so it was.
An exceptional student, a avid reader who always brought a “good” book to read in class, set me straight. “Reading is obsolete,” he said “and that’s why the other kids ignore me.”
Gera Rosy: Richard Feynmans memoirs recounting his experiences on a panel charged with vetting maths textbooks, are an exquisite indictment of the perversity of the whole schooling system. Id recommend digging up the correspondence he entered into with publisher on th esame issue, reproduced in the compendium of his letters published under the title ‘dont you have time to think?
seems he was th eonly one on th epanel who read the math books submitted , and refused to even open the publishers’ promotional material, and returned all the freebies they showered him with, on the grounds that he didnt want anything other than the textbook itself to make his judgment as to its fitness. And, of course, he ripped all of them to shreds.
What was illuminating was that other panel members didnt even look at th ebooks, they just repsonded to whoever lobbied most persuasively.
Unfortunately, we tend to see in art what we want to see. We can see F451 as libertarian literature if we want, but I’m curious if Bradbury saw it that way. He may have been left libertarian. But he could also have written the book in response to what he saw as a particular use of the state. Of course Bradbury would oppose the state burning books. The left always opposes the state when Republicans are in power and support the state when Democrats are in power. Of course, it’s the same with the right. Republicans fear the state when Democrats are in power but have no problems with a larger state when Republicans are in power.
I question Bradbury’s libertarianism mainly because of his Star Trek series, of which btw I am a huge fan. But Star Trek until the Voyager series was pure socialist propaganda. From the beginning there was no money because people no longer worked for profit but for fulfillment and to serve mankind. And the Ferangi were direct assaults on capitalism. The Voyager series changed that attitude to some degree as the crew had to barter its way across the universe.
The Star Trek attitude toward markets and capitalism make me think Bradbury had something other than libertarianism in mind with F451.
Are you confusing Bradbury with Gene Roddenberry? The latter is the creator of Star Trek.
That’s Roddenberry, Fundy, and I’m not even a nerd, I swear.
Ray Bradbury wrote Star Trek? News to me. AFAIK, he was invited to contribute but declined. th eseries writers did name a fictional starship after him though, but thats hardly something to hold against him
Sorry guys! I had a senior moment!
you seem to be confusing left libs with statist lefts. left libs are for the most part anarchists who could care less which party is in power.
“star trek” as “socialist propaganda”? working to serve mankind is “anti capitalistic”? why is that? wouldn’t anyone working in a true free market be working to “serve” mankind? wouldn’t be much profit if you did things to undermine humanity.
being anti censorship is libertarian no matter what your other principles. If a nazi is against censorship, then he is at least libertarian on that account.
the ferangi were swindlers. do they not exist? why would pointing out in a work of science fiction that there are groups of people who take advantage of others be anti capitalistic?
without aggressive force, many worlds are possible.
Thank you, I had long forgotten this book, which I read in my teens, and it is well worth revisiting. Just looking at the review, with hindsight I am now struck by the close thematic similarity with George Orwell’s 1984, right down to the state-controlled interactive TV. Of course, the latter ended rather differently to the former, but being works of fiction, either could have gone either way. As an aside, one wonders what the modern IP lawyer fraternity (Mr Kinsalla excepted) would have made of the similarities had they been published in our time…………
I do find it interesting that Bradbury was stuffed into the scifi mould wholesale, while Orwell escaped it completely, despite 1984 being his best-known work. ( and I cant resist adding that Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange was no less a work of science fiction than either of these books, but he too escaped the dreaded sci-fi label). Could it be because Bradbury was American and Orwell English? Or could it have been that Orwell built a weighty literary reputation ( as a socialist no less…..) before publishing 1984 ?
I always put 451, 1984, and Brave New World by Huxley together in mind as similarly-themed classics.
@ Dave: Huxley! Of course. Baffles me now how his BNW was lionised by the hippy lefties of my generation, not excluding my former self. Looking back, how was it possible for us to miss the glaring contradictions ? Seems we just regarded revolution per se as the only goal and lumped the state and the formal private business sector into a single amorphous mass and called it ‘ the establishment’ , against which revolt was de rigeur. . Boyy, were we ever naieve, not to mention stupid.
While a percentage of Bradbury’s works have a framework of “the future” and thus have contributed him to being labeled a “sci-fi” writer, I’ve read a vast majority of his works (he’s one of my favorite authors) and I tend to describe him to others as “sassafras sci-fi”. The nostalgic overtones of the future and his overall optimism of science irregardless of his characters’ usage of it is what strikes me as being the most important aspect of his writing. Of course, people are quick to assign labels, and publishing books such as “Martian Chronicles”, “R is for Rocket”, and “S is for Space” would lead those hasty individuals to say “science fiction”.
But, again, it’s merely a framework. “Dandelion Wine” is hardly science fiction. A majority of the stories in say, “A Medicine for Melancholy” barely qualify. Even futuristic stories such as “The Veldt” promote a wariness of technology as we progress toward these wonders but the same can be said of “The Dragon”. Instead, I tend to see focus on the characters more than the science. I recommend revisiting stories such as “The Quiet Mice”, “The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit” or “The Town Where No One Got Off” for instance. Kurt Vonnegut JR (another one of my favorites) would be also another example of the “character over environment” slant that I’m trying to convey — “Welcome to the Monkey House” comes to mind immediately.
As far as censorship as a theme goes, F451 is rather light. Other posters have made the suggestion of lumping Bradbury in with the likes of Huxley & Orwell, though I would offer PK Dick as a stronger example of a writer with serious anti-statist overtones.
I like Bradbury’s rant about people, ironically, censoring his book. He inserted it as a coda around 1979. I found a copy here:
http://jdallen.org/news/coda-by-ray-bradbury/
The one line that sticks in my memory:
“If teachers and grammar school editors find my jawbreaker sentences shatter their mushmilk teeth, let them eat stale cake dunked in weak tea of their own ungodly manufacture.”
Thanks so much for the link, JL, that was terrific. I know next to nothing about Bradbury, but he sure don’t sound like any Commie I ever heard.
Aside from the points made in this article, he is simply an excellent author.
Great link. That was highly entertaining
Ray Bradbury could never have known, but it has come to light that CIA was, and still is, subsidizing American publishers, to get them to bring out books it wanted (and wants) to send abroad for propaganda purposes. There is an article in the International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence that confirms this. Because of the subsidies, publishers yielded to CIA pressure to suppress books it didn’t want to be printed. The money was just too good. I wonder what Bradbury would have written about this had he known. The state is NOT benign. The worst aspects of its power are often hidden. Foucauld wrote that power is most effective when it is hidden. That is still the case.
I always wondered if the vagabond professors who had books memorized were also a symbol of the herd-like mentality of people. After all, after the war, when civilization would start anew, they would start it with these very books – books that had been chosen by the professors for everyone else. These book choices would surely influence the direction of the new society, and thus, the profs choices in books would influence everyone else. Is this the cycle simply starting over? Maybe this is too negative…..
Dave, sounds like your quite steeped in the man, and embrace his wonderful metaphors, but I think you’re going a bit too far here.
There was a film version of 451 and I think it was dreadful. Your comment reminded me of this. Truffaut did an admirable job in depicting the dark and dank, sterile and shallow existence of society, but he completely missed the boat with regard to those who held the key to the future. The ending — spoiler alert — depicted them as lifeless automatons, rather than as diverse and hopeful literary hippies.
But your cycle of desolation is thought-provoking, nonetheless.
Well, err… depressing, but thought-provoking. : )
“And so it is that a large segment of our population knows this book because it was assigned in school. For many, it is probably one of the few good things school ever did for them. The downside of the situation is that millions of these people, probably the majority of them, have not looked at Bradbury’s remarkable little novel for years, since they were 13 or 14 years old.”
I have a conspiracy theory…..
Public schools assign this book to make sure students IGNORE the message of it.
Thanks to Riggenbach for this. I considered this past Sunday a holiday, and spent the night re-reading _The Illustrated Man_.
Some of the greatest poetry woven through his pages is testament to our diversity and humanity, images of crumpled candy bar wrappings on sidewalks, and old men at barber shops, like Rockwell paintings. He loved life with “warts and all.” He carried our brutish roots to other planets not as flaws for eradication by clinicians but, rather, as our strength; our hidden capacity to do evil was always overcome by our even deeper capacity for good.
He unabashedly pronounces his eternal, boyish optimism. His aversion to stasis is ubiquitous in his words, as are his warnings of conformity, such as the chilling story, “The Pedestrian.”
To Richard C., interesting information; Bradbury would indeed have been appalled.
And to mpol, your keen eye would appreciate this guy. You must try his stuff out.
Such a great, great man of letters. And still writing even after his stroke of a few years back.
Not much time for him left on this planet, and will be a loss to see him go.
But what a legacy he leaves us, the poetic recognition of our fate: individual freedom.
Thanks, Franklin. What book would you suggest first, this one? I guess if you guys think it’s up there with Orwell and Huxley I really should read it.
Perfect place to start. And if it turns out you don’t like his style, at least it gets his signature classic under your belt.
Most of his works are poetically written short stories, housed in collections. _Golden Apples of the Sun_ and _The Illustrated Man_ are my favorites in that space.
There is also “The October Country”, which is a bunch of short stories – most of which I have not read yet.
You’re in for a treat, Dave.
“Within a week of meeting the 16-year-old Clarisse, Montag has murdered his fire chief and destroyed his station’s expensive, high-tech Mechanical Hound. He has left his wife, gone on the lam, and joined an underground organization of men and women, each of whom has committed one or more books to memory, awaiting the day when it will once again be legal to print, sell, and read such things.” — That ending sounds more like the film than what I remember of the novel.
Everyone seems to make Fahrenheit 451 into something that it’s not…or at least Bradbury himself feels that it is widely misinterpreted. It’s a (prophetic?) tale about a state of stupidity, not necessarily a state of authoritarianism.
“[Bradbury] SAYS THE CULPRIT in Fahrenheit 451 is not the state — it is the people”
source: http://www.laweekly.com/2007-05-31/news/ray-bradbury-fahrenheit-451-misinterpreted/
“….not the state — it is the people.”
Potatoes, potahtoes.
Good link, by the way.
The people make the state, that is, allow the state to do things for (to) them.
Very much like how the literary choices of Medieval monks determined what we would know about the ancient world.
Even his in future dystopia there were misfits and rebels such as Clarisse, the book-memorizing hobos, and Montag himself. Civilization would be safe as long as enough of these misfits preserved knowledge and imagination. The problem in this book (as in the real world) is that the STATE endangers civilization, by sticking their guns in the faces of anyone who they perceive as a threat to their larcenous schemes. That is, anyone with intelligence, knowledge and imagination.
Maybe Bradbury was so steeped in orthodox thinking by his (I assume) public school education, that he cannot see that it is this evil monopoly that is destroying the public’s minds, not their own innate apathy or hedonism.
Unlike many of us, he was definitely not an anarchist. But his contribution to the cause, in spite of his civic mindedness, should not be underestimated.
When I was in school one of the required novels was 1984. At the time I thought there was no way people in the western world would ever allow such a police state to form. I got a copy at a used book store and forced my children to read it about 10 years ago.
Now of course we have all the needed ingredients to form such a society. The technology is here, the blind belief in statism is rampent and all we need is one more economic shock to see the voters rush to embrace Big Brother. It is uncanny how he predicted the future of the west.
I enjoyed that article on Farenheit 451. It was always one of my favorites as was Dandelion Wine. Sadly I see the lowering of standards in the public school systems today. Let’s not teach proper English lest the minority kids lose self esteem and not graduate, or if they do, they graduate with lower marks than other kids from different backgrounds. I would not hire someone who could not speak English fairly well. Pliss don axe me to do so. What a wonderful thing Ebonics is.
The other thing I see is that when an assignment is given it is usually given to a team of four or five students; with various teams throughout the class. You will get one student in many cases, who does all or the majority of the work but everyone gets the same grade. How is that fair, and how is that productive? Whatever happened to individual scholastic achievement? There were always enough programs such as music or sports where we learned to participate as a team, rather than sacrificing individual scholastic achievement or excellence.
I see the media induced brainwashing that has so influenced and dumbed down our kids through every facet of their lives. Mind you not all of them but even in the smart ones, once they are out of school, if it isn’t something that can advance them socially, or doesn’t concern job advancement, they don’t want to have to think about it. They love American Idol and all this stupid reality TV. Most people at work avoid having lengthy conversations with me. I make them think and that scares them.
We have people today who can not read or do math above a seventh or eighth grade level, and a good fifth of the population can’t add the total on a store invoice let alone figure out the tax, or how much to tip in a restaurant.
The public school system has become a joke that produces for the most part third rate students who are lagging behind everyone else in the world. Is it any wonder that the Chinese and East Indian students are so far ahead of us mathematically and in some cases even the sciences? Why should they go to school to end up working for minimum wage if they work at all? The gangs, drugs and pimpin’ pay more money than that. Of course you could always become a rap star. Rap musicians used to be interesting. They knew how to compose, how to think for themselves; intelligently addressing politics and social strata problems through some very well written, intelligent poetry. Today it’s all about pimpin, hos, gangs, bling bling, big cars et al. Here is Bradbury’s Farenheit 451 for today’s world. Dont’ think for yourself, conform; it’s easier. Let the government take care of you. Let them tell you how to vote, what to eat, what to watch, how to behave. Have another pill to cure your depression…..to ease your mind and your pain. Oxycotin anyone???
Americans have or are in the process of becoming the indolent, obese, ugly man in the room whose only purpose in life is to consume all that he can; presume to offer an educated opinion on things he has no experience with; and to be generally reviled into ostracization by the rest of the menagerie on the human farm.
Got a problem? Take one of our new wonder drugs advertised on TV. Did you ever notice that the side affects are given a two second mention at the bottom of the advertisement? Umhummm, and if you have a violent, psychotic reaction, well we have trained and licenced law enforcement professionals standing by to assist you. If they don’t shoot you first, then you could wind up in a rubber room as part of the cultural/medical experimental complex. Don’t laugh, it was done before and is still being continued today. You just don’t tell the public.
Then again, maybe that’s part of the purpose in dumbing down America. It was after all the last true bastion of free thought, and independent action. Why else do we keep involving ourselves in needless little wars that only benefit the elite and the economists [Chicago school economics, the true originators of shock and awe]. The introduction of world democracy at the point of a weapon, in truth it is nothing but another scam to open up closed markets to the Friedmanites, and their lackies the IMF and the World Bank. Democracy is a capricious, cold parent who devours her children, calling it advanced enlightenment. Give us back our Republic. Democracy won’t work in the Muslim world. Muslims are different. Their religion is their politics and vice versa. The War on Terror is nothing more than a belligerent attempt to induce Americans into surrendering their individual rights and freedoms to choose and hence to enslave them.
The national debt verges on 13.8 trillion dollars, and The American Thinker has just today penned it as the next Bear Stearns – bankrupt. Do you have a natural disaster? Ignore it for as long as you can. Wilson did it in 1928 when the New Orleans town council and financiers decided to blow up the levies even though the problem was exacerbated out of all proportion by them; ultimately stranding all the sharecroppers without food, water and medicine. He was finally convinced to let them be evacuated, but only the white ones of course.
George W did it during Katrina [weren't FEMA and the Blackwater assassin teams wonderful?] and Barky has done it through the BP Gulf Spill. I see that as a venue to rid the country of an unwanted societal segment. It’s a good way to rid yourself of all the shanty towns and poor people that seem rife in the postbellum South. They’ll be dead due to the infection of the black mould and other infections soon enough any way. Why bother wasting good money or our time on them?
A doctor friend of mine who resides in Florida has informed me of the increased bronchial and respiratory infections appearing now in children which he assigns the cause to the increased oil pollutants of the BP spill. It wouldn’t surprise me if the warmest summer on record is attributed to an oil laden air curtain that divides the weather patterns from the Gulf to the Great Lakes and eastward. The weather west of that curtain has been unseasonably low, including Los Angeles. I wonder if that curtain could be attributed as a great contributer to the weather patterns in Russia and Pakistan? Oh Al, where have you been hiding lately? Do you know any good masseuses, you bloated lizard?
The way you bring a country to its knees is to stretch it thin militarily, economically, and through ignoring the needs of your people. I haven’t seen such a display of neural linguistic programming as I did during Barky’s elelction campaign. It was like watching the Wizard of Oz and Through The Looking Glass sequentially. People bought it because they were told to buy it, and because it was the path of least resistance. Eight years of Bush left them angry and disconsolate. Change and hope that was promised to them seem like a good idea at the time. Unfortunately like Bradbury’s 451 society they didn’t want to have to put any effort or thought into it. It also helps when police officers are told to arrest anyone saying or exhibiting derogatory remarks about Obama. I kid you not. It did happen. It didn’t matter that Hppe and Change was all smoke and mirrors with no substance. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. I am the great and all powerful Oz; that was of course until his teleprompters broke on stage one night and people got a glimpse of the second rate intelligence that was left dumbfounded in front of millions. Shucks, say what you want about Slick Willy; even if you disliked him you had to admire the man’s ability to think on his feet. This is why so many people are angry over Barky’s inability or indifference to changing Bush’s policies for the most part. People need to realize that at the top of both parties there is no difference in ideology, only its direction. It is only at the mid and lower levels where differences are apparent. This is why when you had the original vote on the stimulus bill, 95 Democrats voted with the Republicans against it. Of course they were summarily coerced into voting for it on the second ballot. Woe and betide those Democrats who didn’t. Nothing has changed. The POTUS is merely a shill, a carny barker fleecing the Americans who are more than willing to throw their money away to see Snake Boy or Woman or some other unnatural attraction. So although Nero fiddled while Rome burned, Barky merely takes another vacation. Guys like Bradbury and Maslowe were true visionaries who everyone needs to read. Wake up America!
Seeing as how Mr. Bradbury has repeatedly and aggressively explained what the book is about, I am still amazed that people read it as if it is an entirely anti-statist, Libertarian work. He was actually implying television destroying interest in literature and that is why he makes such a detailed description of televisions in the book — that “television is useless and compresses important information about the world into little factoids, contributing to society’s ever-shrinking attention span.”
“Fahrenheit” is the closest thing I’ve read to Ignatius Reilly’s angry ode against the contemporary society. Full article: http://www.vladimirkokorev.com/195
Discussions and bashings are welcome.
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