Burning Bright
Ray Bradbury, authoritarianism, and the oppression of technology.
In the weeks after Donald Trump’s inauguration, George Orwell’s 1984 shot to the top of the best-seller lists. The high school English class perennial achieved a 9,500 percent increase in sales, according to the New York Times. Other dystopian classics, like Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World also experienced resurgences, but in the world of “alternative facts,” 1984 seems to have struck a special chord.
People have talked about it, argued about it, and tweeted about it. Much of the conversation revolved around how relatively easy it is for leaders to exploit threats — real or imagined, internal or external — to convince their countrymen to make the devil’s bargain of trading freedom for a little peace of mind. One of the more depressing facts of history is how willing people are to make that trade.
But while Orwell’s classic presents a cautionary tale of how quickly authoritarianism can take hold in the face of a perceived danger, another dystopia spawned by the post-World War II era of the early Cold War better explains how America got to where it is: Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.
It’s the story of a mindless cog of the state, who undergoes an existential crisis in a dystopia where the doomsday clock is quickly ticking down to zero. Guy Montag, the hero of Fahrenheit, is a fireman. But in this world, firefighters start fires rather than stop them. They douse the stashes of books hidden by underground bibliophiles with kerosene and torch them with nifty flamethrowers.
Books are banned in Montag’s world, their contradictions and provocations replaced by a mindless, hedonistic focus on entertainment. Bradbury writes of a world saturated by spectacle, where neighbors come out at night to watch a house burn, transfixed by the crackle of the leaping flames. Montag’s wife Mildred spends her days surrounded by the television screens that make up the parlor walls, and which churn out a steady stream of interactive dramas and 15-minute condensations of classic literary works. She spends her nights with tiny speakers called Seashells tucked in her ears, “an electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk and music and talk coming in, coming in on the shore of her unsleeping mind.”
Orwell writes about oppression by the state. Bradbury’s book is about oppression by technology, a model of totalitarianism that is eminently more familiar in today’s world. There are iPhones, with their ubiquitous white earbuds and hours of music and data, the realization of Bradbury’s Seashells. And YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and reality television fill in for the “family” found in Mildred’s parlor walls that keep her blissfully plugged in throughout the day.
As Montag starts to question whether there might be some value in the contents of the books he burns, he gets a visit from his fire chief, Beatty. More than the oppressive but unnamed State, Beatty emerges as the villain of Fahrenheit 451. Beatty knows books. As he begins to suspect that Montag is questioning firefighter doctrine, Beatty both mocks and tests him by dropping lines from “As You Like It” and John Donne’s “The Triple Fool.”
The most dangerous person in any oppressive regime is the one who has considered life outside the system and rejected it. Beatty, like O’Brien in 1984 and Mustafa Mond in Brave New World, is a good executor for his system because he can anticipate the arguments against it and overcome them. Unlike Montag, Mildred, or the other characters, Beatty knows what he is missing in a world without books. Beatty is Darth Vader. He’s turned his back on the side of good and chosen to embrace evil. And in his soliloquy to Montag, he pretty much nails life in the age of the Internet and cable news.
“You can’t build a house without nails and wood. If you don’t want a house built, hide the nails and wood. If you don’t want a man unhappy politically, don’t give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such as thing as war. If the government is inefficient, top-heavy, and tax mad, better it be all those than that people worry over it. Peace, Montag. Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so 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. If the drama is bad, if the film says nothing, if the play is hollow, sting me with the Theramin, loudly. I’ll think I’m responding to the play, when it’s only a tactile reaction to vibration. But I don’t care. I just like solid entertainment.”
In a world of Spotify, on-demand television, customized news feeds, and Google alerts, it’s possible for a person to move through an entire day without encountering any information that they don’t want to confront. Nothing upsetting, no messy unpleasantness. With the ability to choose from a nearly infinite amount of information, what do the closures and declining economic fortunes of Barnes and Noble, Borders, and other chains say about the position of books in our society? We stand on the brink of a world where books — while not explicitly banned — become obsolete.
The elimination of books from society is a key step in the development of authoritarianism. Independent thought, critical thinking, consideration of contrary viewpoints — all are banned in the dystopia. In Fahrenheit, books are banned because they make people react. They give people ideas. They sometimes make people feel sad or angry, emotions that authoritarians have found to have a negative social effect.
Taking away people’s rights inevitably requires taking away their ability to think and feel. If you gradually and systematically take away people’s ability to feel, you inevitably take away their ability to think. If they can’t put words to the emotions they’re feeling, they can’t protest, they can’t sit in, they can’t march. Eventually, they’ll just sit at home with their high-speed internet and the conveniences of modern life and they’ll take it.
