“It was a pleasure to burn”.
Thus, Ray Bradbury’s 1953 Fahrenheit 451 opens. The novel is known as the ‘book-burning’ novel where the firefighters of the future are not tasked with extinguishing fires, but with the burning of outlawed books and the homes where they are found.
It is a dramatic opening. The vivid irony of the fire-starting firemen is not easily forgotten. And this is often reinforced by cover art which cannot resist the image of matches, firemen, and burning books. Thus, Fahrenheit 451 is often placed alongside its fellow twentieth century dystopia, 1984, as a warning against censorship and the jackboot of totalitarian government. Big Brother is burning the books.
Yet the drama of the book burning has had the unfortunate consequence of distracting from the warning of a far more insidious totalitarianism. Fahrenheit 451 is less a novel about censorship than technology. The future, according to Bradbury, is one where the spoken (or, more accurately, the audio-visual) word has triumphed over the written. A future where the omnipresent screen has subjugated a willing populace.
Fahrenheits 451 is, in this respect, similar to the world of another of Bradbury’s works, the short story “The Pedestrian”. Here, in the dystopic world of 2050, a lone pedestrian wanders the streets of a city dehumanised by its own technology. In this world, literature, conversation, and even walking is wholly supplanted by the repetitive programming of the viewing screen.
Bradbury’s world is one stripped of true emotion, an inner life, or genuine relationship. All is subsumed into, and all is debased, by the addiction of the viewing screen.
In a previous post I made the claim that there has developed a metanarrative in fiction that pits the home and its virtues against the tyranny of an impersonal modernity. But the twentieth century dystopian novel short-circuits this conflict. Whether in the omnipresent surveillance of 1984’s Big Brother or the baby factories of Huxley’s Brave New World, the domestic is not in conflict with modernity. It is completely crushed by it.
Yet the world of “The Pedestrian” differs in one important respect to those other dystopias. In both Huxley’s ‘World State’ and Orwell’s Big Brother, powerful external forces subjugate human nature. Both dystopic societies must be ever on guard lest some humanity threaten to seep through the cracks.
But the dystopic society in Bradbury’s fiction is no enemy of the human nature. Or, put more clearly, the world of ‘The Pedestrian’ and Fahrenheit 451 depicts human nature (or a part of human nature) harnessed against the human spirit.
The citizens of Bradbury’s lifeless city are author-victims of their situation. Addicted to their screens, they have drifted so far from the more elevated parts of their own humanity, they lack the capacity even to recognise that anything is wrong. And their situation is made all the more hopeless as it is their own nature, and its insatiable need for constant, all-conquering distraction, that is co-conspirator in their subservience.
The conquest of the home in Bradbury’s dystopias is not sudden suppression or violent seizure, but a steady, invisible, erosion of the world of the household into the shining void of the screen.
Doubtless there are parts of “The Pedestrian” that have become significantly dated. In an era one-to-one devices, unlimited streaming, and pornography on demand, the idea of a population captivated by a half-a-dozen television programs seems quaint and almost wholesome.
Likewise, the seventy-some years since the invention of the television has worked to somewhat blunt Bradbury’s critique. Our society has hardly been reticent in its embrace of screens and yet, critics might point out, the sky not fallen in. Indeed, the case might be made that modernity, with all its screens and distractions, provides the highest standard of living ever achieved in human history. Moreover, our screens, and the internet, provide many genuine goods and might even work towards satisfying true human desires.
Yet critics of Bradbury’s dystopias often miss the point. His world is not one of a police state or oppressive control. Indeed, crime has virtually vanished as inhabitants have other means of occupying their time. Nor are the population enslaved permanently to the world of their televisions as in a dystopia like The Matrix. It is clear, in both ‘The Pedestrian’ and Fahrenheit 451 that people hold jobs, own houses, and (presumably) live lives very similar to our own.
Here, as with the book burning discussed earlier, the more aggressively totalitarian elements of Bradbury’s stories distract from the true critique. Those made uncomfortable by the dystopic vision of ‘The Pedestrian’ or Fahrenheit 451 might comfort themselves by observing that we neither burn books nor send night-time pedestrians to psychiatric facilities. But Bradbury’s deeper point is that there is no reason to burn books if no one reads them. And those who hold to older forms of living need not to be institutionalised. If they will not assimilate, their children (or their grandchildren) probably will.
As to the defence that the screen provides much that is wholesome and even virtuous, this is, as I have argued elsewhere, a confusion of potential use with actual use. Or, to put this a different way, it ignores the reality that technologies have a purpose or mode of use embodied within them.
One might, I suppose, be able to mount a defence of nuclear weapons as a contingency against killer asteroids à la Deep Impact. But if one were to use such a defence to excuse the current proliferation of nuclear arms, the question might be asked why nuclear silos, submarines, and mobile launch sites are obviously directed towards terrestrial targets.
Likewise, the internet and our screens might be able to be, and maybe even sometimes are, used to find love, educate, and foster very human hobbies and interests. But when a sizable percentage of the internet is dedicated to pornography, when hours are spent consuming short form content (with no real memory of what has been watched even immediately afterward), and when social media consumes more time than socialising, then the question must be asked whether it is fair to defend a technology by the activities that least define its use.
But there is a simpler test of the validity of Bradbury’s fears. And that is to ask whether we are happy with the relationship we, and those closest to us, have with our screens. If you are comfortable with this relationship, then it might be that Bradbury was wrong, and his dystopias are nothing more than the overblown musings of an author whose medium had become superseded.
But if Bradbury is right, if the screen is solvent upon higher human nature, then the devils are in the walls. The screens will rob the home of any potential it held to resist the madness of the world. And we will be complicit in this enslavement, never quite delighted by the distractions at our fingertips but amused enough to persist in the addiction.
