There Is More Than One Way to Burn A Book
From my author website: Ray Bradbury's novel Fahrenheit 451 has plenty to say about our society today, more than 60 years after its publication.
During the weekend, Matt Taibbi wrote in his Substack "TK News" about the kids who threw canned soup on a Van Gogh painting to protest "big oil." He brought up Fahrenheit 451, the Ray Bradbury novel that describes a future world in which books are outlawed and, if any are found, they are burned.
Taibbi's piece is for paid subscribers but reminded me about what I wrote about Fahrenheit 451 on my author website a couple years ago.
I have been planning to move some pieces from my author website to my Substack in the future, but given the recency of Taibbi's piece, I decided to share my piece about Fahrenheit 451 right now.
I plan to write a new piece later on about the climate change protests that are taking place, but I still believe some of the points in my Fahrenheit 451 piece are worth bringing up again.
Again, I plan to bring other pieces from that website to the Substack, but will explain why at a later time. Here's the piece:
More than 60 years ago, Ray Bradbury published his short novel, Fahrenheit 451, about a society in which books are forbidden and any that are discovered are burned.
Bradbury wrote the novel when Joseph McCarthy was at the height of his influence. Bradbury also worried about the end result of attempts to censor written material. He noticed the rise of television and how it could limit people’s imagination, even their emotions.
The themes of the book are still relevant today, though in new ways. Back during the McCarthy era, those who sought to censor books tended to lean to the right side of the political spectrum. Now, they tend to lean to the left side of that spectrum — and they have an influence in the tech industry.
Reading some of the passages in Bradbury’s novel, it’s amazing to notice how the events he describes draw parallels to today’s world, even if Bradbury’s world doesn’t exactly match our world today. In his book, flat screen panels surround people in their living rooms — not far removed from how you can find multiple televisions inside homes these days, along with smartphones and computers that let people consume video in other ways.
And while there aren’t firemen going around burning books, there are plenty of people using their influence to engage in censorship over social media and the Internet, ranging from “doxxing” people who are accused of saying something offensive (a parallel to people in Bradbury’s world calling the firemen to reveal who is hoarding books) to attempting to derail an author’s new release for not portraying characters the way some think they should be.
Bradbury’s own writing warns about what happens when we allow too many people to decide what should and shouldn’t be said or written. Indeed, one of his own characters, Beatty, tells the tale about how books came to be illegal to Montag, the book’s protagonist. An excerpt:
“Now let’s take up the minorities in our civilization, shall we? Bigger the population, the more minorities. Don’t step on the toes of the dog-lovers, the cat-lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, second-generation Chinese, Swedes, Italians, Germans, Texans, Brooklynites, Irishmen, people from Oregon or Mexico. The people in this book, this play, this TV serial are not meant to represent any actual painters, cartographers, mechanics anywhere…. It didn’t come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God.”
We are coming closer to that world, in which technology, mass exploitation and minority pressure are carrying the day. Social media and technology allows people to communicate throughout the world, which leads to certain individuals who use it to exploit the masses, which leads to minority pressure to determine what spoken and written word are permissible.
In the 60th anniversary edition of Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury writes about how a group of students wrote to him, wondering why a special edition of his book for students differed from the teacher’s personal copy. This comes from “Coda,” a Bradbury column he wrote in 1979.
He discussed letters that several people wrote to him about The Martian Chronicles, in which one woman wrote that more female characters should appear, several letter writers thought the black characters were caricatures and should be re-written, and a Southern white thought Bradbury was too favorable toward black characters and should scrap his entire story.
As Bradbury pointed out, taking all the elements of an author’s story that one deems offensive or problematic, leaves you with stories that aren’t distinct and authors who aren’t unique in their styles. The way he put it: “There is more than one way to burn a book.”
Bradbury’s message to those who didn’t like how authors portray certain people was simple: They have the right to address their grievances in which they are clearly affected in the real world, but that right ends when it comes to his ideas about where a story goes. If people don’t like what they read, they are welcome to write their own.
I would add to Bradbury’s writing that people are free to criticize the books they don’t like. They are free to write rebuttals and discuss counterpoints to any written or spoken material they find offensive. But when it comes to silencing people or attempting to revise ideas to fit what another person wants, that’s where the line has to be drawn.
Our technological advances have led to the Internet becoming a major means of public discourse and the exchange of ideas. Yet there are those who live their lives through it and believe those lives are forever affected if just one idea is shared that conflicts with their worldview. And because the people who are the driving forces in technology today are sympathetic to those who lean a certain way, they respond accordingly.
Therefore, it would behoove us to ask some serious questions about how far technology should be allowed to go when it comes to the marketplace of ideas. Because, as Bradbury once wrote, there is more than one way to burn a book.