Fahrenheit 451? We Are Closer than You Think (But With Better Hair)
Google Gemini thought that was witty, so I am using it.
I recently started reading, again, though it feels like the first time, Fahrenheit 451. I have looked at it sitting on the shelf for months, thinking about picking it up. Almost doing so, and then stopping because something else would grab my attention. A book of short stories by L. Ron Hubbard or a classic by Phillip K. Dick. I would also look at the book and feel a slight sense of fear at the thought of reading it.
It almost felt like something that was forbidden. As if this was a book you were supposed to have on your shelf but not actually read. You were supposed to just own it for the clout. You maybe skimmed it in high school, but as an adult, you just relied on snippets and other people’s commentary to give you just enough of an understanding of it that you could reference in conversations and sound smarter than you are.
I am 40 years old. That means it has been about 25 years since I last picked up this book, but I believe I have picked it up at just the right time.
One of the themes in the book is the idea of people consuming electronic media that has no true meaning. It is not making them better people. It is not enhancing their lives. It’s a controlled brain rot. There’s talk of the kinds of conversations that people have in the streets where they just repeat words and phrases back and forth and yet never say anything of substance, with the implication being that it is the television shows they are watching that are contributing to it.
The other evening, as myself and the kids were returning home from a walk around the neighborhood, we stopped to pet a neighbor’s dog and talk with him for a few minutes. He is an elderly gentleman, largely confined to a motorized wheelchair. He is grumpy and cranky and actually a very nice guy. We were talking about how quickly people drive through the neighborhood and he and I were sharing things we had seen and acknowledging that it was becoming a real problem and my stepdaughter interjected with, “Yeah. People just drive through here like crazy and don’t even care. They just don’t care. They just drive through here like crazy and don’t care.” She said this a couple of different times in the exact same way.
Other conversations with her have been similar. What she says in some of these more serious conversations are just regurgitated platitudes that do not carry in themselves any meaning beyond just saying them. Dead-end phrases and things you are just supposed to or expected to say at a given time.
To a certain extent, she cannot help it. Her expression of Autism is that way. She struggles to understand and appropriately respond to social cues. So I am not unfairly judging what she was saying. She largely cannot help it. Rather, her interactions in social situations are a very literal illustration of what we are becoming as a society (and what Bradbury envisioned and bemoaned).
Our reading and media consumption has been undergoing a shift just in the 20 years since I was in college. Back then, for fun, we would sit around and read books like John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion (650 pages) or the Systematic Theology by Wayne Grudem (1,616 pages. Some would plow through books like that in a couple of weeks like it was nothing. And even when it took longer for someone to read that, we still would.
Now, books that long are not at the top of most people’s lists, even among my friends. Graphic novels and trade paperback novels from the grocery store seem to top the lists. And they’re definitely not likely to read something more than a few years old. Even on one of the reading social networks I am a part of, it seems like the majority of the users are reading young adult romance, no matter how old they might be. Books, movies, and music of value exist, but it does not seem to be making the rounds in the same way that maybe it once did.
As we have shifted to an increasingly digital world, our attention spans have grown shorter. Accustomed to the short-form video format of TikTok, we expect even our news and movies to keep our attention in short intervals. And when they do not, we are likely to turn them off or swipe to the next video. We get our news primarily from the headlines, and maybe the first couple paragraphs of the story, often refusing to read on to glean the nuance and smaller details that make the story important.
Last week, Don Lemon posted a cell phone video from a pro-Palestinian protest on the NYU campus. He went around asking people there if they felt it was anti-semitic to protest what Israel was doing. He also asked people why they were there. People repeatedly said that one of the reasons they were there was because they wanted their university to “divest” from Israel. “NYU needs to divest” they kept saying. And yet, when he asked them what that meant or what that meant to them, the light left many of their eyes and they did not have a good answer. They felt that NYU needed to divest, but they had no clue what that really meant. It was as though they had heard the phrase and latched onto it for the likes on their TikTok channel.
We are developing an understanding of the world built on soundbites.
Is this the fault of technology? Is it TikTok’s fault we are like this? I do not think so. TikTok is a symptom. Or, if not a symptom, it is an expected result of an increasingly technological society. We have become overly reliant on technology to tell us what to say and think and even to do our work for us. With a few clicks of a mouse and a sentence or two, we can write a 10-page essay (or in my case, the title for this post) in a matter of seconds by simply asking a computer to do it for us. We can turn our lights on, run the vacuum, and order groceries simply by telling a little box in our kitchen to do so. Along with this increasing reliance on technology, we do not even have to sit down and read a book, in more cases than ever before, we can have the book read to us. There is even an app that will summarize books for you into brief summaries that you can listen to in the time it takes to commute to or from work.
Enter the firemen.
As we have become increasingly reliant on technology, we have also gained access to information about humanity and other cultures and countries and even learned more about ourselves and how ideas like sexuality and gender function within the human psyche. We have learned about systemic racism and our complicity as white people in building those ideas into the fabric of American culture. And as we have learned more about these things, authors have penned books telling those stories or creating narratives that people who are on the receiving end of gender, sexual, and racial bigotry can relate to and find empowerment in.
This threatens the status quo. It threatens the primacy of the dominant classes. It encourages questioning of the powers that be. The segregation deliberately created when establishing the interstate highway system. The blatant flaws in trickle-down economics. The importance of unions. The idea that gender is a spectrum rather than a binary. The more of these stories and ideas we are learning about, the more the ones with the power want to put a stop to it.
So Libs of TikTok posts bigoted videos and tweets. Moms for Liberty formulates lists of books that need to be banned from not just school libraries but public ones as well. It is not enough to ensure the ideas are only accessible to an age-appropriate audience. These ideas need to be completely eradicated from the public square. As I talked about last time, we are silencing the dissenting ideas and often taking extreme measures to do so (think police with riot gear disbanding student-led protest on the NYU campus).
Those in power like that we get our ideas and news from two-minute TikTok rants and aggregated headlines with little backstory or details. They encourage it even. Because by taking away the books, they can funnel us onto social media in order to find the information we are looking for and then control what we see and how it is presented. They can tweak the algorithm to hide accurate information about what it means to be transgender, forcing us to get our information from the comment section under a provocative meme. This keeps most of us uninformed and therefore easier to manipulate. They can tell us trans people are groomers while sweeping under the rug story after story of Christian pastors being arrested for the same. As we turn our hatred toward the transgender community, they can then step in and tell us the only solution to the problem is to vote for this certain candidate or buy these certain products and click more of these kinds of videos for more of the same information.
By keeping us uninformed, they can trap us in echo chambers and keep us divided and maintain their grip on power for just a little while longer.
The more I read these books and watch what is happening in our world, the more I see that these authors saw something. They had an insight into where things could be headed. Where things were headed. Robert Heinlein had people interacting with computers in their homes in much the same way we interact with Alexa. Aldous Huxley saw a world where we drug individuality away in the name of productivity. Ray Bradbury saw a world where ideas are so dangerous they need to be burned as soon as they are found.
None of this is conspiratorial thinking. It is where we are now. Remember back when Trump was president and in a speech told a group of veterans, “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”? George Orwell already said it…and said that the bad guys were the ones saying it.
“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
Something the Nazis did when they were on their homicidal rampage through Europe was burn books. In fact, the Nazis targeted the LGBTQ community in much the same way modern conservatives are targeting them. At one point, the Nazis came down on a German research facility that focused on human sexuality, the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft. This would have been the largest library of LGBTQ information and books at the time. They destroyed all of it. That research could have helped us be more ahead of where we are regarding gender and sexuality than we currently are, no matter what the outcome of the research turned out to be. One would have a hard time making a case that this particular brand of modern Conservatives would not behave similarly.
In Fahrenheit 451, it is the bad guys who burn the books. It is always the bad guys who want to silence ideas and free thought. So read the banned books. Think the banned thoughts. Ask the banned questions. Seek to understand your world beyond the soundbites.