Photo by Movidagrafica Barcelona on Pexels
There is a pivotal monologue given by a fire chief at the center Ray Bradbury’s enduring classic, Fahrenheit 451. The book’s firefighter protagonist, Guy Montag, has called in sick. He’s not physically sick, but he is sick of the meaningless life he’s leading. An ethereal teenager has opened up his eyes to the beauty of the world outside of the cycle of firefighters burning books, and he wonders if he has devoted his life to the wrong thing. Addressing Montag, as he has many other firefighters who burn out (pun intended) from their jobs, chief firefighter Beatty tells Montag why the firefighters came into being:
“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. The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that! All the minor minor minorities with their navels to be kept clean. Authors, full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters. They did. Magazines became a nice blend of vanilla tapioca.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
Beatty’s speech is meant to tell Montag that there was no government mandate to burn books. Through politically correct pressures on society, society itself banned its own books by watering them down to nothing. He reinforces his point in the following quote:
“There you have it, Montag. 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.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
Genre writing can help you explore societal themes and wargame out large-scale policies within the safe confines of a book. What would happen if everyone was so afraid of offending a minority that they started censoring themselves? Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451 in 1953, and with McCarthyism rampant, it can also be seen as a screed against the strict McCarthyistic monitoring of the wrong kinds of thought that was happening at the time.
But I can’t get over that central speech of Montag’s. The idea that political correctness could lead to book banning is the same burning engine that is driving the bans against “woke” books and school curricula that I’ve written about in the past. State governments are banning books today, and those laws are starting to influence large publishers. Recently, Maggie Tokuda-Hall refused to allow Scholastic to publish her book about her family’s experiences with a Japanese internment camp because the publisher wanted her to remove the word “racism” from her Author’s Note.
In the year 2023, here is a major publisher refusing to publish a book about horrific minority treatment during World War II in the US because the author dared to mention the word “racism.”
Was Ray Bradbury Conservative?
Bradbury may not have been conservative when he wrote Fahrenheit 451, but he certainly became one as he got older. In his old age, he praised Ronald Regan, Charlton Heston, and George Bush (junior) and spewed insults about Bill Clinton, according to this Slate article. Having recently read Fahrenheit, I can definitely see the seeds of that conservatism in that iconic book.
Montag, a man in his 30s needs a young, milk white (“Her face, turned to him now, was fragile milk crystal with a soft and constant light.”) angel to show him the dead-end that his life has become. And when I say young, I mean young -- Clarisse is just 16. How could Montag’s wife, who has also lived through this awful life with Montag, possibly compete with that? No, it’s only the supposed-innocence of the not-yet-adult girl that could open Montag’s eyes to this impossibly woke world that he has found himself in.
Montag finally escapes this hellscape society by going off the grid and into the woods, meeting up with like-minded men. They all keep various books in their heads, refusing to print them out. They have become the books they remember. And Montag remembers Ecclesiastes. What is this book about? In my brief Google-fu, it seems that this is a Biblical book about the meaninglessness of man’s earthly search for contentment. The only way to find true happiness is to find God, which seems like quite the conservative message to me.
To tie this back to my original thoughts: I had started reading this book because of my fear of the book banning that is currently happening. The fear that Bradbury had in the 1950s has actually started to happen, but not for the reasons he mentioned in the book. Being sensitive to appropriate cultural representation expands our world view. Not just showing white or male points of view is expansive, not repressive. The current move to ban books today is about shutting down those minority points of view, and I hope that we can make sure that we push back while we can. None of us wants to live in a world where we are forced to burn books.
Comments