After the events of yesterday, I found myself scrolling through Instagram, and feeling really hollow. A lot of people were saying stuff, and a lot of it was good stuff, but very little of it had, as the great Ray Bradbury would say, “pores.” And not because the people writing it and posting it weren’t well-informed, but more because Instagram’s utility is in its briefness and immediacy. Everything I saw yesterday–and that I ever see–is determined by an algorithm whose sole goal is to encourage me to be spend just over a tenth of a second, but no greater than a minute being “influenced” by flashes of “information.”
The Instagram algorithm, and the internet in general, rewards users whose content elicits a reaction–whether positive, or negative, it doesn’t care. An article that thoughtfully lays out both sides of an issue, and causes one to reconsider their opinions in a way that makes them uncomfortable, or uncertain enough to feel hesitant about clicking “like,” commenting, or sharing on their own platform, will shrivel and die.
And as I was thinking about this truth (which is not revolutionary by the way, as I am sure even the most transient of Instagram users are aware of it), as well as the events that transpired in D.C. yesterday, I couldn’t help but draw some parallels between our current reality, and one of my absolute favorite fictional novels: Fahrenheit 451.
Now some of you might be tempted to stop reading here, because, TBH, it’s pretty alarmist and conspiratorial to compare our current reality to the truly horrifying dystopia depicted by Bradbury in his seminal novel. So I’ll tell you up front, I’m not trying to argue that we’re living in a dystopia. I don’t think big brother is constantly watching me (via a chip implanted in my body by a vaccine, as some might say…), or that our government is hiding some kind of mass conspiracy from us that will ultimately lead to our complete destruction (because I think we can all agree that a few of our key leaders are so completely incapable of keeping their mouths shut on Twitter that they would definitely have let that one slip a long time ago).
But I do think that, on a philosophical level, there are some important parallels.
Firstly, one of the important points I think a lot of people who have read this novel forget is that the dystopian world of Fahrenheit 451 was not created by an oppressive government, per say, but by a population who didn’t care enough, or know enough, to vote for anything different.
Throughout the book, Bradbury implies that even though the horrific nature of their current reality would seem to suggest that it had been forced upon the citizenry, it was actually chosen by them. Because, for them, and oftentimes for us, it is so much easier to ignore what is happening, than to really engage with it. Essentially, the world of Fahrenheit 451 is one that was built on a total rejection of information, education, and real human connection, and which values apathy and disengagement above all else.
I think that a lot of people who teach this novel would agree that the absolute best chapter is the one that details a crucial conversation between the protagonist, Montag (a one-time participant in the oppressive regime), and his newfound mentor, and former literature professor, Faber. This chapter is entitled “The Sieve and the Sand,” and we could spend about an hour digging into that title, but I’m pretty sure I’ve already lost about 4 out of 5 of my readers, so I’ll just move on instead.
In this chapter, Montag and Faber discuss what is missing from their society–the pieces that have, in their absence, allowed civilization to rot. And when I re-read this passage last night, I couldn’t help but feel like they are the exact same things that seem to be missing from our society, today. So let’s break it down:
- According to Faber, the first missing piece is “quality.”
“This book has pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. You’d find life under the glass, streaming past in infinite profusion… The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies”
Bradbury 79
When I think about what is missing from the conversation today, this is exactly it. When we call a group of “personalities” who go on TV to scream at one another and give credence to conspiracy theories (while openly admitting, on the sidelines, that their role is more to entertain, than inform) “The News,” we have undeniably lost sight of what “quality” of information even means.
When I was in college, I took a class called New American Literature. During one class period, my professor stopped our heated discussion and told us that we were talking to much (she may have rolled her eyes at us, but I could have just imagined that). She then made us sit there, in silence, and just think, or journal, or re-read the piece, and then only speak if we had a question to pose. No more “commenting” allowed, because it wasn’t really doing anything other than allowing us to voice perspectives that we already knew we had. If I had asked her to choose from the options Faber mentions in his quote, she probably would have told me that we were “raping” the text, and that she was really sick of it.
And when I look at the way so many of us, and our models on TV, speak with each other, or engage with each other online, we are most often doing just that. Very rarely are we taking the time to look at anything under a microscope, let alone the information guiding our values and beliefs.
When discussing why “quality” is important, Bradbury explains that people need to be “rooted” to something. That, if we aren’t connected to something substantial, and real, we grow weak, and feeble, and will perish as easily as Antaeus did when held off the ground by Hercules. So I challenge you to ask yourself, what am I rooted to, and how deeply have I investigated it’s truth?
2. The second missing piece is “leisure,” which is defined by Bradbury as something other than time to merely rest.
“Off hours, yes. But time to think? If you’re not driving a hundred miles an hour, at a clip where you can’t think of anything else but the danger, then you’re playing some game or sitting in some room where you can’t argue with the four-wall televisor. Why? The televisor is ‘real.’ It is immediate, it has dimension. It tells you what to think and blasts it in. It must be right. It seems so right. It rushes you on so quickly to its own conclusions your mind hasn’t time to protest”
Bradbury 80
In Bradbury’s world and, I think, in ours as well, people don’t like the fact that books provide us with the leisure to think complicated thoughts, and feel difficult emotions. Books can be argued about, disproven, rejected, and integrated into the very fabric of our beliefs and identities. A news correspondent, yelling at you through the TV screen, or via his or her twitter, is invincible. A meme, positioning one political party as more evil than the other is too simple to debate, and, as a result, is much more easily accepted, and shared, as a certain kind of truth.
Today, we are flooded with such small snippets of information or emotion that we don’t have the “leisure” to actually do any mental work around it. Or, even worse, the information is presented to us, but in such an angry or accusatory way that we are essentially discouraged from doing the mental work that would actually allow us to realize that we did, in fact, agree with and benefit from said information.
3. And lastly, Faber tells Montag that the final missing piece–the crux of what is missing from their doomed reality– is “the right to carry out actions based on what we learn from the interaction of the first two” (Bradbury 82).
In the novel, the “action” Faber has in mind is rebellion, and insurrection. He and Montag devise a plot to make copies of the banned books, and plant them in the houses of the “firemen,” and other government officials. They hope to turn burn down the system of oppression from the inside out. If you haven’t read Fahrenheit 451 in its entirety and think you would like to, you might want to stop reading now (spoilers ahead).
In the end, Bradbury allows his fictionalized reality to stray so far off course, that there is no possible avenue for self-correction. Ultimately, a society built and perpetuated by mindlessness can not save itself, and the story ends with an enemy force bombing all of the major cities. In the aftermath, those living on the fringes of society, who also happen to be the long-since rejected thought leaders of the old institutions, are the only ones left to start over.
So no, I don’t think there are any explicit parallels to be drawn here, because our society is not too far gone. We still have books, and people who read them. We still have evidence-based science, and a large majority of the population who believes in it’s value. We still have some quality of information, even though it is undervalued, and often difficult to find. And we have the ability to choose leisure for ourselves. We have the self-awareness to course correct, and retrain our brains to slow down and become more effective at filtering in what matters, and out what does not.
I know that this is more of a literary analysis of my favorite novel, than any kind of real comment on current events, and that’s largely because there are people more informed than me who I will be deferring to for political analysis of our current moment (and you should probably do the same).
But yesterday, I was truly despondent over the state of our country. I wanted to check out, and stop reading, and retreat into my own, insular version of reality. And I needed a book to remind me, as the late, great Elie Wiesel once said, that “the opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.”
And because of that, I think it’s important for me to stand here, on whatever tiny platform I have, and tell you all that I won’t be indifferent about what’s happening right now. That I will keep having hard conversations, and engaging with information, and trying my best to wade through the garbage that we, as a society, have chosen to let weigh us down. We can all do better (and a few of us can do a lot better), but the only person I can start with is myself.
Ray Bradbury’s Works (Affiliate Links):
