Ray Bradbury's 'Fahrenheit 451'

0:00The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with Jeff Brighenbach. Ray Bradbury will celebrate his 90th birthday this coming Sunday. He was born August 22, 1920 in Waukegan, Illinois, a medium-sized town of around 20,000 people about Midway Between Chicago and Milwaukee on the Western Shore of Lake Michigan. Bradbury has depicted Waukegan fondly, even idyllically in his fiction, most notably in his 1957 novel Dandelion Wine. Though the Waukegan conjured up in that book, which is set in 1928, is a bit larger than the Waukegan Bradbury was born into in 1920.

0:52The town's population grew by more than 50% during the 20s. By the beginning of the Great Depression, there were more than 33,000 people who called Waukegan home. The Bradbury family was not to be among these people for much longer, however. They had already spent a year in Tucson, Arizona, in the 20s, for reasons having to do with Ray's father's employment. Tucson was where Ray attended first grade. In school year 1932-33, when Ray was twelve, they were back in Tucson again. Then, after a few months cleaning up loose ends in Waukegan, not long before Ray's fourteenth birthday, they moved to Los Angeles, where they remained. Ray Bradbury himself is there to this day.

1:40It was in Los Angeles that he went through high school, and in Los Angeles that he launched his extremely successful career as a fiction writer. It is common to hear Ray Bradbury described as a science fiction writer, but this is misleading at best. Only a minority of Bradbury's total production is science fiction by any normal standard, and at least half of it is straightforward realistic fiction like Dandelion Wine. The fact is, however, that Bradbury's second, third and fourth books, his first three books to come to widespread attention, The Martian Chronicles, 1950, The Illustrated Man, 1951, and Fahrenheit 451, 1953, were works of science fiction, or at least were widely believed to be.

2:31Bradbury was typecast early, you might say. He came to fame as a science fiction writer, and a science fiction writer he will therefore forever remain. For our purposes here on the libertarian tradition, on the other hand, Bradbury's most important book is undeniably the third of those titles I just rattled off, Fahrenheit 451, his short novel about censorship, one of the most influential libertarian novels of the 20th century, first published nearly 60 years ago, in 1953. And of all Ray Bradbury's books, Fahrenheit 451 is probably the one most entitled to be called Science Fiction. It describes an American society of the indeterminate but probably fairly near future in which possession of books is illegal. In an emergency, if, for example, an individual is found to be in possession of a sizable collection of books, the local fire department is summoned. The firemen arrive on a truck dressed in fire-resistant clothing Reading and Carrying Hoses, but their hoses pump not water, but kerosene, which they use to drench the illegal collection of books they've been called to take care of, along

3:48with the rest of the house in which they're stored. Then they set the whole sodden mess afire and watch it burn to the ground. Actually, not all books are illegal in Bradbury's America of the probably fairly near future. or so at least it would appear. For when Guy Montag, the young fireman who is the main character of Fahrenheit 451, poses a question to his colleagues at the local firehouse, in the old days, before homes were completely fireproofed, he asks them, didn't firemen prevent fires rather than stoke them up and get them going? They answer him, Bradbury tells us, by consulting their rule books, which also contained brief The Firemen of America According to these rule books, the Firemen of America was established in 1790 to burn English-influenced books in the colonies.

4:48The first fireman, according to the rule books, was Benjamin Franklin. Like all state-sponsored official history, this relies on a certain level of ignorance in its readers if it is to have its full intended effect. The firemen reading the rule books should be unaware, for example, that by 1790 the colonies had been politically independent from England for seven years, and that Benjamin Franklin in 1790 was 84 years old and on his deathbed. It would help if the firemen reading these rule books were also unaware that Franklin really was a pioneer fireman, though it was in the 1730s, not the 1790s, and he was, of course, the kind of fireman who puts fires out and prevents them, rather than the kind who stokes fires and gets them going.

5:39Of course, in a society whose government banned the possession of any books that taught any and any contrary revisionist history, such a level of ignorance might be fairly easy to maintain in the general population. It might be argued that people don't have to have books, necessarily, to stave off such ignorance. They could get correct information about history from other media. And this is true. Today, people can get such information from the Internet, and we haven't even reached the future yet. But there is no internet in the world of Fahrenheit 451. There is television. In fact, television is very close to omnipresent, and it is a kind of television that could exist only with the assistance of computer technology.

6:26A typical middle class home in the world of Fahrenheit 451 has an entire room devoted to TV, The Theory of Money and Credit 1951 is a result of government censorship or an outcome of market processes. It unquestionably might be the latter.

7:12One of his characters, a retired English professor and secret lover of books named Faber, speaks contemptuously of the solid unmoving cattle of the majority. And it is, of course, majorities that markets serve best. Remember, Faber tells Montag at one point, the firemen are rarely necessary. The public itself stopped reading of its own accord. You firemen provide a circus now and then at which buildings are set off and crowds gather for the pretty blaze. But it's a small sideshow, indeed, and hardly necessary to keep things in line. And why did the public itself stop reading of its own accord? Because so many of the individuals who made up that public wanted to avoid ever being offended by reading anything they didn't already believe.

8:05And most of the rest wanted to avoid having to think at all. They wanted to avoid difficult decisions, the strain of trying to focus their minds on ideas that could plausibly be looked at and understood in more than one way. The author of Bradbury's characters, a fire chief named Beatty, explains the part about being offended in a key conversation that takes place about a third of the way into the novel. Let's take up the minorities in our civilization, shall we, Beatty says to Montag? Bigger the population, the more minorities. Don't step on the toes of the dog lovers, the cat lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, The people in this book, this play, this TV serial, are not meant to represent any actual painters, cartographers, mechanics, anywhere.

9:10The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy. Remember that. Magazine became a nice blend of vanilla tapioca. Books, so the damned snobbish critics said, were dishwater. No wonder books stopped selling, the critics said. 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. Today, thanks to them, you can stay happy all the time. Ask yourself, Beatty says to Montag, what do we want in this country above all? People want to be happy, isn't that right?

9:57Haven't you heard it all your life? I want to be happy, people say. According to Beatty, one part of what has to be done to make them happy is to make them feel equal to everybody else. Surely, he says to Montag, you remember the boy in your own school class who was exceptionally bright, did most of the reciting and answering while the others sat like so many leaden idols hating him? And wasn't it this bright boy you selected for beatings and tortures after hours? Of course it was. We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal, each man the image of every other.

10:43Then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against. Keeping people happy, Beatty tells Montag, also requires that you avoid confusing them or expecting them to judge between competing ideas. If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a question to worry him, Beatty tells Montag. Give him one. Better yet, give him none. If the government is inefficient, top-heavy and tax-mad, better it be all those, than that people worry over it. In the space of a crucial week, Montag himself opts to worry, instead of being mindlessly happy.

11:30He has been vaguely aware for a while now that, despite the government's best efforts on his behalf, he is not, in fact, happy. His wife drifts mindlessly through her nights and days in a haze induced either by sleeping pills or by radio and TV. She no longer has anything to say to her husband, who has become, at best, an afterthought in her life. Montag Ludwig has been stealing the occasional book from the clandestine libraries he has assigned to burn. By the time of the beginning of Fahrenheit 451 he has accumulated maybe twenty of these books and has stuffed them into a hiding place he has devised behind an air conditioning grill in the ceiling of his suburban house. He has tentatively decided to take a look at these books, see for himself what they contain, why they are illegal. Then one night on his way home from work he meets a sixteen-year-old girl on the street.

12:28It turns out she's his next-door neighbor, a girl who likes taking walks in the evening, a girl with a startlingly different way of looking at things and the world, a girl who, perhaps unwittingly, encourages Montag's growing determination to rebel, if only in a small way, against the system that, at least through his employment, sustains him. In a week of meeting the 16-year-old Clarisse, Montague has murdered his fire chief and destroyed his station's expensive, high-tech mechanical hound. He has left his wife, gone on the lam, and joined an underground organization of men and women, each of whom has committed one or more books to memory, against the day when it will once again be legal to print, sell and read such things.

13:22Fahrenheit 451 has become one of the most influential libertarian novels of the past century in large part through the efforts of school teachers in both public and private institutions of learning. Virtually anyone who has gone through the 7th, 8th and 9th grades in this country in the past 40 years has likely been assigned Fahrenheit 451 in an English class. When I was in the 7th, 8th and 9th grades myself only a few years early, earlier, between 1958 and 1961, Fahrenheit 451 was not yet part of the official curriculum. Instead, it was one of those books students were likely to be seen carrying around with them in some sort of cheap mass market paperback edition to read on their own time, for pleasure.

14:12The fact that students liked it was, of course, one of the reasons it became part of the official Curriculum. Here was a book you didn't have to struggle to get kids to read. Also, it was a book that would raise the hackles of few, if any, parents. There was no sex in it at all, and only a few hells and dams by way of so-called bad language. On top of all that, for a libertarian novel, it was really fairly kind in its depiction of the state. It absolves the state of blame for starting the war on books. It acknowledges is that powerful impulses toward mindless conformity and suppression of deviation exist in the population itself, that, on a deep level, many, many people want to be protected by the state from the risk of being offended and from the necessity of thinking for themselves.

15:07And so it is that a large segment of our population knows this book because it was assigned in school. For many, it is probably one of the few good things school ever did for them. The downside of the situation is that millions of these people, probably the majority of them, have not looked at Bradbury's remarkable little novel for years, since they were 13 or 14 years old. It's worth another look. This is Jeff Rigenback.