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Fahrenheit 451: Not About Censorship, But People “Turned Into Morons by TV”
- savethefuture 9y agoWho writes the material, who reviews the material, who approves the material, who owns these news/media networks, this stuff goes all the way to the top, who is allowing this in their organizations... Question the owners and people in charge, and always follow the money.
- Powerofmene 9y agoMaybe Bradbury was right when he said "I am not afraid of robots, I am afraid of people."
- savanaly 9y agoThe title here on HN is not especially helpful in understanding what the article is about, since it leaves out that it's a) about Fahrenheit 451 and b) said by Bradbury. Maybe replace it with the title of the article "Ray Bradbury Reveals the True Meaning of Fahrenheit 451."
- dang 9y agoAgreed, but I think we can do a bit better by dropping a word or two. Submitted title was 'It's Not About Censorship, but People “Being Turned into Morons by TV”', which was a reasonable effort but doesn't say what "it" is.
- convery 9y agoEverytime this quote brought up; people on social media start jerking over how the real meaning is in the eye of the beholder. Death of the author and all that. How does HN feel about it?
- mindcrime 9y agoDo you believe that the author has some privileged position w/r/t defining the meaning of a story for everyone else? I see no reason to believe that. As far as I'm concerned, no story has any universal, objective meaning. Meaning comes from the interaction of the story's contents and the reader's mind / beliefs / knowledge / biases, etc. The author can always say what he/she intended the story to mean, but that really has no bearing on what any individual reader takes from the story.
- convery 9y agoI feel that while the author shouldn't be the arbitrator of what the whole work is about, they should have a say in what it's not about. e.g. if Lewis Carol would have stated that Alice in Wonderland is not about drugs; then the public should respect that and stop telling everyone else that it is. Following that thought to its logical conclusion, if extremists of any kind praise a work for promoting their view while the author denies that it does; with whom should we side? I do think there's an interesting discussion to be had about it.
- nsaslideface 9y agoThe idea of "meaning" is synonymous with agreement. Individual words "mean" things because we agree on the mapping. "Subjective, individual meaning" seems to just refer to personal thoughts and interpretation. It's fine to have personal thoughts, but "the author's meaning" is what they ultimately attempted to make others think is the message within the work. So to make comparisons between properties of the author's meaning and personal "meanings" is comparing apples to oranges, no?
- Retra 9y agoI care what the author thinks they were expressing because it matters if you want to know if the did a satisfactory job of expressing it, or why they didn't. But whatever you can do to learn something useful from someone else's work is valuable regardless. Some people fall in love with things and make their whole life perspective about things like this. I'm sure one could study a rock and learn how to be a great person if they have the mind to do it. On the other hand, people tend to think The Terminator is some kind of prophetic documentary ALA "fiction has some basis in truth" (as though the reality didn't have a better claim to that description.) So I'm wary of anybody who takes a work of fiction too seriously, except in the academic sense of being a good communicator.
- gojomo 9y agoTwo short stories by Bradbury address similar themes around screened entertainment, and are worth the 10 minutes to read if you're not yet familiar: 'The Pedestrian' – http://www.riversidelocalschools.com/Downloads/pedestrian%20short%20story.pdf http://www.riversidelocalschools.com/Downloads/pedestrian%20... 'The Veldt' – http://www.veddma.com/veddma/Veldt.htm http://www.veddma.com/veddma/Veldt.htm
- _proofs 9y agoThe Pedestrian was the inspiration or muse if you will, behind the very book itself.
- PhasmaFelis 9y agoIn retrospect, a lot of Fahrenheit 451 seems like "cranky old man" territory, although Bradbury was only 33 when it was published. I recall a lengthy passage where Clarisse talks about how highways have destroyed respect for nature because it's impossible to see flowers at freeway speeds. Literally impossible, this wasn't just a metaphor--she also mentions how freeway advertisements have to be extremely long because ordinary billboards would just be a blur, which implies that Bradbury had never actually ridden on a freeway before despising them.
- nyolfen 9y agoi think these two things probably imply that vehicles traveled much faster than on the freeways of the 1950s, extrapolating from trends he saw (car travel becoming faster) in the same way that he extrapolated the wall-sized televisions from early tv screens increasing in size, or people readings fewer books for that matter
- jacoblambda 9y agoHe wasn't completely off, even just a few years ago the speculation of wall size TVs becoming common place was a very real possibility.
- notahacker 9y agoBy far the most original and entertaining character in Fahrenheit 451 is Captain Beatty, with his sneering denunciations of the cultural value and psychological impact of books, not least because of the (probably unintentionally) ironic way they mirror better-informed versions of Bradbury's own contempt for the worth TV and radio
- PhasmaFelis 9y agoBradbury now insists that Fahrenheit 451 had nothing to do with censorship or McCarthyism, but he used to say just the opposite. In 1956 he said: "I wrote this book at a time when I was worried about the way things were going in this country four years ago. Too many people were afraid of their shadows; there was a threat of book burning. Many of the books were being taken off the shelves at that time. [...] I wanted to do some sort of story where I could comment on what would happen to a country if we let ourselves go too far in this direction, where then all thinking stops, and the dragon swallows his tail, and we sort of vanish into a limbo and we destroy ourselves by this sort of action." And in 1979: "Only six weeks ago, I discovered that, over the years, some cubby-hole editors at Ballantine Books, fearful of contaminating the young, had, bit by bit, censored some seventy-five separate sections from the novel. Students, reading the novel, which, after all, deals with censorship and book-burning in the future, wrote to tell me of this exquisite irony." Really not sure what to make of that.
- Chathamization 9y agoIt's been years since I read it, but I always got the feeling that the world was generally dystopian. Take the TV aspect of it - it's not just that people watch TV instead of reading, but that their attention spans are so shot that TV has become extremely vapid, violent, and rapid fire. The main characters wife runs over dogs for fun, and she almost kills herself taking sleeping pills because she couldn't pay attention to how many she took. The firehouse dog isn't a lovable dalmatian, but a cold and deadly eight legged robot. If the book is based on a grotesque exaggeration of trends he was seeing in post-war America, then it could well be about censorship, TV, pills, paving over natural beauty, alienation from society, etc. Perhaps Bradbury has just emphasized different aspects at different times.
- Jaruzel 9y agoThis worries me... Having read 451 several years ago (and absolutely loving it) how do I know if I've read an uncensored version or not?
- MichaelBurge 9y ago> Johnson quotes Bradbury describing television as a medium that "gives you the dates of Napoleon, but not who he was,” spreading "factoids" instead of knowledge. “They stuff you with so much useless information, you feel full.” I wonder if books bypass this by giving so much information that you need to summarize it to follow along. And the compressed representation is closer to knowledge.
- yters 9y agoSlaves were forbidden to read it was so dangerous. Nat Turner's ability to form an uprising came from learning to read and consequently preach. Frederick Douglass had to learn secretly, and what he read inspired him to escape slavery. Now, we as a society are becoming illiterate, incapable of basic reading comprehension. We are voluntarily enslaving ourselves.
- ninkendo 9y ago> Now, we as a society are becoming illiterate, incapable of basic reading comprehension. That's an extraordinary claim. Do you have evidence to back it up? Because from a cursory glance, studies seem to show the opposite: https://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/ourworldindata_rising-education-around-the-world-school-and-literacy.png https://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/ourwor...
- bigbugbag 9y agoDepends on the definition of literacy[1] turns out the low end (basic literacy) is getting better and the high end (full proficiency) is getting worse. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States
- thinkfurther 9y agoThat's people attending school, not having reading comprehension -- which isn't just getting something from the text, but understanding precisely what it says and doesn't say -- or having much of an attention span. Just an cursory listen and read to the gibberish in marketing, TV, movies, on youtube, not to mention people in real life, while not showing me a trend, shows me there's lots of FUBAR accepted as normalcy. Idiocracy was optimistic I think, no way is it going to take 500 years.
- DaiPlusPlus 9y agoReading comprehension isn't the same thing as Critical Thinking. Take a look at a typical community Bible Study group: they'll definitely score high marks for reading comprehension, but (in my own biased perspective) low marks for critical analysis.
- mc32 9y agoIf he was critical of TV and suspicious of radio for they made people lazy and were satisfied by factoids rather than knowledge, I can only imagine what he'd think about social networks and twitter and even computer games. I imagine him declaring them utterly corrosive to knowledge and true learning.
- rtpg 9y agopeople said the same thing about mass production of books. It's ultimately been the major criticism of all pop culture, usually coming from people vested in more "elite" forms of culture. Meanwhile people are probably reading way more than 20 years ago (at least through social networks). And most definitely writing more. Getting back to Bradbury's points about TV/radio, he talked about how TV/radio addiction makes it harder to read a book. So what? You've replaced one addiction with another. Books aren't inherently better than other media (except perhaps some ancillary stuff about your brain generating imagery or eyesight). I'm saying this as a person with this lament (more because some stuff is only available in book form). I wonder what he would have thought about audiobooks.
- kccqzy 9y agoGoing back even further, Socrates has said the same thing about writing. This new-fangled-thing-is-dumbing-us-down idea is an old idea.
- mc32 9y ago>I wonder what he would have thought about audiobooks. Background noise. Ever since the greeks began taking up writing and reading, and Socrates bemoaning the loss of the ability to memorize entire epics, there has been an attack on "vain" knowledge. I'd guess in his mind the epitome of a learned person was the aristocratic scientist who read first sources in the native language: Sanskrit, Greek, Latin among others. First sources, always in the original, not interpreted. I don't doubt that results in improved critical thinking. But whether it's a good investment when you have limited time, I don't know.
- bigbugbag 9y ago
- palad1n 9y agoWhatever happened to HTTP oode 451?
- r3bl 9y agoSubmitted in IETF as an RFC 7725 in February 2015. Seems like it's still in that stage.
- _Codemonkeyism 9y agoI don't think there are today more "morons" than 100 or 1000 years ago. With TV, magazines and lately the internet they just surface more. 100 years ago you only knew the three "morons" in in your small town. On top of that cultural pressure goes down and people do things - being "morons" - today they we're afraid to do 50 years ago.
- Broken_Hippo 9y agoThis, with the addition that populations tend to demonize whatever is new. Then it was TV, then it was cable TV (MTV is evil!). Rock music, the internet, smartphones and tablets. But in the past, they thought reading would ruin a generation and ruin their memories (it did kill a tradition, but we really just remember different things). Chess was certainly going to dumb down a generation, and folks were seriously suspicious of the automated elevator.
- reader5000 9y agoWe don't have a world in which TV/internet saturation never existed, so it's really hard to determine who is right.
- Broken_Hippo 9y agoAmish and Mennonite communities to a point. Places with poor electricity outside the US. And we have some records of times before television. In fact, there are still folks alive who remember such things. Heck, I remember times before the internet. My parents didn't have cable at one point. My grandmother remembers not having television in her house as they couldn't afford it. Their parents lived without radio. Their parents wrote down their experiences. It isn't true that we don't have such a world, it just happened before now. Maybe we won't know who is right, but no one is actually willing to give up what they have and it is rather likely that it will fall into the same doomsday predictions about the new-fangled thing as all the previous one.
- EADGBE 9y ago
- basicplus2 9y agoEveryone is a moron, it's just the amount that varies
- agumonkey 9y agoTV is interesting. It's amazing to see kids watching TV, and I remember how stimulating it was to my imagination (animated shows, live action shows...). I think it taps into a deep desires for virtual schemas in the form of stories as a way to learn. Except you don't learn anything, especially since it's passive and none of what you see gets translated into reality. Maybe turning half of TV consumption into real world challenge/game could restore balance.
- mnm1 9y agoWith all due respect to Mr. Bradbury, the author does not have a monopoly on meaning and while his interpretations are all valid so are ours. It's clearly at least about both and I'm sure there are plenty of other well supported theories that are also correct.
- arjie 9y agoInteresting. I think the 2003 reprint had a little section at the end with an interview that Judy Del Rey did with him. In that, if I recall correctly, he mentions a different origin story: that works of art become slowly bowdlerised as each affected group of people takes offence to something in them. In time, all books are banned so as to prevent offence.
- angus-prune 9y agoIts been a long time since I read the book, but I remember that being explicitly in the text.
- Iv 9y agoBradbury wanted to write a book about TV turning people into morons, but he failed. He tried to: he wrote about a world where TV is omnipresent and people lack any intellectual cricism and curiosity, and tried to persuade readers that TV was the cause of this intellectual laziness. This is actually a common trick that dystopian SF authors will use: they will create a world with two prominent features (e.g. GMO and caste society in "A Brave New World") and suggest that they are causally linked. Bradbury failed at that. In his world, books are burnt. He assumed readers would see that as a consequence of TV that made people incurious, instead most readers recognized (correctly IMO) that book burning and censorship was instead the most likely cause of the situation. And actually, as history unfolded (this book dates from 1953), we saw that TV did not replace books and did not actually displace them at all. Internet did, to some extent, but ebooks are pretty popular (and people still read them, despite all the SF predictions about audiobooks becoming the only available medium) Also, in 1949, a famous book, 1984, presented a word full of incurious and frankly intellectually limited people that was caused by propaganda and censorship. It was closer to what was observed in real authoritarian systems and presented much more convincing causal links. To people who had read 1984, the world presented in Fahrenheit 451 is a magnification of a post-propaganda society, not a result of TV taking over the world. This is an interesting case of a book staying relevant despite the original idea of its author being invalidated.
- Clubber 9y ago>he wrote about a world where TV is omnipresent and people lack any intellectual cricism and curiosity, and tried to persuade readers that TV was the cause of this intellectual laziness. If you look closely you can see huge swaths of that today. How many people actually formulate their own political and social opinions without seeds or entire forests planted by television news? They literally tell you what your opinion should be in many cases. A common cited example is the Nixon/Kennedy debate. People who listened to it on the radio thought Nixon won, while people who watched it on television thought Kennedy won, and that was when TV was in it's infancy. The relevance of that is people started voting based on visual appearance rather than competence of the issues. Unfortunately Nixon didn't do very well once he actually was elected, but that is besides the point. Imagine people like most of us who grew up with it. As you mentioned, people now don't know any other way, because we grew up with it. That's the long term problem. Perhaps without TV, people would make much better decisions at the polling stations. It's a constant, one-way deluge that people get exposed to. I think the internet, with all it's faults, helps to alleviate that, because at least with the internet, an individual can discuss alternating opinions.
- vixen99 9y agoTangential but can thoroughly recommend that otherworldly film (1966) of the book directed by François Truffaut.
- jstewartmobile 9y agoIt's a little harsh, but I can't totally disagree. Same could also be said for radio/books/internet/vidya/etc... It's not so much the medium as the marketplace, which optimizes for revenue. This is not to say that nourishing things don't squeak through--just that nourishment is not the objective.
- roceasta 9y agoPeople who notably stop thinking are those living in totalitarian regimes who are afraid to incriminate themselves by careless speech. If TV in general were capable of turning people into morons then no TV shows could be made. This is because screenwriters, presenters, etc, couldn't learn their craft without watching thousands and thousands of hours themselves.
- bbrady1992 9y agoAs I read through this, I'm most disappointed by the people claiming that Bradbury is wrong about the meaning of his book. The reasoning people are using seems to be that it's wrong for the author to think that he has sole say on how his book should be interpreted. I agree with that in general, but that's not the case here. Those claiming the book is about censorship very clearly ignore major points in the story. In Montag's conversation with Captain Beatty, it's explained that the government only started burning because the people asked for it. Books made people uncomfortable, so they wanted them gone. They much preferred the intellectual comfort that came with the "family". Personally, I think those that claim he was wrong are exactly the people that Bradbury wrote about. They argue against his themes, going as far as to ignore very clear exposition, because they ring true and bring discomfort.
- abritinthebay 9y agoThey aren’t ignoring the themes, there is just and alternative cause and effect relationship possible. Nothing you point out changes this. It’s still perfectly valid to say that while TV in the book is their comfort space the situation is primarily driven by generalized censorship of uncomfortable views. In fact, if anything, your point about the conversation helps support this point.
- rumcajz 9y agoUmberto Eco defines a novel as a "machine to create interpretations".
- gumby 9y ago> "Ray Bradbury Reveals the True Meaning..." Which I thought he did pretty unambiguously in his book!
- coliveira 9y agoIf you want to understand the full array of problems caused by TV I suggest the book "Four arguments for elimination of television". He consulted experts in several areas to show how tv leads to an altered state of mind that makes you accept information uncritically, and the consequences for our society. Many of his arguments are still valid for the internet.
- mcguire 9y ago"During a radio interview in 1956, Bradbury said: "I wrote this book at a time when I was worried about the way things were going in this country four years ago. Too many people were afraid of their shadows; there was a threat of book burning. Many of the books were being taken off the shelves at that time. And of course, things have changed a lot in four years. Things are going back in a very healthy direction. But at the time I wanted to do some sort of story where I could comment on what would happen to a country if we let ourselves go too far in this direction, where then all thinking stops, and the dragon swallows his tail, and we sort of vanish into a limbo and we destroy ourselves by this sort of action." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit_451 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit_451