Seventy years after its publication, Ray Bradbury’s 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451 can still be found holding on with white knuckles to the required reading list of some grade 10, mid-level English classes.
The copies that are handed out would fail to spark a flame of interest under students, even if they were sitting on a pile of dry kindling: nondescript cover, pages discoloured by 30 years of exposure and graffiti, stored in a cardboard box that lies in wait for 11 months out of the year, like a box of dusty Christmas ornaments.
The specific hardcover copy that I have in mind is small enough to fit into the back pocket of a baggy pair of jeans, but big enough to hide a smartphone behind at your desk.
Unfortunately, kids, what gives you away is spending more than five minutes on the same page while you move your thumb in a scrolling motion.
But isn’t that just a sign of the times?
Bradbury’s novel explores a dystopian reality in which technological advancements in flame-retardancy have rendered firefighters obsolete; rather than leave these gentlemen out of a job, firefighters now bear the responsibility of starting fires to lay siege upon every book in existence.
In the wake of the Second World War, the burning of books was an inflammatory symbol: a burning book blazed synonymous with censorship, totalitarianism and the destruction of knowledge. It calls to mind, with the speed of combustion, an image of the Third Reich. From this side of history, any 10th grader can summarize this connection with a flippant: “Okay… burning books is bad.”
It’s not profound to note how our relationship with physical media has changed since 1953; if you burn the novel I’m reading for class, I can just find everything that I would ever need to know about anything at all, really, (including but not limited to that novel) by using the smartphone I keep on me at all times. If the destruction of physical media has become a flippant symbol without a spine, what keeps the book about burning books so terrifyingly pertinent?
In reality, the book on fire has become a red herring in modern analysis of the text. It is a rhetorical distraction so effective that it adds to the Ray Bradbury time-travel conspiracy theory; not only was he a time-traveller, but he also taught grade 10 English classes at Fort Frances High School.
His students today can easily identify that the destruction of books is disastrous, but somehow they cannot internalize that knowing the content within those books is, therefore, essential. Book burning is the side of the coin they look at while they flip through the pages of his book, but they keep the other side, the much more challenging side, safely face-down: that neglected side of the coin which warns them of the dangers of their anti-intellectualism, their apathy towards the pursuit of knowledge.
There is a critical section within Captain Beatty’s monologue, the supervisor of the protagonist Guy Montag, where he says, pertaining to the burning of books: “‘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.”
Even more succinctly, Professor Faber, the icon of academia within the work, states simply: “Remember, the firemen are rarely necessary. The public itself stopped reading of its own accord.”
There are young students taking one look at this phenomenal book that is inextricably linked to our current, lived reality, and they are asking if they can just watch the movie instead. They cannot even take a moment to revel in the glorious, infuriating irony of what they ask! An anti-intellectual society cannot call into question its own behaviour; those standing on the smooth-moving walkway of anti-intellectualism cannot find the fault in their path of least resistance.
The messaging that readers miss when homing in on the light of a burning book is how the loss of critical analysis is a cause, and not a consequence, of the destruction of knowledge. It was never about destroying books: that image was made to trap you on a surface level interpretation of the book, while the citizen’s true life’s work is to dig beneath what we are so readily fed.
If we extrapolate the consequences of taking information at the surface level, of going through the motions of thinking and nodding along with others’ interpretations of reality, we will find our universities churning out more than useless degrees, discouraging genuine research when it fails to provide immediate returns on investment, and rewarding the stagnation of our population.
Anti-intellectualism is anti-social. It is anti-human. We risk sowing fertile grounds for corruption across all levels, and it begins with letting students believe it’s fine to not seek out knowledge on their own accord. Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 is a herald of warning to the dangers of academic apathy, and the audience who needs to hear it most is too preoccupied with the short-form content, something that Bradbury predicted half a century before the first iPhone was released. We are marching towards a population of passive, complacent masses of citizens easily manipulated by confabulated histories and palatable mistruths.
Who benefits when you refuse to read? I promise that it is not you.
