WEBVTT NOTE Ray Bradbury's 'Fahrenheit 451' 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:09.540 The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with 2 00:00:09.540 --> 00:00:12.780 Jeff Brighenbach. 3 00:00:12.780 --> 00:00:17.780 Ray Bradbury will celebrate his 90th birthday this coming Sunday. 4 00:00:17.780 --> 00:00:25.980 He was born August 22, 1920 in Waukegan, Illinois, a medium-sized town of around 20,000 people 5 00:00:25.980 --> 00:00:32.100 about Midway Between Chicago and Milwaukee on the Western Shore of Lake Michigan. 6 00:00:32.100 --> 00:00:38.140 Bradbury has depicted Waukegan fondly, even idyllically in his fiction, most notably in 7 00:00:38.140 --> 00:00:41.860 his 1957 novel Dandelion Wine. 8 00:00:41.860 --> 00:00:48.140 Though the Waukegan conjured up in that book, which is set in 1928, is a bit larger than 9 00:00:48.140 --> 00:00:52.180 the Waukegan Bradbury was born into in 1920. 10 00:00:52.180 --> 00:00:57.260 The town's population grew by more than 50% during the 20s. 11 00:00:57.260 --> 00:01:02.120 By the beginning of the Great Depression, there were more than 33,000 people who called 12 00:01:02.120 --> 00:01:03.780 Waukegan home. 13 00:01:03.780 --> 00:01:08.680 The Bradbury family was not to be among these people for much longer, however. 14 00:01:08.680 --> 00:01:14.300 They had already spent a year in Tucson, Arizona, in the 20s, for reasons having to do with 15 00:01:14.300 --> 00:01:16.460 Ray's father's employment. 16 00:01:16.460 --> 00:01:19.780 Tucson was where Ray attended first grade. 17 00:01:19.780 --> 00:01:27.260 In school year 1932-33, when Ray was twelve, they were back in Tucson again. Then, after 18 00:01:27.260 --> 00:01:33.480 a few months cleaning up loose ends in Waukegan, not long before Ray's fourteenth birthday, 19 00:01:33.480 --> 00:01:40.220 they moved to Los Angeles, where they remained. Ray Bradbury himself is there to this day. 20 00:01:40.220 --> 00:01:45.120 It was in Los Angeles that he went through high school, and in Los Angeles that he launched 21 00:01:45.120 --> 00:01:49.580 his extremely successful career as a fiction writer. 22 00:01:49.580 --> 00:01:55.500 It is common to hear Ray Bradbury described as a science fiction writer, but this is misleading 23 00:01:55.500 --> 00:02:01.580 at best. Only a minority of Bradbury's total production is science fiction by any normal 24 00:02:01.580 --> 00:02:07.860 standard, and at least half of it is straightforward realistic fiction like Dandelion Wine. The 25 00:02:07.860 --> 00:02:13.660 fact is, however, that Bradbury's second, third and fourth books, his first three books 26 00:02:13.660 --> 00:02:22.220 to come to widespread attention, The Martian Chronicles, 1950, The Illustrated Man, 1951, 27 00:02:22.220 --> 00:02:29.900 and Fahrenheit 451, 1953, were works of science fiction, or at least were widely believed 28 00:02:29.900 --> 00:02:31.400 to be. 29 00:02:31.400 --> 00:02:34.620 Bradbury was typecast early, you might say. 30 00:02:34.620 --> 00:02:39.700 He came to fame as a science fiction writer, and a science fiction writer he will therefore 31 00:02:39.700 --> 00:02:42.160 forever remain. 32 00:02:42.160 --> 00:02:47.400 For our purposes here on the libertarian tradition, on the other hand, Bradbury's most important 33 00:02:47.400 --> 00:02:54.680 book is undeniably the third of those titles I just rattled off, Fahrenheit 451, his short 34 00:02:54.680 --> 00:03:01.040 novel about censorship, one of the most influential libertarian novels of the 20th century, first 35 00:03:01.040 --> 00:03:05.840 published nearly 60 years ago, in 1953. 36 00:03:05.840 --> 00:03:11.720 And of all Ray Bradbury's books, Fahrenheit 451 is probably the one most entitled to be 37 00:03:11.720 --> 00:03:18.080 called Science Fiction. It describes an American society of the indeterminate but probably 38 00:03:18.080 --> 00:03:25.160 fairly near future in which possession of books is illegal. In an emergency, if, for 39 00:03:25.160 --> 00:03:30.980 example, an individual is found to be in possession of a sizable collection of books, the local 40 00:03:30.980 --> 00:03:37.280 fire department is summoned. The firemen arrive on a truck dressed in fire-resistant clothing 41 00:03:37.280 --> 00:03:43.480 Reading and Carrying Hoses, but their hoses pump not water, but kerosene, which they use 42 00:03:43.480 --> 00:03:48.780 to drench the illegal collection of books they've been called to take care of, along 43 00:03:48.780 --> 00:03:54.180 with the rest of the house in which they're stored. Then they set the whole sodden mess 44 00:03:54.180 --> 00:03:57.440 afire and watch it burn to the ground. 45 00:03:57.440 --> 00:04:04.760 Actually, not all books are illegal in Bradbury's America of the probably fairly near future. 46 00:04:04.760 --> 00:04:07.240 or so at least it would appear. 47 00:04:07.240 --> 00:04:13.580 For when Guy Montag, the young fireman who is the main character of Fahrenheit 451, poses 48 00:04:13.580 --> 00:04:19.360 a question to his colleagues at the local firehouse, in the old days, before homes were 49 00:04:19.360 --> 00:04:25.720 completely fireproofed, he asks them, didn't firemen prevent fires rather than stoke them 50 00:04:25.720 --> 00:04:27.880 up and get them going? 51 00:04:27.880 --> 00:04:34.740 They answer him, Bradbury tells us, by consulting their rule books, which also contained brief 52 00:04:34.740 --> 00:04:38.740 The Firemen of America 53 00:04:38.740 --> 00:04:44.820 According to these rule books, the Firemen of America was established in 1790 to burn 54 00:04:44.820 --> 00:04:48.100 English-influenced books in the colonies. 55 00:04:48.100 --> 00:04:52.600 The first fireman, according to the rule books, was Benjamin Franklin. 56 00:04:52.600 --> 00:04:57.400 Like all state-sponsored official history, this relies on a certain level of ignorance 57 00:04:57.400 --> 00:05:01.480 in its readers if it is to have its full intended effect. 58 00:05:01.480 --> 00:05:18.080 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. 59 00:05:18.080 --> 00:05:23.160 It would help if the firemen reading these rule books were also unaware that Franklin 60 00:05:23.160 --> 00:05:30.440 really was a pioneer fireman, though it was in the 1730s, not the 1790s, and he was, of 61 00:05:30.440 --> 00:05:36.160 course, the kind of fireman who puts fires out and prevents them, rather than the kind 62 00:05:36.160 --> 00:05:39.160 who stokes fires and gets them going. 63 00:05:39.160 --> 00:05:44.800 Of course, in a society whose government banned the possession of any books that taught any 64 00:05:44.800 --> 00:05:52.800 and any contrary revisionist history, such a level of ignorance might be fairly easy to maintain in the general population. 65 00:05:52.800 --> 00:05:59.800 It might be argued that people don't have to have books, necessarily, to stave off such ignorance. 66 00:05:59.800 --> 00:06:03.800 They could get correct information about history from other media. 67 00:06:03.800 --> 00:06:10.800 And this is true. Today, people can get such information from the Internet, and we haven't even reached the future yet. 68 00:06:10.800 --> 00:06:15.800 But there is no internet in the world of Fahrenheit 451. 69 00:06:15.800 --> 00:06:20.800 There is television. In fact, television is very close to omnipresent, 70 00:06:20.800 --> 00:06:26.800 and it is a kind of television that could exist only with the assistance of computer technology. 71 00:06:26.800 --> 00:06:33.800 A typical middle class home in the world of Fahrenheit 451 has an entire room devoted to TV, 72 00:06:33.800 --> 00:07:03.800 The Theory of Money and Credit 73 00:07:03.800 --> 00:07:09.640 1951 is a result of government censorship or an outcome of market processes. 74 00:07:09.640 --> 00:07:12.980 It unquestionably might be the latter. 75 00:07:12.980 --> 00:07:19.240 One of his characters, a retired English professor and secret lover of books named Faber, speaks 76 00:07:19.240 --> 00:07:24.520 contemptuously of the solid unmoving cattle of the majority. 77 00:07:24.520 --> 00:07:28.560 And it is, of course, majorities that markets serve best. 78 00:07:28.560 --> 00:07:34.440 Remember, Faber tells Montag at one point, the firemen are rarely necessary. 79 00:07:34.440 --> 00:07:38.200 The public itself stopped reading of its own accord. 80 00:07:38.200 --> 00:07:43.280 You firemen provide a circus now and then at which buildings are set off and crowds 81 00:07:43.280 --> 00:07:45.560 gather for the pretty blaze. 82 00:07:45.560 --> 00:07:51.620 But it's a small sideshow, indeed, and hardly necessary to keep things in line. 83 00:07:51.620 --> 00:07:56.040 And why did the public itself stop reading of its own accord? 84 00:07:56.040 --> 00:08:00.920 Because so many of the individuals who made up that public wanted to avoid ever being 85 00:08:00.920 --> 00:08:05.000 offended by reading anything they didn't already believe. 86 00:08:05.000 --> 00:08:09.120 And most of the rest wanted to avoid having to think at all. 87 00:08:09.120 --> 00:08:14.560 They wanted to avoid difficult decisions, the strain of trying to focus their minds 88 00:08:14.560 --> 00:08:20.920 on ideas that could plausibly be looked at and understood in more than one way. 89 00:08:20.920 --> 00:08:26.080 The author of Bradbury's characters, a fire chief named Beatty, explains the part about 90 00:08:26.080 --> 00:08:31.000 being offended in a key conversation that takes place about a third of the way into 91 00:08:31.000 --> 00:08:32.000 the novel. 92 00:08:32.000 --> 00:08:38.080 Let's take up the minorities in our civilization, shall we, Beatty says to Montag? 93 00:08:38.080 --> 00:08:41.120 Bigger the population, the more minorities. 94 00:08:41.120 --> 00:08:47.040 Don't step on the toes of the dog lovers, the cat lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, 95 00:08:47.040 --> 00:09:06.280 The people in this book, this play, this TV serial, are not meant to represent any actual 96 00:09:06.280 --> 00:09:10.320 painters, cartographers, mechanics, anywhere. 97 00:09:10.320 --> 00:09:14.880 The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy. 98 00:09:14.880 --> 00:09:16.480 Remember that. 99 00:09:16.480 --> 00:09:27.480 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. 100 00:09:27.480 --> 00:09:37.480 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. 101 00:09:37.480 --> 00:09:43.600 Technology, mass exploitation and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God. 102 00:09:43.600 --> 00:09:48.440 Today, thanks to them, you can stay happy all the time. 103 00:09:48.440 --> 00:09:54.280 Ask yourself, Beatty says to Montag, what do we want in this country above all? 104 00:09:54.280 --> 00:09:57.200 People want to be happy, isn't that right? 105 00:09:57.200 --> 00:09:59.360 Haven't you heard it all your life? 106 00:09:59.360 --> 00:10:02.280 I want to be happy, people say. 107 00:10:02.280 --> 00:10:06.640 According to Beatty, one part of what has to be done to make them happy 108 00:10:06.640 --> 00:10:10.000 is to make them feel equal to everybody else. 109 00:10:10.000 --> 00:10:16.160 Surely, he says to Montag, you remember the boy in your own school class who was exceptionally 110 00:10:16.160 --> 00:10:22.640 bright, did most of the reciting and answering while the others sat like so many leaden idols 111 00:10:22.640 --> 00:10:24.000 hating him? 112 00:10:24.000 --> 00:10:29.520 And wasn't it this bright boy you selected for beatings and tortures after hours? 113 00:10:29.520 --> 00:10:31.000 Of course it was. 114 00:10:31.000 --> 00:10:33.440 We must all be alike. 115 00:10:33.440 --> 00:10:41.040 Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal, each man the 116 00:10:41.040 --> 00:10:43.240 image of every other. 117 00:10:43.240 --> 00:10:50.720 Then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against. 118 00:10:50.720 --> 00:10:56.840 Keeping people happy, Beatty tells Montag, also requires that you avoid confusing them 119 00:10:56.840 --> 00:11:01.140 or expecting them to judge between competing ideas. 120 00:11:01.140 --> 00:11:06.580 If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a question to 121 00:11:06.580 --> 00:11:09.380 worry him, Beatty tells Montag. 122 00:11:09.380 --> 00:11:10.820 Give him one. 123 00:11:10.820 --> 00:11:13.340 Better yet, give him none. 124 00:11:13.340 --> 00:11:19.300 If the government is inefficient, top-heavy and tax-mad, better it be all those, than 125 00:11:19.300 --> 00:11:22.460 that people worry over it. 126 00:11:22.460 --> 00:11:29.260 In the space of a crucial week, Montag himself opts to worry, instead of being mindlessly 127 00:11:29.260 --> 00:11:30.260 happy. 128 00:11:30.260 --> 00:11:35.320 He has been vaguely aware for a while now that, despite the government's best efforts 129 00:11:35.320 --> 00:11:41.920 on his behalf, he is not, in fact, happy. His wife drifts mindlessly through her nights 130 00:11:41.920 --> 00:11:48.920 and days in a haze induced either by sleeping pills or by radio and TV. She no longer has 131 00:11:48.920 --> 00:11:55.320 anything to say to her husband, who has become, at best, an afterthought in her life. Montag 132 00:11:55.320 --> 00:12:00.480 Ludwig has been stealing the occasional book from the clandestine libraries he has assigned 133 00:12:00.480 --> 00:12:07.320 to burn. By the time of the beginning of Fahrenheit 451 he has accumulated maybe twenty of these 134 00:12:07.320 --> 00:12:12.600 books and has stuffed them into a hiding place he has devised behind an air conditioning 135 00:12:12.600 --> 00:12:18.240 grill in the ceiling of his suburban house. He has tentatively decided to take a look 136 00:12:18.240 --> 00:12:24.240 at these books, see for himself what they contain, why they are illegal. Then one night 137 00:12:24.240 --> 00:12:28.960 on his way home from work he meets a sixteen-year-old girl on the street. 138 00:12:28.960 --> 00:12:34.320 It turns out she's his next-door neighbor, a girl who likes taking walks in the evening, 139 00:12:34.320 --> 00:12:40.440 a girl with a startlingly different way of looking at things and the world, a girl who, 140 00:12:40.440 --> 00:12:47.020 perhaps unwittingly, encourages Montag's growing determination to rebel, if only in 141 00:12:47.020 --> 00:12:53.780 a small way, against the system that, at least through his employment, sustains him. 142 00:12:53.780 --> 00:13:00.260 In a week of meeting the 16-year-old Clarisse, Montague has murdered his fire chief and destroyed 143 00:13:00.260 --> 00:13:04.720 his station's expensive, high-tech mechanical hound. 144 00:13:04.720 --> 00:13:10.380 He has left his wife, gone on the lam, and joined an underground organization of men 145 00:13:10.380 --> 00:13:16.400 and women, each of whom has committed one or more books to memory, against the day when 146 00:13:16.400 --> 00:13:22.540 it will once again be legal to print, sell and read such things. 147 00:13:22.540 --> 00:13:28.220 Fahrenheit 451 has become one of the most influential libertarian novels of the past 148 00:13:28.220 --> 00:13:34.180 century in large part through the efforts of school teachers in both public and private 149 00:13:34.180 --> 00:13:40.420 institutions of learning. Virtually anyone who has gone through the 7th, 8th and 9th 150 00:13:40.420 --> 00:13:46.260 grades in this country in the past 40 years has likely been assigned Fahrenheit 451 in 151 00:13:46.260 --> 00:13:52.500 an English class. When I was in the 7th, 8th and 9th grades myself only a few years early, 152 00:13:52.500 --> 00:14:00.900 earlier, between 1958 and 1961, Fahrenheit 451 was not yet part of the official curriculum. 153 00:14:00.900 --> 00:14:05.820 Instead, it was one of those books students were likely to be seen carrying around with 154 00:14:05.820 --> 00:14:12.920 them in some sort of cheap mass market paperback edition to read on their own time, for pleasure. 155 00:14:12.920 --> 00:14:17.980 The fact that students liked it was, of course, one of the reasons it became part of the official 156 00:14:17.980 --> 00:14:23.660 Curriculum. Here was a book you didn't have to struggle to get kids to read. Also, it 157 00:14:23.660 --> 00:14:28.660 was a book that would raise the hackles of few, if any, parents. There was no sex in 158 00:14:28.660 --> 00:14:34.700 it at all, and only a few hells and dams by way of so-called bad language. 159 00:14:34.700 --> 00:14:39.940 On top of all that, for a libertarian novel, it was really fairly kind in its depiction 160 00:14:39.940 --> 00:14:46.700 of the state. It absolves the state of blame for starting the war on books. It acknowledges 161 00:14:46.700 --> 00:14:53.240 is that powerful impulses toward mindless conformity and suppression of deviation exist 162 00:14:53.240 --> 00:15:00.780 in the population itself, that, on a deep level, many, many people want to be protected 163 00:15:00.780 --> 00:15:07.740 by the state from the risk of being offended and from the necessity of thinking for themselves. 164 00:15:07.740 --> 00:15:13.620 And so it is that a large segment of our population knows this book because it was assigned in 165 00:15:13.620 --> 00:15:15.020 school. 166 00:15:15.020 --> 00:15:19.720 For many, it is probably one of the few good things school ever did for them. 167 00:15:19.720 --> 00:15:24.740 The downside of the situation is that millions of these people, probably the majority of 168 00:15:24.740 --> 00:15:30.220 them, have not looked at Bradbury's remarkable little novel for years, since they were 13 169 00:15:30.220 --> 00:15:32.500 or 14 years old. 170 00:15:32.500 --> 00:15:35.060 It's worth another look. 171 00:15:35.060 --> 00:15:35.740 This is Jeff Rigenback.