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Philosophy Universe -- Episode 3: A World Turned Upside Down: Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451.” © Alfredo Mac Laughlin, 2022; NC-BY Good dystopian stories make use of an interesting technique: they describe a world that is truly bizarre, a world that seems upside-down. These details are not arbitrary, though: they pick up on trends from our present-day life, and then stretch them to their logical conclusions. Sometimes comically, sometimes more dramatically. In this upside-downness we can recognize our own world, if we look carefully enough, and be warned of things that could get worse if we don’t keep vigilant. Such is precisely the world of Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury’s master work. In this world, you can get a ticket for driving too slowly, but not for driving too fast. People who go for a walk without headphones of any kind are regarded with suspicion: you are encouraged to stay home and watch TV instead. They call the TV their “family,” but reading books is a criminal offense. And firemen don’t put out fires: they start them. So welcome to Philosophy Universe. I’m your host, Alfredo, and this is Episode 3: A World Turned Upside Down: Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451.” An interesting thing about Ray Bradbury, acclaimed as one of the all-time masters of science fiction, is that he didn’t care about technology much – not even about the science! I think, though, that this may be one of the reasons why Farenheit 451 aged particularly well: The book was written in 1951, but Bradbury kept the technology simple: cars are cars, flamethrowers are flamethrowers, and you can fill in the details with your imagination. People in this future walk with “ear-thimbles” in their ears that constantly pour out music: seventy years later we don’t call them ear-thimbles, or speakers, or even headphones, but “pods,” and it’s much the same thing. Bradbury’s stories are not about predicting future technologies, but about reflecting on social issues and philosophical problems that he saw emerging in his time. Many of these are rather enduring, as we’ll see. The story itself is fast-paced and straightforward; there aren’t many twists to give away. Still, if you want to read it on your own first, I strongly recommend that you do so: it’s just three chapters long! The main character is a guy named Guy Montag (Guy? Gui?). He is a fireman, which in this not-too-distant future means someone whose job is to seek hidden caches of books, and burn them all. This is because the possession and reading of books are criminal offenses! There’s no distinction, no selection; books are books and they must burn. Montag, though, has growing misgivings about his profession. He’s been keeping some of these books for himself to see what they are about. He’s dealing with bigger issues still: he is aware of an overbearing unhappiness and misery pervading everything – not just his life but his wife’s and his neighbors’, and his society as a whole. He harbors some hope that in the books he’s been swiping he’ll find some cure to this malady. He doesn’t know how to get started, though, so he secretly contacts an old acquaintance, a retired teacher, and asks for his help. The teacher then invents what may be the first podcast! He fits Montag with an earphone and reads to him while Montag travels and works. But his colleagues are onto him. He receives a surprise visit from his superior, Captain Beatty. Now Beatty is an interesting character. He’s quite educated. You can tell he’s read a lot. And he’s very much aware of the reasons why they are burning books, a question that has barely crossed Montag’s mind. In a fantastic monologue, he spills the beans to Montag. He’s hoping that Montag will do like he did: take a short illegal excursion into books, get it out of his system, and get to see things his way: that books only make people unhappy. That thinking makes people unhappy. That we, as a society, are better off without any those things. So this is the ultimate reason books have been persecuted: it’s not about any particular idea, but about thinking itself. Asking deep questions. Do you remember last episode? We talk about Plato’s cave, and three meanings we can focus on. One is, of course, the puppeteers. Beatty and some unmentioned others have taken upon themselves to keep people entertained but without thinking. But, unlike the released prisoner in Plato’s cave, Montag is willing to put up a fight. He decides to hide the books instead of burning them. His wife, though, is terrified, and calls the firemen on him. Montag makes a stand. He has a flamethrower, after all. He defeats the first wave, and becomes a fugitive of the law. The chase scenes are particularly exciting, because – again, anticipating the “reality shows” of the 2000s – Montag can see the whole chase in the TVs of the dozens of houses he is running past. I’ll stop here, so I can leave a little for you to discover on your own. There’s a lot to talk about in this book, so it’ll take us one or two more episodes. Now there are two interesting pairs of opposing characters in the story, that we can use to frame this discussion. There is, of course, the opposing philosophies of Captain Beatty and professor Faber. But earlier on we find an equally important pair. In one corner there’s Mildred, Montag’s disenchanted wife, and in the opposite corner Clarisse McClellan, a wonder-filled teenager that Montag meets on his way from work. (Cleverly, in the first movie version of the novel, director Francois Truffaut had the same actress, Julie Christie, perform both roles. It is as if he was saying, you could be either of these!) Now Mildred, Montag’s wife, is really irritating, deeply unhappy and in constant denial. When we first meet her, she’s just attempted suicide by swallowing pills, and Montag has to see how a pair of technicians come to his house, replace her blood with clean one and leave without asking a single question to them. It’s just another working day for them. But when Montag tries to find out what was going through her head, she just refuses to discuss it, denies that there’s anything wrong, and takes refuge in their TV room. The TV room has wall-to-wall screens – really affluent families can install four of them for complete immersion, and the shows are “interactive” --- and absolutely brainless. “What’s the show about?” “Well, I already told you: there’s these people called Bob and Ruth and Helen…” And that’s just it, they talk about nothing, and every few lines Mildred gets to read one of her own. Mildred, apparently, has learned to read lips, because she hasn’t taken off her pods, I mean, her “ear-thimbles” in ten years. What are we to make of Mildred? She’s obviously a very unhappy person, but why? She doesn’t seem to be clinically depressed. She’s quite active, even chirpy, and goes about through her daily routine half-convinced that she’s a happy person. She even advises Montag, when he’s in a particular bad mood, “Go take the beetle… I always like to drive fast when I feel that way. You get it up around ninety-five and you feel wonderful… It’s fun out in the country. You hit rabbits, sometimes you hit dogs. Go take the beetle.” I know, it’s horrible. I think it would be fair to say that Mildred’s malady is of a philosophical nature. Let me introduce to you a very important psychologist from the late-1900s: Viktor Frankl. Maybe you’ve heard of him: he wrote a famous book called Man’s Search for Meaning, and developed a type of therapy based on the principles of the book. He called it Logotherapy. Frankl lived in Berlin just before the Second World War. He was concerned with a rise in suicide rates in the youth. He attributed this to what he called “existential vacuum,” an absence of purpose and meaning in people’s lives. He connected this to a rise, precisely, of philosophies that we could call “nihilistic.” We have to talk about nihilism at some point, but for now: “nihil” is the Latin word meaning “nothing.” “Nihilism” is roughly a philosophy that states that life has no meaning, that nothing has any “meaning,” that we are just a random happenstance in the passing of the universe, and that’s that. Frankl was Jewish, and was sent to a concentration camp. There he sadly had the chance to observe his theories in action: Those who lost their meaning would quickly decline, get sick and die. It was those that had a purpose in life, who would endure enormous hardship. (He did, and survived, and published his book; again, Man’s Search for Meaning.) Now, I don’t want to oversimplify nihilism. Off the top of my head I could tell you of at least four different types of nihilism with very different attitudes. There’s Nietzsche’s “tragic hero,” who knows things are pointless but still carries on. There’s the destructive nihilist, the “Joker” who “just wants to see the world burn.” That’s Mildred in her car, trying to hit rabbits and dogs; we get hints in the novel that hitting people with cars is a favorite youth pastime! There’s the possibility of a suicidal nihilist, and here again we have Mildred. But toning things down a little, we can find the nihilist who regards life as so pointless that they only look for entertainment, to take their minds off the fact that life is so pointless. This is again Mildred, most of the time. She cannot stay still and chat, she needs to fill her eyes with images and her ears with noise. When that’s not enough she takes the Beetle for a ride and goes on a rampage. This is, in fact, Montag’s entire society. We’ll see how Beatty explains it. But let’s turn to Clarisse, as Mildred’s polar opposite. The key to her character can be put in one word: Wonder. When Montag first meets Clarisse on the street, it’s almost like an apparition. In her face, says Bradbury, “was a kind of gentle hunger that touched over everything with tireless curiosity. It was a look, almost, of pale surprise; the dark eyes were so fixed to the world that no move escaped them.” Clarisse likes to go out and “smell things and look at things, and sometimes stay up all night, walking, and watch the sun rise.” This is absolutely countercultural in Montag’s world. Speed is of the essence; things need to become blurs. “Sometimes,” Clarisse says, “I think drivers don’t know what grass is, or flowers, because they never see them slowly… a green blur, Oh yes! That’s grass! A pink blur? That’s a rose garden… My uncle drove slowly on a highway once. He drove forty miles an hour and they jailed him for two days.” It’s hard to think of something more important than wonder to stay really alive. Love, perhaps?. Maybe love is a kind of wonder? What we do know is that great philosophers like Plato and Aristotle put wonder at the beginning of philosophy. Aristotle famously wrote, “philosophers and poets both have this in common: that they both have to do with wonder.” So Clarisse is basically a teenage philosopher. Wonder is difficult to define – maybe a sort of intellectual hunger, a desire to know that involves also our passions and feelings. It’s easy to point it out and recognize it, though: Just look at any child under seven, and most children under twelve, that time in life in which they don’t think they know all the answers. They are interested in things with their entire body: let them loose in a museum, and they’ll run to the next dinosaur, to the next exhibit, while you run behind them and can barely catch your breath. Wonder is important – I would say essential – to philosophy for two reasons. The first is positive: it is the drive to know things for its own sake, not because we are paid or need to finish a project, but because they are there, and are interesting. It makes you question deeper and deeper. Clarisse, we learn, gets in trouble in school because she asks, not how things are made, but why. And you can’t have those people running around! Secondly, because wonder involves realizing that we don’t have the answers to many things. It implies a humility, a vulnerability, that one is not ashamed of. We stop asking questions – interesting questions, not just “how to get to school” but “why go to school” and such – too early in life, and this may be either because we learned the answers by heart, or because we are afraid we are going to look stupid, or stand out, if we ask those questions. Well, wonder says, “to hell with that,” and asks the questions anyway. We’ll dig a bit deeper, I promise. Philosophy is a bit like a corkscrew: we take up the same topics many times, but every time we give them another twist. Now you may be thinking, if wonder is important for philosophers, is it important for anyone else, though? The answer lies again in the comparison between Clarisse and Mildred. For Clarisse, every new day is like a new feast of being. As long as Clarisse can keep this wonder burning, she’ll never be lost like Mildred. She doesn’t need the noise and the constant distractions to feel that she is alive, because she is really alive. But how do you keep it this way? How did Clarisse avoid the traps that her classmates all fell into? Much of the answer is her family. Her parents and her uncle maintain wonder alive in their house. They speak until really late – Montag walks to their house, is tempted to just knock and be let in. They do things “out of fashion,” because they enjoy them, not because they are supposed to be doing them. They don’t really need their TVs. It’s like making a coal fire: if you put the coals together, they keep each other alive, but if you separate them, they languish and give no heat. So we’ve gotten, I think, to the heart of Fahrenheit. It’s wonder, against a way of life that actively neutralizes every attempt to bring wonder forth. But why is Montag’s society framed in this way? And what does the book burning have to do with it? I hope you’ll join us to keep asking these questions, in our next episode of … Philosophy Universe. By the way, here’s another interesting fact about Francois Truffaut’s version of Fahrenheit: at the time of the credits, they don’t roll them: they shout them over a megaphone! This is a clever irony: the makers of the movie don’t want you to read anymore…