
Fahrenheit 451: Not About Censorship, But People “Turned Into Morons by TV” - davesailer
http://www.openculture.com/2017/08/ray-bradbury-reveals-the-true-meaning-of-fahrenheit-451.html
======
Iv
Bradbury 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
>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.

~~~
klondike_
The Nixon/Kennedy debate anecdote is a common misconception. In reality most
radio listeners were older and lived in rural areas, making them more likely
to lean towards Nixon anyways. [1]

People have always interpreted things the way they want to, whether it's radio
or TV.

[1] [https://www.paleycenter.org/p-the-nixon-kennedy-debates-a-
lo...](https://www.paleycenter.org/p-the-nixon-kennedy-debates-a-look-at-the-
myth/)

------
_Codemonkeyism
I 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.

~~~
Clubber
I wouldn't call them morons, to me that depicts an inability to learn. I would
say today there are far more people (as a percentage) that are incapable of
critical thought and reading between the lines than there were 100 years ago,
at least in the US. Many people are also much less educated than when the only
entertainment was reading books.

Example: Years ago, when Obama was bailing out the banks, GOP talking heads
skewered him. They wanted the banks to fail and rebuild. A few years later,
when Occupy Wall Street formed, who were also against the bank bailouts, the
GOP talking heads skewered them, even though they had similar political
positions about the banks that the same talking heads where talking about just
a few years earlier. How many people caught on to that? Lack of critical
thinking.

~~~
Gravityloss
Good point. Which opinionated news sources would you recommend?

~~~
Clubber
Honestly, none of them, but you have to digest news somewhere, don't you? You
have to be an informed citizen as part of your civic duty, don't you? Reading
is typically better than watching or listening. Read multiple sources form
multiple points of view and have your BS detector fine tuned. It's also better
to get news from other countries, they don't have as much skin in the game.
Constantly ask, "do I really care?" "Why do I care" "Is this really important,
or are they trying to sway me to care?" "Why do they want me to care?" Also,
if you do care, read the entire article, because relevant facts are often
buried at the bottom under the top which is sensationalism / clickbait.

Furthermore, care more about stuff that directly affects you and your family.
Jobs is certainly a big one. I care that companies are constantly pushing down
wages more than I care about other things, because it directly affects me.
Just an example. I care that companies are polluting the river my family
visits. I care that the educational system in our state is horrible, I care
that health care is fucking expensive.

Also, never read opinion columns, the same is true for TV. The old 6'oclock
news is decent because they only have 30 minutes, but all the auxiliary shows
and the 24 hour news are nothing but opinion. Unfortunately decent sources
like the NYT is half opinion, but at least they label it as such.

------
PhasmaFelis
Bradbury 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
It'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.

------
bbrady1992
As 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.

~~~
rumcajz
Umberto Eco defines a novel as a "machine to create interpretations".

------
PhasmaFelis
In 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
i 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
He wasn't completely off, even just a few years ago the speculation of wall
size TVs becoming common place was a very real possibility.

------
mc32
If 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
people 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.

~~~
bigbugbag
What do you mean mass production of books ? Democratization of the printing
press ?

It seems to me the printing press actually improved things, but in more recent
time the educating power and self improvement potential of books got
significantly diluted by drowning books into huge numbers of published
entertainment pieces. Entertainment took over knowledge.

I'd say the opposite: today people are reading less book than 20 years ago,
writing on paper less and language is on a trend ot become impoverished.

~~~
Broken_Hippo
Yes, exactly that. Folks thought that cheap, freely available books would ruin
a generation, their minds being unable to remember things like past
generations. Young folks would no longer learn as their heads were stuck in
fantasy books. They might even become immoral.

They thought similar things about chess - that it would make a generation of
morons.

"The Simpsons" were controversial in the 80's, since they just _knew_ kids
would try to emulate Bart, just for a more recent example. My mother wouldn't
let me watch it for some years on the single family television.

And lastly: I don't know if folks are reading fewer books or not if you count
digital books. That said, I think folks read a lot more than they used to,
since a lot of communication is text-based.

~~~
Apocryphon
Whoever thought that chess would make people stupid?

~~~
Broken_Hippo
Quick look shows I've mixed up facts, and honestly don't have the time to do a
deeper search to find the attitude. It seems more of a social evil from a
shallow search, but that's just a mention in the Wikipedia article [1]. A
little more information here [2].It has been banned numerous times through
history.

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_chess#Europe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_chess#Europe)
[2] [http://www.strangehistory.net/2013/04/07/the-evils-of-
chess/](http://www.strangehistory.net/2013/04/07/the-evils-of-chess/)

------
savethefuture
Who 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
Maybe Bradbury was right when he said "I am not afraid of robots, I am afraid
of people."

------
roceasta
People 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.

------
convery
Everytime 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?

~~~
PhasmaFelis
There are plenty of songs whose words I've interpreted in a way that was
probably not what the writer was thinking of, but is nonetheless deeply
meaningful to me. Of course meaning is in the eye of the beholder; it's
certainly useful and interesting to ask what the author intended, but that
doesn't invalidate other interpretations.

~~~
Digit-Al
I think songs are a bit different to novels. Because of the format - having to
incorporate rhyme an meter - songwriters are more often likely to put stuff in
that doesn't neccessarily make sense but fits into the rhyme. I don't have any
proper evidence for this, but I did used to know a musician and once asked him
about the meaning of an ambiguous line in one of his songs (it could be
interpreted in a coule of different ways) and he said that it could mean
whichever one you wanted it to. I definitely got the vibe from him that he put
it in because it rhymed and sounded good, without neccessarily having any
particular meaning in mind for it.

I would say some songwriters would be more inclined towards that way of
songwriting and others would definitely consider themselves storytellers and
have a definite meaning for all their lyrics. Telling the difference is not
always easy.

------
agumonkey
TV 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.

------
MichaelBurge
> 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.

------
mcguire
"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)

------
gojomo
Two 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%20...](http://www.riversidelocalschools.com/Downloads/pedestrian%20short%20story.pdf)

'The Veldt' –
[http://www.veddma.com/veddma/Veldt.htm](http://www.veddma.com/veddma/Veldt.htm)

~~~
_proofs
The Pedestrian was the inspiration or muse if you will, behind the very book
itself.

------
coliveira
If 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.

------
arjie
Interesting. 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
Its been a long time since I read the book, but I remember that being
explicitly in the text.

------
yters
Slaves 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
> 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/ourwor...](https://ourworldindata.org/wp-
content/uploads/2013/03/ourworldindata_rising-education-around-the-world-
school-and-literacy.png)

~~~
thinkfurther
That'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
Reading 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.

~~~
adrianratnapala
That's pretty biased.

------
jstewartmobile
It'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.

------
mnm1
With 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.

------
gumby
> "Ray Bradbury Reveals the True Meaning..."

Which I thought he did pretty unambiguously in his book!

------
vixen99
Tangential but can thoroughly recommend that otherworldly film (1966) of the
book directed by François Truffaut.

------
palad1n
Whatever happened to HTTP oode 451?

~~~
r3bl
Submitted in IETF as an RFC 7725 in February 2015. Seems like it's still in
that stage.

------
basicplus2
Everyone is a moron, it's just the amount that varies

------
savanaly
The 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
Agreed, 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.

