Book Burning

It’s taken me two weeks to finish Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, a slim 173-page volume, not for lack of time but lack of interest. I found the text somewhat dry and overwritten and the story so-so, but Fahreneheit 451 has been a minor point of reference these days; I heard someone refer to it recently in light of all this Golden Compass censorship business, so I labored on. Aside from the obvious comparisons to comtemporary feel-good culture, what is most incredible about the story is this: maybe you missed it, or maybe you just remember it as a book about burning books in the future, but in Fahrenheit 451 the reasons books were initially destroyed altogether was because minorities kept finding something they disliked in literature and wanted re-edited.

He writes:

Now let’s take up the minorities in this civilization, shall we? Bigger the population, the more the minorities. Don’t step on the toes of the dog-lovers, the cat lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, second generation Chinese, Swedes, Italians, Germans, Texans, Brooklynites, Irishmen, people from Oregon and Mexico.

a page later:

Colored people dont like “Little Black Sambo.” Burn it. White people dont feel good about “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Burn it. Someone’s written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping? Burn the book.

In 1979, twenty-six years after the publication of the text, Bradbury writes a five-page “Coda” where he speaks this topic specifically. With all the ire and cranky privilege of a member of the majority, he expounds ever further upon this problem, and not-so-delicately:

The point is obvious. There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running along with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist/Unitarian, Irish/Italian/Octogenarian/Zen Buddhist, Zionist/Seventh-Day Adventist, Women’s Lib/Republican, Mattachine/FourSquareGospel feels that it has the right, the duty, the will to douse the kerosene, light the fuse.

In the main text and in the “Coda”, Bradbury’s issues seem to be largely with what he considers fractionary religious groups, and given the importance of the Bible in his texts, I would imagine this is his primary axe to grind; although he has no sympathy, neither, for the stupid nor for the intelligent, or for ethnic groups. This line from the “Coda” killed me:

If the Chicano intellectuals wish to re-cut my “Wonderful Ice Cream Suit” so it shapes “Zoot” may the belt unravel and the pants fall.

Yikes! Ouch!

Overall, Bradbury’s point is amazing to me not due to its accuracy or pith but that it identifies the problems within political correctness before political correctness was really developed. I imagine the book cites an earlier use of the term “minorities” which really didn’t take form until the 1970s and 1980s.

In that very same vein, it mis-idenitifies and mislabels what it is to be a minority, a problem characterized by the intellectual leverage of equality which forms the basis of political correctness. Bradbury oversimplifies a minority as a person with an individual characteristic, someone with a point-of-identity, and specific concerns as it pertains to this identity. In a sense, everyone is a minority, Bradbury softly argues, and if so, to claim your individual identity is to be nothing but annoying.

As he prattles on, a minority-qualifier is nothing but a job, an affinity, an affiliation, a religious belief or a nationality. When each of these are compared to one another, they are nothing more than a random characteristic, flattened and equalized, none meaningful, a collection at random, some important, others not, but mere trifles, perhaps happenstance of natural selection or free will, ultimately random and trivial and unimportant.

However, a minority identity is not a noun-modifier. Like many who misunderstand and equalize individual identity politics, Bradbury does not credit the access to power one random characteristic has over another. In passages from Fahrenheit 451 we see his problem is really with minorities exercising their right to power and voicing interest in decent representation. It is this aching and moaning, in a climate of shortened attentions spans and heightened entitlement to ignorance that leads to the destruction of books.

So today, Christian groups challenge The Golden Compass and other books fade into oblivion to take root in our subconscious cultural memory (google Little Black Sambo). I could summarize this entire scenario within my continued exploration of information access and pertinent “knowledge bases” but instead, I’d rather proffer this; of course, zero books would be considered offensive unless ignited by the explosive factor of exposure (distribution + readership + criticism). When the general population has the contextual sophistication to put things in their proper place (using non-judgment) and to really accept dissenting voices, that is, to allow them to exist, or even to allow them to permeate one’s personal world view, books will no longer be considered so offensive. As it pertains to censorship of older books, lack of context, not poor content, is usually the problem. The solution is to preserve literature but teach its context through improved education. Since hindsight somewhat approximates 20/20 when we’re lucky, learning context requires us to be a bit revisionist, yes, but ideally, more complete in our knowledge and understanding. It’s particularly hard in America, where there are so many diverging voices, but comprehensive context cannot be achieved without allowing a platform for all of them.

Here is a list of the “most challenged” books in the US from 1990-2000.

To another point, most of these books are challenged in the interest of protecting children.