Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Fahrenheit 451 eloquently shows the ruin that comes if we abandon intellectual pursuits for mindless pleasure.
The purpose of this Substack is to reflect on the ways fiction authors express their philosophical ideas in their works. Where possible, I will integrate those themes with other ideas and evaluate them. Though I may occasionally comment on various aspects of the writing, these articles are not reviews. For those who are unfamiliar with the works discussed, I will include the relevant details from the story in the “context” section, so if you are familiar with the work, I recommend you skip that section. I will try to avoid the most important spoilers, but there will be some, as it is often impossible to properly analyze the meaning of a story without accounting for how it ends.
Context
Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, named after the temperature at which paper burns, is set in a dystopian America where reading anything beyond training manuals and scientific literature is forbidden. Firemen don’t put out fires—they start them, burning the entire contents of a book owner’s home. This state of affairs was caused by (and encourages) a hedonistic society in which instant gratification and mindless thrills (such as speeding and destroying things) have become ubiquitous. The humanities were pushed out of the universities, leaving only science and engineering. And TV and radio are omnipresent, from the subway to one’s bedroom. This way of life wasn’t forced on people by a sinister enemy or ideology; it was chosen by citizens before it was formalized by government decree.
When reading became illegal, it was purportedly to make people happier. But the society Bradbury depicts is not a happy one. Attempted suicides are frequent. Accidental killing happens often. Casual cruelty to animals is commonplace. People rarely form intimate relationships with anyone, even their spouses or children. People don’t talk to their relatives—the characters in the frivolous TV shows they watch are referred to as one’s ‘family.’ In short, most of the characters have ceased to value life at all.
The novella follows Guy Montag, a fireman who becomes curious about reading and ends up escaping the authorities when he’s caught hoarding books he was supposed to have destroyed.
Major Ideas
Value of books
Creation over destruction
Importance of the individual
Value of books
Books are the manifestation of what’s missing in this society. But books aren’t necessarily what people need; as one character tells Montag, it’s the content of the books that matter—namely, ideas, knowledge, and stories. These things, he explains, could have been made in different forms, but because people no longer seek them out, they aren’t. (A modern reader might think of podcasts, audiobooks, documentaries, and certain TV shows and movies.) One needn’t look at printed words on a page to learn something new, consider a view one has never heard before, or connect with well-developed characters in a fictional world.
These cognitive actions are what people actually need to be happy. Beatty, Montag’s boss, claims that by removing books from society, people have reduced confusion, because books disagree with one another. But Montag comes to realize that by replacing books with adrenaline highs and mindless TV, what they’ve done is created a society full of people who don’t think. People don’t question the value of the lights and sounds; they merely observe them uncritically. Rather than weighing different ideas and arguments, discovering truth, or savoring beauty, they look for constant stimulation, which numbs them.
Clearly, Bradbury’s main message is that for people to be genuinely happy, they have to use their minds. That simple insight is powerful, because it recognizes the fundamental nature of human beings. The defining feature of humans, as opposed to other animals, is that we have the capacity for reason (the ability to form, retain, and use abstract concepts and integrate them into a consistent body of knowledge). As Aristotle argued, you have to use reason to make your daily decisions and to develop your character if you want to reach a state of deep, fulfilling happiness (which he called eudaimonia). This is sometimes called his “argument from excellence”—the idea that for anything to be good, it has to be good at being what it is (a good knife is one that cuts well, for example). Since being human means being a rational animal, to be an excellent human means cultivating and using our reason. Bradbury projects the extreme of what would happen if the vast majority of us stopped doing that.
Creation over destruction
It’s not just thinking that leads to fulfillment, though; people must produce to live and be happy as well. And if people are not creating, they tend to destroy. Most in this dystopia frequently engage in wanton destruction—and never achieve more than a fleeting spark of joy. But, as a character late in the story explains, a person’s legacy is that which he or she creates:
It doesn’t matter what you do. . .so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching. . . . The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime (156).
Humans use our minds to figure out how to produce—to take what’s in our environment and make it work for our purposes, be they the necessities of survival or the pure enjoyment of beauty. It’s what we do, and Bradbury’s celebration of it, although brief, lends a sense of hope and positivity to the end of the book.
Importance of the individual
There is, however, one hint of an idea that isn’t in accordance with human nature. When Montag finally finds some kindred spirits, their leader and spokesman emphasizes that they mustn’t consider themselves important. Their mission is only to safeguard ideas, fragments, facts, bits of story, for the rest of humanity. Though of course an unjustly inflated ego is neither rational nor a desirable personality trait, a person who has accomplished something difficult has earned the right to feel proud of him- or herself. Similarly, a person who does something of great value to others has earned their appreciation. Your ability to value things, people, and abstract concepts comes from your own life, and thus your own life should be your highest value (the one that makes all others possible). Denigrating that life isn’t a path to happiness.
Modern parallels
Readers coming to the book in the twenty-first century will be reminded of the short attention spans and constant stimulation-seeking that smartphones and social media encourage. Though both technologies can be powerful tools for connecting individuals, making us more productive, and creating new kinds of products, they can just as easily damage or destroy our sleep cycles, concentration, relationships, and self-image.
The key is to bear in mind the purpose of any tool or activity you engage with, and structure it into your life accordingly. Using social media to connect with friends, family, and people with similar interests is a valid and life-serving purpose, but not one you should let interfere with your most important relationships and goals. Short video content, such as some Instagram reels and TikToks, can be informative, thought-provoking, or simply entertaining, but it is inherently limited in depth. It’s fine to scroll from time to time as a form of relaxation, but if you want to be deeply satisfied with your media consumption, it’s important to mix this in with engaging with more long-form media, be it novels, TV shows, movies, podcasts, video games, or anything else that presents in-depth ideas or stories.
In conclusion
The novella has earned its place as a quintessential entry in the dystopian fiction genre. Bradbury concretizes his abstract values—truth, ideas, art—in a form we all recognize and can therefore see clearly in our minds as symbols of those values (and clarifies that they can come in other forms). In barely more than a hundred pages,
Fahrenheit 451 eloquently shows the ruin that comes if we abandon intellectual pursuits for mindless pleasure—and that one needn’t bring down an entire regime to begin changing the world.