When Fact Meets Fiction.
“We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the constitution says, but everyone made equal . . . A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man’s mind.” Fahrenheit 451.
What if our democratic nation, this shining city on a hill failed to function as a beacon for the freedom we so hardily espouse? What if we lost our independence not because it was taken by force, but because it was consciously surrendered by apathy? The quote which opens this entry addresses man’s failure to value intellectual authenticity over the non-threatening ease of emptiness. Censorship, which is taken to an extreme in Fahrenheit 451, is a device that, as history can attest, has the power to disarm an entire people.
It is because of the enormous threat censorship holds over independent thought that responsible citizens need to actively and jealously guard their right to free speech. This week’s assignment in Mass Media & Society was to address a case of attempted censorship and assess its validity. I have always been intrigued by the various movements across the country to ban or censor the use of certain books in schools, and was recently shocked to learn that Fahrenheit 451 was among the accused. The Orange County Register reported a censorship battle in an Irvine school over the book’s offensive language, and deletecensorship.org exposed a similar struggle that ended in Fahrenheit 451’s removal from a high school reading list in Foxworth, Mississippi.
A book that encourages readers to shake off their complacency and awake to the realities of a delicate freedom has been attacked on the grounds of objectionable content. The irony here is too rich. Are we really to the point where literature that inspires action is a threat? And if so, then we should be consuming such works with a furor. Novels like Fahrenheit 451 are of an interesting genre, painting a future of dystopia, I believe, in an attempt to avoid such a reality.
Some concerned Americans seem to have taken away unintended lessons from the novel. Rather than identifying with the protagonist and his need to seek unfiltered truths, a movement took action to resemble the flat homogeneity of a sheltered and censored society. In ignorance, fear, or insecurity, a vociferous few took their cue from the novel’s book burning firefighters, and attempted to protect today’s youth from its radical messages. Thank goodness they failed.
When we begin silencing voices of dissent, ignoring the revisionist, and tiptoeing around controversial issues to avoid offending a faction’s sensitivities we risk entering the proverbial slippery slope; possibly leading to a failure to exercise constitutional rights. We will unconsciously erode principles that, as James Madison made clear in the Federalist Papers, were meant to protect not only the minority from the majority, but the majority from the dangers of a powerful minority.
I hope that those who called for censorship of books will someday sit down and read a few. That they will allow themselves to come to an independent decision with careful scrutiny of each work’s conclusions and merits, then allow others the opportunity to do the same. Fahrenheit 451 would be an excellent place to start. At 88 years old, the author, Ray Bradbury would most likely be the first to say that it is never too late to reexamine your assumptions. No one should become so insulated as to lose their awareness and idly watch the world transform around them as books disappear from once crowded shelves. I believe that by speaking out against the gradual acquisition of freedoms, even in the seemingly benign form of literary censorship, we can keep the dark future painted by Bradbury within the pages of a book. Let’s keep it fiction.
If you have read and appreciated Fahrenheit 451, then I would also highly recommend A Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, and of course, George Orwell’s classic, 1984.
