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Fahrenheit 451 still sends shudders through its readers. Ray Bradbury’s famous science fiction novel is a statement for all freedom-loving people, to beware the government that wants to destroy knowledge and censor information. Bradbury’s novel is the story of literal book burning. An authoritarian government wants to destroy the written word by fire; 451 degrees Fahrenheit is the temperature at which paper burns. In a 1994 interview, Bradbury said that political correctness and thought control concerned him, the reason he spoke out for freedom of speech.
Controlling what people hear in media is a constant concern for freedom-loving people. One of the key themes about control in Proverbs is the comparison between “integrity” and “crookedness.” The word “integrity” suggests not perfection but a wholehearted commitment to God, including the dedication to truthfulness, honesty, trustworthiness, and reliability. In contrast, the word “crooked” describes what has been twisted from its original or intended design. The original has been tweaked or altered from its fundamental integrity.* Perverse people distort reality, but the righteous person is careful to guard himself from truth-twisting, according to Proverbs 22:5.
Our summer series, “What will you replace it with when it’s gone?” applies to who controls the information we consume. In the 1992 movie Sneakers, Ben Kingsley’s character summarizes the concern, as he preaches to Robert Redford’s character, “There’s a war out there, a world war, it’s not about who has the most bullets, it’s about who controls the information. What we see and hear, how we work, what we think, it’s all about the information!” The science fiction novel Fahrenheit 451, the movie Sneakers, and the book of Proverbs agree: beware those who control information so that they can twist the truth.
For the Comenius Institute, this is Dr. Mark Eckel, Executive Director of the Center for Biblical Integration at Liberty University, personally seeking truth wherever it’s found. [First published at MarkEckel.com]
Links:
Bradbury’s interview: Bradbury Talk Likely to Feature the Unexpected Archived July 10, 2019, at the Wayback Machine, Dayton Daily News, 1 October 1994, City Edition, Lifestyle/Weekendlife Section, p. 1C.
*John A. Kitchen Proverbs: A Mentor Commentary. Christian Focus Publication, 2006: 640
Discussion (3)
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It's always great to see Bradbury referenced. He's one of the four great science fiction writers of the mid-to-late 20th century, and the only poetic voice among them.
I reread Fahrenheit 451 a couple of years ago. The saddest aspect of the story to me, though one that plays a relatively minor role, is the way the protagonists wife has been taken from him by immersive entertainment. She dons the earphones, enters the television room, and is lost to the world, and to her husband.
Bradbury imagined this mind-numbing distraction inflicted on us by government, a not unreasonable assumption for a post-war writer. He couldn't anticipate Tik Tok, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, ubiquitous cell phones, and the constant barrage of transient distractions that afflict us today. Nor, apparently, did he realize that it might be our own choices, our own appetite for stimulation and entertainment, that would bring the deluge, rather than government with its own dark intentions.
Nor did he know, of course, that Google and commercial media would be the Great Censors.
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These days it is not so much about book burning.
This is because books and other information have become digital.
It is about the ability of the dissidents to have a platform from which to operate.
People have channels on twitter or youtube or facebook, and wake up one day to find all their content has been removed.
Then there is the story of the couple who operated a site called "Vdare."
On the dozen times or so that I have posted about a gang of thugs using iron pipes to beat up Sunday strollers out and about in Chicago, Summer of 2020, the site that featured this story, including the video of this brutality, was Vdare.
Now it is on its last legs. If you go here -- https://vdare.com
And then scroll down til you see the large photo of Lydia, you can read about the difficulties which she and her husband faced in terms of having a web platform and in terms of having a bank who will let their subscriptions and donations be processed.
As Tolkien's verse in a parable suggested: One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.