Fahrenheit 451

As you know from previous posts, I read Fahrenheit 451 on the airplane back to the United States. I had heard about this book my entire adult life but had just never gotten around to actually taking the time to read it.

What I found was a very scary book. Not scary in a horror sense but in the fact that I feel it very accurately predicted the future, something most books fail to do. They imagine some future scenario but ten years after the book is written it starts to feel old. I read Animal Farm by George Orwell last year and its focus on the evils of communism seemed rather dated Good book, but its warnings no longer ring with the shrillness that they once did.

Fahrenheit 451, however, paints a future where people have abandoned books. Now they are satiated by huge screens or “parlors” where they can interact with the people on the screen and are part of the soap operas. The main character is Montag, whose wife is very addicted to these dramas in her “parlor” and speaks of adding a fourth screen so that the entire room can be one, giant, imagined world. Montag meets a young girl who is alive in ways he has never seen or known before. She asks him if he knows there is dew on the grass or a man in the moon. It has been along time since Montag has looked. This makes him start to question his job, which is to burn contraband books.

What made it eerie was the semblance to the society today. (I don't want to turn this into an anti-technology rant so please bear with me!) One of the most popular gifts in the USA this Christmas season was the high-definition television. Lots of gifts centered around four things: the cellphone, the TV/DVD, MP3 players (IPOD) and the computer. What struck me over and over again was that the world we now live in is very much like the one envisioned by Bradbury.

Technology is a great thing, when it augments human life. An MP3 player is capable of playing wonderful music to make our lives better and to fill dull moments. However, it is also capable of building a wall between us and our fellow human. Would you strike up a conversation with someone on a bus wearing headphones? Doubtful.

When technology begins to detract from our experience as humans, then it has failed to add value to our lives. It has instead provided a poor substitute for experiencing life in the raw. Who needs to scuba dive when we have Jacques Cousteau?

Also, it can stop us from experiencing one another. In my short life I have had the distinct pleasure to interact at length with two other cultures, Korean and Malaysian. Both have afforded me opportunities to learn, grow, smile, laugh, become angry and cry. I am not the same because of these experiences.

Let us not settle, allowing technology to detract from our lives. Let us instead use cameras to capture the beauty of nature and humankind, the TV to provide wholesome laughter and relaxation, the computer ease the difficulty of our jobs, the phone to call a loved one and an MP3 player to play a song that thrills our hearts. Let us not be satisfied with “less” of a life lived dependent on technology but the “more” of live augmented by it.

100. S. Lewis said:

     Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

See you on the beach!