“It was a pleasure to burn. It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed.”

Those are the opening words of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. They could also have been the words of whoever torched Uncle Hugo’s Bookstore in Minneapolis. (The crowdfunding campaign to restore it is still active.)

The arsonist might have gone on, as the protagonist’s thoughts do: “You weren’t burning anyone, you were burning things! And since things really couldn’t be hurt, since things felt nothing, and things don’t scream or whimper … there was nothing to tease your conscience later. You were simply cleaning up.” The goons who write in defense of looting and burning regularly say there’s nothing wrong with destroying mere property.

The burning of books has a long history. Gottesmann’s public burning of a controversial book in The Magic Battery reflects numerous real-life incidents in the 16th century. Nazis in Germany and Austria held ceremonial book-burnings in the 1930s. Just this year, wokes have revived the fine art of book burning, carrying on the tradition of their Nazi predecessors. Fahrenheit 451 is as applicable to our times as it was when Bradbury wrote it in 1950. Maybe more so.

In an interview, Bradbury insisted that Fahrenheit 451 was the only science fiction novel he had written. Most of his work is fantasy or realistic fiction. This book can’t be taken very literally. It’s satire more than prediction. He takes all the paraphernalia of the traditional fireman and reverses only the function. They start fires instead of putting them out. It’s not what you’d expect of a police state. Burning books and homes seems more important than catching their owners. It’s a dramatic form of civil asset forfeiture.

Bradbury’s premise isn’t that a tyrannical government destroys books to keep the population ignorant. Censorship is by popular demand. Thinking is discouraged as stressful. The society is a Brave New World which shows its 1984 teeth when it has to.

Years before the time of the story, publishers self-censored to avoid offending anyone. Beatty, Montag’s boss, tells him, “Now let’s take up the minorities in our civilization, shall we? Bigger the population, the more 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 or Mexico.” He goes on, “There you have it, Montag. It didn’t come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God. Today, thanks to them, you can stay happy all the time, you are allowed to read comics, the good old confessions, or trade journals.”

“To start with.” When official censorship came, no one objected. Some books are still allowed; the firemen have rule books. The rules are always different for those who enforce them.

The choice to give up thinking and controversy is an important theme, perhaps even more important than censorship. People’s lives are crammed with mindless entertainment from full-wall television. Some living rooms have screens on all four walls. The liberal arts colleges have all closed, not by government decree, but for lack of interest. Television was new when Bradbury wrote his story, and he was one of the first to think it would dumb down the population.

He lived long enough to see the Internet, which he called “a big distraction” and worse. For some people, social media sites are like full-wall TV, only more so. “Politics? One column, two sentences, a headline! Then, in midair, all vanishes!” That sounds like a good description of Twitter. But the Internet is also a defense against censorship, making archived works available online even where governments prohibit them.

Near the end we encounter people who are living books. They have the books memorized, with the help of some novel memory-enhancement techniques. They safeguard many of the classics. The books stay alive even if all the printed copies are burned.

Some points don’t hold up well. We’re told that the United States is prosperous while the rest of the world is mired in poverty. A technological society that bans books will collapse quickly. Perhaps there are exceptions for textbooks and reference books? It’s never clear. The country is on a permanent warfare basis. The USA has won two nuclear wars, another war starts during the course of the story, and the city Montag used to live in is destroyed. He is just a few miles away when it is bombed. Perhaps in 1950 the long-term consequences of nuclear detonations weren’t as well known.

There have been multiple versions of the story. Bradbury first wrote it as a serialized story, “The Fireman,” for the January-April 1951 issues of Galaxy. He expanded it to a novel which was published in 1953 and then serialized in Playboy. In the afterword in the 50th Anniversary Edition, Bradbury talks about additional scenes which he wrote for a theatrical version.

Ironically, Fahrenheit 451 was itself bowdlerized to avoid offending people. Ballantine produced a “Bal-Hi edition” aimed at high school students, taking out a few curse words and changing some scenes. From 1973 to 1979 this was the only version in print, and Bradbury didn’t notice. When it was called to his attention, he demanded that Ballantine restore the original version, which it did in 1980. In 1992, the Venado Middle School in Irvine, California distributed copies of the book with horribly dirty words like “damn” and “hell” blacked out. It’s reported that students did the blacking out, which seems to defeat the whole purpose of protecting them from being corrupted by those words.

Fahrenheit 451 is an important reminder of what can happen when people demand the suppression of words that offend them.

For further reading, you might want to look at Jeff Riggenbach’s commentary on Fahrenheit 451.

Support independent bookstores! You can find one near you and ask if they have Fahrenheit 451 or other books I’ve mentioned on this blog.