Beatty's Lecture

Fahrenheit 451 is a novel that portrays where the world might be in a few hundred years if we quit reading, start stifling free thought, and censor or ignore ideas that are contrary to our own. The firemen in the novel do not put fires out, but rather start them and stoke them with books. It was originally published (in the early 1950s) as a science fiction novel, but it seems to be less so with each passing year. Many of the gadgets and technological innovations that Ray Bradbury "predicted" are no longer fiction, but rather part of our every day lives: the "parlors" with their wall-sized televisions, personal "seashell" radios (i.e., Ipods), "robot tellers" in banks (i.e., ATMs). Bradbury also speculated about the effects of such technologies on the society and the culture. It was a grim vision: a dystopia in which the population remained willfully ignorant of all uncomfortable thoughts by racing through life so fast that they didn't have time to think about anything. Of course books had to be burned to prevent the spread of potentially troubling ideas, and, to this end, the fire department became the official censors of the society: rather than putting fires out, they started them.

Captain Beatty is the fire chief. At one point in the first section of the novel, he "lectures" Guy Montag (the main character) about the origins of the fire department and how they came to be book burners. He tells Montag that they are the "Happiness Boys," destroying books that only confuse people and make them think too much. Books can offend. Books make people depressed. To keep the mass culture happy, books must be burned! And speaking of happiness, Beatty asks, "What do we want in this country, above all? People want to be happy, isn't that right? Haven't you heard it all your life? I want to be happy, people say. Well, aren't they? Don't we keep them moving, don't we give them fun? That's all we live for, isn't it? For pleasure, for titillation? And you must admit our culture provides plenty of these." Couldn't the same thing be said of modern American culture? Is our society becoming like the one in the novel? Are we a society of pleasure seekers who want only to ignore the troubling things in life in favor of continual "fun"? I think yes. How 'bout you?