Beatty thus not only directly claims minority pressure as a cause of intellectual self-censorship and conformity but also emphasizes its pervasiveness with his rhetoric, listing fully twenty-one pressure groups organized by ethnicity, religion, geography, occupation, and even pet preference. He shows that from the major to, in the case of dog lovers and cat lovers, the ridiculously "minor minor," each narrow pressure group pares down free expression of individuals' thoughts a little more.
Beatty's reiteration of the idea just over a page later is similar in purpose, although its rhetoric is slightly more restrained. He explains, "You must understand that our civilization is so vast that we can't have our minorities upset and stirred" (59): "Colored people don't like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don't feel good about Uncle Tom's Cabin. Burn it. Someone's written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping? Burn the book. Serenity, Montag. Peace, Montag. Take your fight outside. Better yet, into the incinerator" (59). The mesmerizing Beatty again shows how intolerance for opposing ideas helps lead to the stifling of individual expression, and hence of thought.
While it is not actually part of the novel itself, Bradbury's postscript "Coda"--which between 1979 and 1982 was called the Afterword--likewise emphasizes the dangers of minority pressure. Commenting on the text, Bradbury claims that "Fire-Captain Beatty . . . describe[s] how the books were burned first by minorities, each ripping a page or a paragraph from this book, then that, until the day came when the books were empty and the minds shut and the libraries closed forever" (177). Here, in the author's own explanation of his work, he reminds readers that the pressure of intolerant minorities is the "first" and presumably most important cause leading to the decline of thought.
Bradbury also repeats Beatty's idea of the dangers of minority pressure in relation to the real world: "There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist/Unitarian, Irish/Italian/Octagenarian/Zen Buddhist, Zionist/Seventh-day Adventist, Women's Lib/Republican, Mattachine/Four Square Gospel feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse" (176-77). Like Beatty, he emphasizes the pervasiveness of the problem by defining the pressure groups with ridiculous improbability.
In addition to the evidence of the text itself and of Bradbury's coda, we are more likely to see the dangers of minority pressure in the novel because of the widespread perception that such dangers exist in our own society. In the 1950s readers might have thought of McCarthyism or perhaps the pious efforts to "clean up" comic books. Today adult readers are aware of various pressure groups' campaigns against sexually explicit music, the burning of the American flag, or sex and violence on television. Moreover, the current debate about political correctness also helps shape how we read Bradbury. Awareness of these controversies is certain to make us even more aware of Bradbury's treatment of minority pressure.
The threat of "mass culture" has been recognized by Peter Sisario (210), John Huntington (136), and David Mogen (107-08), and the idea, though not the term, has also been used by Donald Watt (212), Kingsley Amis (111-12), and Charles F. Hamblen (819). No one, however, has followed up with an investigation of the real importance of mass exploitation, especially in relation to Beatty's overemphasized scapegoat, minority pressure.
Despite the obvious role of intolerant minority pressure in the decline of thought, the text actually shows mass exploitation to be the more serious problem. Whereas Beatty's discussion of minority pressure is explicit and highly coherent, comprising mainly most of a paragraph over half a page long, his discussion of mass exploitation is less explicit and is diluted through eight pages. Yet Beatty himself cites mass exploitation as a problem that began even earlier, and both his exposition and the rest of the text show that mass exploitation requires the participation of a far greater majority of the population and replaces thought with conformity even more directly than does minority pressure.
Mass exploitation in the novel begins long before minority pressure, as soon as technology allows for the development of mass communication and mass culture. According to Beatty, the trends leading up to censorship "really got started around a thing called the Civil War," when modern technology, beginning with photography, enabled communication "to have mass" (54). Presumably this metaphorical use of "mass" refers to the greater amount of information carried; whereas earlier oral and printed communication still left much information to the imagination of the audience, photography and, later, moving pictures shifted this "mass" from the audience to the means of communication themselves. Rather than challenge audiences, controllers of communication chose to rely on "mass" to sell, thereby simplifying the ideas being transmitted: "`And because they had mass, they became simpler,' said Beatty. `Once, books appealed to a few people, here, there, everywhere. They could afford to be different. The world was roomy. But then the world got full of eyes and elbows and mouths. Double, triple, quadruple population. Films and radios, magazines, books leveled down to a sort of pastepudding norm'" (54). Although technology makes this change possible, technology itself is not the cause, as Faber's understanding of technology's capacity for projecting "infinite detail and awareness" (82) indicates. Minority pressure is also not responsible for this reduction of communication to the "pastepudding norm," for Beatty does not even bother to bring that last problem into the discussion for another three pages. The more important problem is the preexisting mass exploitation of easy gratification.
The responsibility for the decline of thought this exploitation causes belongs to a great majority of the population. Because the damage of minority pressure is caused primarily by intolerant pressure groups and secondarily by the controllers of communication who follow their wishes, the public is far less responsible; people for the most part may be unaware that pressure groups influence what they watch, hear, and read. Mass exploitation is very much different, however, for it is the result of the public's active desire to avoid controversy and difficult thought in favor of easy gratification and, eventually, intellectual conformity. Beatty tells Montag that the pressure for censorship and the abandonment of thought at first "didn't come from the Government down" (58), and this is especially true of mass exploitation. The disseminators of mindless escapism are to some extent to blame, and the consumers of this escapism are guilty as well.
Bradbury names the exploiters only once. According to Beatty, they are the "publishers, exploiters, broadcasters" who "whirl man's mind around about so fast . . . that the centrifuge flings off all unnecessary, time-wasting thought" (55). Phrased another way, the exploiters are the controllers of mass communication who appeal solely to the public's desire for pleasure. Although Beatty does not say it, the exploiters are also those who design and market the dangerously powerful automobiles and drugs that the society consumes. They are those who encourage the acceptance of, as Granger, the leader of the book-memorizers, says, "dream[s] made or paid for in factories" (157). Knowing that the public prefers easy gratification to difficult contemplation and evaluation, the exploiters "empty the theaters save for clowns and furnish the rooms with glass walls and pretty colors running up and down the walls like confetti or blood or sherry or sauterne" (56). Beatty's imagery here, effective as always, mirrors the triviality, violence, and intoxication of the four-wall televisions. While Beatty explicitly identifies the exploiters only once, their effect on society is apparent throughout the novel.
Although the exploiters bear some responsibility for the decline of thought, the exploited are at least as guilty, for they are willingly exploited. Faber remembers that "the public stopped reading of its own accord" (87) and that when the newspapers died out "no one wanted them back. No one missed them" (89). Because he did not speak out when he could have, Faber even considers himself to be guilty as well (82). He explains to Montag that after half a century of the vigorous pursuit of easy gratification, the book-burning firemen are "hardly necessary to keep things in line. So few want to be rebels any more" (87). According to Faber, who paraphrases very closely from Henrik Ibsen's 1882 An Enemy of the People, "the most dangerous enemy to truth and freedom" is neither technology nor minority intolerance but "the solid unmoving cattle of the majority" (108). This important statement seems to refer to the public's acceptance of and even craving for mind-numbing mass exploitation and the comfort of its resulting intellectual conformity.
Beatty shows a similar understanding when he notes that the public, "knowing what it want[s], spin[s] happily" (57). He explains the motivation to Montag: "Ask yourself, What do people 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" (59). Beatty thus blames--or, according to ms view, credits--not only the exploiters but the willingly exploited.
According to Clarisse, the inquisitive seventeen year old who helps Montag learn to question and wonder, people no longer really think or talk about anything important: "No, not anything. They name a lot of cars or swimming pools mostly and say how swell. But they all say the same things and nobody says anything different from anyone else" (31). The public is happy to think of pleasure and brand names and talk in cliches.
One of the most pathetic examples of the public's willingness to allow itself to be exploited is not its attraction to obviously seductive pleasures but its automatic acceptance of even the least attractive things that the televisions and radios present. People are so accustomed to enjoying mindless mass communication that they also enjoy the accompanying commercials. While riding on the subway, Montag sees people "tapping their feet to the rhythm of Denham's Dentifrice, Denham's Dandy Dental Detergent, Denham's Dentifrice one two, one two three, one two, one two three . . . mouths . . . faintly twitching the words Dentifrice Dentifrice Dentifrice" (79). The masses are unwilling to break with conformity and relinquish even this least attractive "pleasure" by thinking for themselves.
Mass exploitation hastens the decline of thought even more directly than does intolerant minority pressure, for while pressure groups may make people avoid controversy, easily gratifying entertainment actually provides a seductive alternative to any and all difficult thought. Beatty neatly sums up the philosophy embodied by the mass exploitation of easy gratification: "Life is immediate, the job counts, pleasure lies all about after work. Why learn anything save pressing buttons, pulling switches, fitting nuts and bolts?" (56) While minority pressure comes from a comparative few members of the public, the impetus for this exploitation comes instead from an overwhelming majority. "Publishers, exploiters, broadcasters" sense the public's desire for relaxation and pleasure and exploit this for profit by producing only entertainment which is easily gratifying, and the willingly exploited enjoy their freedom from independent thought.
Four main kinds of this exploitation exist in the novel: the simplification of intellectual challenges, competitive diversions, drug use, and commodifed physicality. Referring to such pleasurable distractions, Beatty says, "So bring on your clubs and parties, your acrobats and magicians, your daredevils, motorcycle helicopters, your sex and heroin, more of everything to do with automatic reflex" (61). Easy gratification is to be pursued to the exclusion of independent thought.
Although, as Bradbury says in the coda, books may have been "burned first by the minorities" (177), works of art with the potential to be challenging were simplified even earlier. Beatty shows that this exploitation of easy gratification began "around a thing called the Civil War" and rapidly accelerated in the twentieth century with the increasing sophistication of mass communication technology, when "films and radios, magazines, books leveled down to a sort of paste-pudding norm" (54). Beatty explains that intellectually challenging works were made easier so that they would appeal to a larger audience: "Classics cut to fit fifteen-minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a two-minute book column, winding up at last as a ten- or twelve-line dictionary resume.... [M]any were those whose sole knowledge of Hamlet. . . was a one-page digest in a book that claimed: now at last you can read all the classics; keep up with your neighbors" (54-55). In this example the exploitation is two-fold in that publishers play both on the public's desires for shorter and easier readings and on desires to "keep up with [the] neighbors" as well.
After such exploitative cutting, books and magazines were watered down still farther so that by the time of the novel only "comics, the good old confessions, [and] trade journals" survive (58). Drama on television has been simplified to the level of the "Clara Dove five-minute romance" (95) and pointless serials featuring a "gibbering pack of tree apes that [say] nothing, nothing, nothing and [say] it loud, loud, loud" (44). Presumably films are similar. Radio is simply "an electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk and music and talk" that figuratively drowns the listener (12). In a more visceral metaphor, radio "vomit[s] . . . a great tonload of tin, copper, silver, chromium, and brass . . . pound[ing listeners] into submission" (79). Most sinister of all, Bradbury describes the ubiquitous thimble-sized ear radios rather ominously as "hidden wasp[s]" (12), "electronic bees" (18), and "praying mantis[es]" (48). The novel's equivalent of music videos on the "musical wall" are now "only color and all abstract," and even such musical art as previously existed in record-playing machines has been so drained of emotion and changed in form that the machines have gradually become merely "joke boxes" (31). Moreover, Clarisse says that in what passes for modern museums, art is "all abstract," paintings refusing to "[say] things or even [show] people" (31) and thereby risk making people think. The public wants easily gratifying entertainment, the exploiters help make the situation worse by producing only that which requires no original thought to enjoy, and thought is gradually abandoned.
Moreover, education is simplified as "school is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling gradually neglected, finally almost completely ignored" (55). Clarisse tells Montag that school now stifles thought rather than encouraging it: "An hour of TV class, an hour of basketball of baseball or running, another hour of transcription history or painting pictures, and more sports, but do you know, we never ask questions, or at least most don't; they just run the answers at you, bing, bing, bing, and us sitting there for four more hours of film teacher" (29). To ensure that children do not grow up to ask what Beatty calls "embarrassing" questions, the government has "lowered the kindergarten age year after year until now [it is] almost snatching them from the cradle" (60). Even to parents school is simply a place to "plunk" the children is nine days out of ten" (96).
This reflects and reinforces the conformity already manifested in the public's acceptance of simplified entertainment, for children who are never taught to think about anything challenging are unlikely to want to be challenged by their entertainment or by anything else. According to Beatty, when "school turn[s] out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators, the word `intellectual,' of course, [becomes] the swear word it deserve[s] to be" (58). Thus the simplification of education reinforces the public's existing desire to avoid difficult thought, reteaching the lesson already taught by mass entertainment: thoughtless conformity is simple and pleasurable.
Just as the simplification of intellectual challenges helps stifle independent thought by catering to and encouraging intellectual apathy, so does an emphasis on competitive diversions. Beatty shows how an overemphasis on sports can take the place of thought: "More sports for everyone, group spirit, fun, and you don't have to think, eh? Organize and organize and superorganize super-super sports" (57). Beatty is even more explicit about the mindlessness of contests: "Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of `facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely `brilliant' with information. Then they'll feel they're thinking, they'll get a sense of motion without moving" (61). Feeling stuffed with unimportant facts thus replaces actual thinking. Likewise, Faber reminds Montag that most people are satisfied if they can "dance faster than the White Clown. shout louder than `Mr. Gimmick' and the parlor `families'" (87). Both sports and contests emphasize a simple competitiveness leading away from individual thought.
A more dangerous type of thought-destroying mass exploitation is socially condoned drug use. Heroin is the most powerful drug in the novel, and Beatty's reference to it is casual enough to suggest that its use is not uncommon (61). Although the sleeping pills prevalent in the society could be used responsibly, the book shows only escapist overuse. When Montag's wife, Millie, overdoses, perhaps accidentally, by taking "thirty or forty" pills (19), the medical technicians who detoxify her and replace her blood tell Montag that the problem is common: "We get these cases nine or ten a night. Got so many, starting a few years ago, we had the special machines built" (15). Millie also shows that alcohol abuse is still widespread, for when she wakes in the morning with a headache and no memory of the previous night, her first thought is that she has a hangover from "a wild party or something" (19). Just as people flee difficult thought with simplified challenges and competitive diversions, they also occupy their time with mind-altering drugs that, presumably, are marketed without care for their dangerous effects.
The most common of the distracting drugs is nicotine, which Bradbury often presents the enemies of thought as using. Beatty smokes compulsively (33, 53-59). Bradbury's conspicuous imagery of flame and smoke certainly reflects the destructive burning of Beatty's profession, but the act itself also reveals the nervous behavior of a mind mechanically avoiding thought; later Bradbury shows Beatty smoking automatically, lighting up habitually without any fanfare (105). The medical "handymen" who save Millie's life, "the men with the cigarettes in their straight-lined mouths," are able to stand "with the cigarette smoke curling around their noses and into their eyes without making them blink or squint" (15-16). Millie's imbecilic friends are similar, for when Guy turns off the television walls the women sit nervously "lighting cigarettes, blowing smoke" (95). Later Montag tells Granger that when he tries to remember his wife, one of the only things he can see is that "there's a cigarette in [her hands]" (156). Montag smokes early on in the novel (24), but as he grows more thoughtful Bradbury simply lets this habit disappear. For the others, however, the ritual of smoking fills the time that might otherwise be used for thought and self-reflection.
The final type of mass exploitation speeding the decline of thought is commodified physicality, both actual and vicarious. People can "head for a Fun Park to bully people around, break windowpanes in the Window Smasher place or wreck cars in the Car Wrecker place with the big steel ball" (30). Powerful "beetle cars" are designed, and probably marketed, for "driving a hundred miles an hour, at a clip where you can't think of anything else but the danger" (84). Millie often drives "a hundred miles an hour across town . . . hearing only the scream of the car" (46), and late at night she likes to "get it up around ninety-five and . . . feel wonderful" hitting rabbits and dogs out in the country (64). Children as young as twelve might go "playing `chicken' and `knock hubcaps'" (30) or go "out for a long night of roaring five or six hundred miles in a few moonlit hours, their faces icy with wind, . . . coming home or not coming at dawn, alive or not alive" (128). Violence and danger thus crowd out original thought.
Even dramatic entertainment contains a small element of actual physicality that helps replace emotional and intellectual content. Beatty reveals this when he says, "If the drama is bad, if the film says nothing, if the play is hollow, sting me with the theremin, loudly. I'll think I'm responding to the play when it's only a tactile response to vibration. But I don't care. I just like solid entertainment" (61). Like Beatty's hypothetical play, Millie's insipid television serials use irresistibly climactic "thunderstorm[s] of sound" that alone give the impression of plot resolution "even though the people in the walls of the room [have] barely moved" (45).
Vicarious physicality provides a seductive alternative to thought just as the more dangerous actual physicality does. Vicarious physicality also comes in many forms in the novel, from entertainment of what Professor Faber calls "passionate lips and the fist in the stomach" (89) to "the three-dimensional sex magazines" (57-58), from the graphic violence of the animated White Clown cartoons to the televising of fatal jet car demolition derbies (94). Common people also go to such races (9). "Nights when things [get] dull, which [is] every night," the firemen "let loose rats . . . and sometimes chickens, and sometimes cats that would have to be drowned anyway" and bet on which will be the first killed by their eight-legged Mechanical Hound (24-25). Occasionally the public voyeurs of violence are treated to television coverage of "dangerous" criminals being similarly hunted down (124, 133-39, 147-49).
Even while Bradbury in the coda warns of intolerant minority pressure, he apparently cannot help but also attack the first type of mass exploitation, that of the simplification of challenges. Most of the coda discusses the way pressure groups threaten free thought by "ripping a page or a paragraph from this book, then that" (177), but some also concerns the simplification of challenging entertainment by exploiting editors. The motive for editors' censoring is sometimes ideological, but it is also sometimes simply economic:
How do you cram 400 short stories by Twain, Irving, Poe, Maupassant
and Bierce into one book?
Simplicity itself. Skin, debone, demarrow, scarify, melt, render down and
destroy. Every adjective that counted, every verb that moved, every
metaphor that weighed more than a mosquito out! Every simile that would
have made a sub-moron's mouth twitch--gone! Any aside that explained the
two-bit philosophy of a first-rate writer--lost!
Every story, slenderized, starved, bluepenciled, leeched and bled white,
resemble[s] every other story. Twain read[s] like Poe read[s] like
Shakespeare read[s] like Dostoevsky read[s] like--in the finale--Edgar
Guest. Every word of more than three syllables [has] been razored. Every
image that demand[s] so much as one instant's attention--shot dead. (176)
The economic rather than ideological motive shown in this impassioned passage is important to recognize. Although the rest of the coda attacks the intolerance of minority pressure groups, including editors who have censored the "controversial" ideas of Bradbury himself, in this instance the motive of the editors is simply to remove anything requiring even "one instant's attention." This exploits readers' desires for easy gratification just as do the "digests-digests, digests-digests-digests" (55), which Beatty in the novel cites as one of the first examples of simplified challenges.
Certainly present-day American society abounds with examples of the exploitation Bradbury discusses: the simplification of challenges, both artistic and educational; an overemphasis of competitive diversions like sports and contests; rampant drug use; and commodified physicality, both actual and vicarious. All of these pleasurable pursuits interest us so much that they threaten to replace independent thought. If it were not for the controversies over censorship and political correctness, the numerous examples of mass exploitation in American society might make readers wonder why Bradbury attacks the real but lesser problem of intolerant pressure groups so much more vehemently.
Professor Faber says that "books are to remind us what asses and fools we are" (86). Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 certainly fulfills this goal, for it shows readers more than forty years after its first publication how individual thought can so easily be supplanted by thoughtless conformity. Bradbury's warning about the dangers of intolerant minority pressure is perceptive and important, but it should not overshadow his subtler but more important warning about mass exploitation. Despite the ease of recognizing the problems of minority pressure in the book, mass exploitation begins earlier, requires the participation of a far greater majority of the population, and has a more direct effect on the decline of thought. This should remind us that even more dangerous than the pressure groups that attempt to peck away at the freedom of expression and, eventually, thought is our own desire for easy gratification. The "publishers, exploiters, broadcasters" have great economic incentive to exploit this desire, and when we allow such pleasurably escapist mass exploitation to replace our thoughtful interest in the real world, we abnegate our intellectual and moral responsibilities as human beings.
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