Every year the sophomore English classes at Paris High School read Ray Bradbury’s novel, Fahrenheit 451. In the novel, Guy Montag, a fireman, is part of a society where people watch television on huge screens and listen to the radio all day. No one reads or carries on meaningful exchanges of ideas because independent thought is frowned upon. The job of firemen in his society is not to put out fires but to burn down houses that contain books, which have been outlawed. Montag’s boss, Beatty, explains to him that people began to ban individual books whose ideas offended them. Eventually, writers all wrote the same thing in order to avoid the banning of their books and books fell out of favor entirely. Those who harbor books from Shakespeare to the Bible must keep them hidden, and, when they are betrayed by a friend, a neighbor, a family member, not only is their home burned down with the books inside, but they themselves are carted off to an asylum. Independent thinkers could corrupt or offend society and so must be silenced.
Fahrenheit 451 is just one of a number of books including masterpieces like Adolf Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984 as well as more modern additions such as Susan Collins’ The Hunger Games and Veronica Roth’s Divergent Trilogy, which can be classified as dystopian novels. Dystopian novels describe a dystopia, the opposite of a utopia — a society in which everything is perfect. In a dystopia, everything is wrong. Propaganda controls the citizens, restricting their access to truth and to information that is contrary to what the government wishes them to know, through technology and the media. The people are under constant surveillance and are further controlled by a mindless bureaucracy of red tape and relentless regulations. Independent thought and freedom are restricted and philosophy and religion are controlled, often by a dictator or a theocracy in which the people are expected to worship the leader. The protagonist in such novels grows to feel that something is wrong with the society and eventually feels compelled to rebel against the system.
When the year 1984 rolled around, many news pundits were quick to point out that Orwell’s society where “Big Brother” was watching every move of the citizenry had not come to pass. We who had read the book chuckled softly to ourselves, content in the knowledge that such a society could ever take place in “the land of the free and the home of the brave!” Yet, a closer look at some of the things which are taking place in the United States in 2017 will demonstrate that we are teetering eerily and dangerously on the edge of a precipice that could plunge us into the very dystopian society that 1984, Brave New World, and Fahrenheit 451 warn us against.
Although Orwell disdained the BBC during his life, in 2016 a statue of the novelist had been commissioned to be placed outside the BBC in London, England. The inscription on the statue reads, “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” The quote is taken from Orwell’s introduction to Animal Farm, a satirical novel about the Russian Revolution and Communism. In this introduction, he goes on to make this scathing indictment of the British establishment in the 1940s, an indictment which could equally apply to the media and much of the intelligentsia of present day America:
He writes, “At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. . . Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals. . . The ordinary people in the street-partly, perhaps, because they are not sufficiently interested in ideas to be intolerant about them-still vaguely hold that ‘I suppose everyone’s got a right to their own opinion.’ It is only, or at any rate it is chiefly, the literary and scientific intelligentsia, the very people who ought to be the guardians of liberty, who are beginning to despise it, in theory as well as in practice.”
Add Orwell’s words here to Bradbury’s book burning to avoid “offending anyone” with ideas contrary to their own, and we can see what is happening in our own society. College campuses have created “safe spaces” where members of minority groups can go and know that others are not allowed to come and dirty their minds with contradictory ideas. Students on many campuses, egged on by their far left professors, angrily petition administrations to rescind invitations to conservatives to speak on their campuses. And when the administrations refuse to rescind the invitations, leftist student groups, aided by club carrying, black-masked Antifa members flown in from out of town, have “protested” with those protests quickly turning into property damaging riots. Often students, sometimes innocent passers-by, have been injured. On one campus, a faculty member who was trying to hurry the speaker into his car was injured by the angry crowd. Recently, Berkeley, that bastion of free speech of the 1960s and 70s, has come under fire for cancelling conservative speakers or charging them exorbitant amounts to pay in advance for crowd control and damage repair. To combat this new image, they insisted last week on allowing a conservative campus group to invite Ben Shapiro to speak. Police controlled the ensuing protests, arresting several. But in advance of the speech, Berkley announced they were providing counselors to speak with students and faculty who were traumatized by the thought of a conservative coming to speak on their campus. The speaker, who is a practicing Jew, was typically accused by his detractors as being a Nazi!
This is right out of the dystopian novels. Free speech, nay even freedom itself, have become offensive to the left, and because the left fills most of the teaching positions at colleges and universities, free speech and freedom have become offensive and traumatizing to college students. And when Orwell says, “Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals,” he could be speaking of the U.S. of the past nine years. During the Obama administration, anyone who disagreed with any policy of the president was accused of being a racist and his/her ideas were dismissed without consideration. There could be no thought independent of the administration or of the media and Hollywood denizens who worshipped at the president’s shrine.
And little has changed. Actors and actresses who are conservatives, still find it difficult to get jobs if they voice their beliefs publicly. And the current President, because he is not a leftist liberal, is vilified at every Hollywood function, at the Oscars, at the Emmys, and with every news report or article in many papers. Conservatives, especially those who voted for President Trump or who support him now, are regularly labeled racists, bigots, white-supremacists, Nazis, homophobes, xenophobes, and their ideas dismissed out of hand. Shane Dayton, in his article “Twelve Best Dystopian Novels,” speaks of Fahrenheit 451 showing the “dumbing down of society, specifically on how Hollywood pop culture slush and TV entertainment can create an entire nation of people who are not only incapable of fighting for their rights, but who don’t even realize the importance of doing so” ( 2008). When people listen to Hollywood personalities for their guidance in political issues and real world problems as many now do, we are in grave danger of losing our rights!
In Brave New World by Adolf Huxley, as Dayton describes it, “left leaning thinking and self hedonism is taken so far to the extreme” that people have lost all concept of honor and religion. And in fact, one of the principles of dystopian novels is the control of philosophical and religious thought. Again we see that happening today. Christianity is carefully kept out of our schools (I could provide myriads of examples here, but space prohibits it) while Muslims are provided with a place to pray. The government of the past administration attempted to force religious organizations to provide contraception or the “morning after pill” to their employees through employer-provided insurance, even though to do so violated their religious beliefs. Thankfully the Supreme Court intervened in one such case and when it takes up another this year, the current Justice Department will be arguing on behalf of the Christians.
In 1984 again, “Big Brother” saw everything and in today’s world that is close to the truth. Security cameras abound everywhere, on the streets, in business, on homes, and in the last presidential election we have recently discovered that the Obama administration “unmasked,” that is revealed, the names and all kinds of personal information of private citizens who were spoken to or about by members of foreign governments whose communications our government routinely listens in on. Why this is egregious is because those individuals were not under investigation by our government for any wrong-doing, but were intimates or members of the Republican presidential candidate’s election team. At least one of them, Paul Manafort, was wire-tapped, purportedly for something he may have been involved in 2007 — nine years earlier — with the then president of the Ukraine, but which suddenly became an issue requiring wire-tapping when he became a part of candidate Trump’s team. The information obtained about these Republicans was widely distributed among the Obama administration and no doubt to members of candidate Clinton’s team. The stench of political corruption by the Democrats here, and the danger to the freedom and privacy of all Americans is frightening. These individuals were not targeted because of any crime they had committed, but simply because their political views were not those of the government. That is a chilling thought!
The banning of books is not a new thing in the United States, but what is new is that the same liberals who for decades argued against such suppression of ideas is now either supportive or strangely silent on the issue. Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn is banned for use of the “n” word, even though Blacks routinely use that word to describe one another and even though the book itself is anti-slavery. The legendary Civil War novel, Gone with the Wind, has joined the list of offensive books and the classical movie version has been so vilified that theaters have been forced to cancel showings of it. And the list of offensive items moves beyond books and movies. A student once draped a banana peel over a tree limb on his college campus rather than throw it on the ground, little difference if you ask me, but Black on his campus were traumatized by the sight of it and the hapless student forced to publicly apologize. A college administrator also had to apologize when he invited a group of Black students to his home only to have them offended by a table centerpiece which contained cotton stalks. It is highly unlikely the student intended to compare Blacks to monkeys in trees by leaving his banana peel there nor did the college administrator’s wife intend to reference black slaves picking cotton in the fields of Georgia with her fall table decoration, but intent has no meaning. If one individual imagines himself/herself to be offended, then apologies must be produced. When did our children become such wimps? When the left pushed their dystopian ideas into our colleges and universities.
Liberal English professors at colleges across the country routinely assign dystopian novels as reading material for their students, ironically ignoring the similarities between the horrid, futuristic societies described in those novels and the very atmosphere that they themselves are promoting in our country. “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” These are not words that they believe any longer. To them, liberty means the right to say what they wish to say and to do what they wish to do without any opposition, verbal or otherwise. Those of us who truly understand the meaning of liberty, of the freedoms upon which this country was founded, must keep Orwell’s words as our mantra. “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” And we must not allow our voices to be silenced!