I finally got around to reading Fahrenheit 451. Year after year it’s made my list of books to read and year after year I never quite manage it. There’s a certain small irony in never-reading a book that’s fundamentally about a culture that no longer reads, but there’s only so much time and far too many books.
It’s a scary book. It’s taken its rightful place as one of the cultural dystopias in the public consciousness along with Brave New World and 1984. Fahrenheit 451 is a well-known and famous classic so I hardly have any place discussing whether it is a ‘good’ book or a ‘bad’ book, but I do have a place in discussing whether it is proving true.
As mentioned repeatedly before, I work for a Library System. I do not work at or for any one library, but I manage, in part, the technology behind seventy different libraries. As part of my job I respond to the technical needs and questions of the member libraries and I periodically attend library conferences where the future of libraries is discussed.
In Fahrenheit 451 book burning is not really the great evil. It is a natural response to a cultural anomie towards knowledge. Having a book isn’t a grand crime against the state as much as it is a grand crime against the society. Pursuit of knowledge is frivolous and dangerous for everyone and so book-burning is a honorable and necessary response.
It is easy to dismiss any dystopian novel if one only attends to the specific evils. Our culture is hardly going down the road of Alpha and Beta people or Room 101s. The motivations and causes of the dystopian settings must be analyzed outside of the fictional results. Fahrenheit 451 has a number of foundation motivations, media distraction and anti-intellectualism among them, both of which are present concerns in contemporary society. But is there any basis for this? As much as we might fear the coming ‘idiocracy’ that doesn’t make it a looming threat.
From the standpoint of libraries, things are not so terribly bad at all. Library circulation is almost universally up. The rate, by percentage, has fallen off to an extent, but libraries are hardly flailing. They are getting more patrons than ever before, more books are checked out than in any time in history, and the number of library resources is growing as fast as our culture itself.
Books, well, physical books are living on borrowed time. E-books will someday become more convenient, cheaper, and more accessible than any physical book, but is that such a bad thing? Books themselves were an improvement on fragile papyrus, expensive velium, and immovable stone. E-books and other digital distribution methods will not destroy books, they will improve books. Even in this future world, the libraries that Ray Bradbury loved so much, have a place. Already our library system is setting up methods of e-book distribution. Our libraries provide public wireless, printing capability, and power for a casual read. Our current catalog allows for searches of our system to be made anywhere in the world and holds can be placed for later pickup. Combine the search with a digital distribution method and libraries will transcend any fire that Guy Montag might light.
True enough, libraries are on a point of change and they do not always respond so optimistically, but neither books nor libraries no intellectualism seem to be slowing in anyway. If anything, the great battles fought over such a nebulous concept are signs of its triumphant success. The digital age has become both a near infinite source of and a tremendous inspiration to knowledge and any backlash, no matter how loud or vigorous, is little more than dying screams.
I enjoyed Farhenheit 451 immensely. It is a tremendous work and expertly written, but reading it I could not help but feel that it’s power is lost on me. Perhaps in the Cold War, when it was written, the sense of doom was greater, but sitting here at a computer, connected to more ‘books’ than anyone ever has been in history, the fear is lost. Farhenheit 451 was successful. What it set out to do has already been done. Every book has been fireproofed and rendered immune. The ashes that are left mean not a thing.
