what happens before the story? i mean what caused the books to be banned?i understand that people in the story have been exposed to the books and i realize that people are afraid of conflict that are caused by the books and their readings. In the book it mentions, that minorities are regarded as not mattering. and it also leads us to believe that books are only being read by the minorities. I don't understand if only minority reads the books then why they are causing so much of a conflict for everyone???

Amber, banning books is a form of censorship--Society trying to decide what we can or can't read or ultimately that we shouldn't read at all. The society in Farneheit 451 has become focused on technology and conformity. Books present different ideas and opinions that might cause people to think for themselves, and that is why they are dangerous. Although the book doesn't tell us what happened to cause book banning, we can see by the society described (look at the lifestyle of Montag's wife) what may have happened to cause this.

What caused the books to be banned, and the means by which it occured, is mostly revealed through dialogues between major characters -- mostly between Montag and Beatty, but including Faber, also.

Why the books were banned is that they bred non-conformity, which led to conflict which led to confusion and unhappiness. People had to think for themselves. In many cases, people were happy to have access to materials with conflicting and deeper ideas limited, because they didn't have to expend any energy thinking about their lives or beliefs. Far easier and less complicated to just live at an animal level and not deal with thought and reflection. There is a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon where Calvin gives a book back to his mother. She asked how he liked it. He said it gave him a lot to think about. She looks pleased. But then, in the final panel, Calvin says, "Don't give me any more, it's complicating my life".

Some of the censorship is derived from government. Free-thinking people are hard to keep happy. Better they just focus on mindless entertainment than think about whether or not government is making a better life.

Sub-groups in our society today often limit reading to certain books. When I was in High School, I had to read "The Catcher in the Rye" and "Lady Chatterley's Lover" in secret in my room. Neither the school nor my parents were comfortable with it. No harm in making sure that maturity levels are appropriate. Religions often warn people to limit their reading to certain kinds of reading, because things outside their "approved list" can introduce doubt and create conflict and loss of faith. Again, no problem with religions, while recognizing individual conscience, to help people focus on "the way".

We often censor ourselves -- tragically -- through laziness. We are just too lazy to read and to think and to discuss serious matters with friends and family and collegues. It is just easier to agree with the prevailing groupthink. As the saying goes, "To get along, go along".

My view is that the text of F451 seems to support the interpretation that, in general, the censorship occured a little at a time, until a certain threshold was reached, where the book burnings and outlawing of books began in full force.

This kind of life is not fully human. It is only a small part of what we are capable of as human beings.

In my classes (I teach part time community college -- English and Philosophy), I have my students read a wonderful, short essay by Kant. The essay begins with this paragraph:

"Enlightenment is man's leaving his self-caused immaturity. Immaturity is the incapacity to use one's intelligence without the guidance of another. Such immmaturity is self-caused if it is not caused by lack of intelligence, but by lack of determination and courage to use one's intelligence without being guided by another. . .have the courage to use your own intelligence! is therefore the motto of the enlightenment."

It is a great essay. I sent a photocopy to my older brother almost ten years ago, and we still talk about it. He says it helped him take responsibility for his own beliefs.

Censorship means that someone has decided they can take that function away from us and determine what we ought to think. Too often, we allow the rational function to be usurped by others.

John Adams had an interesting thing to say about censorship. He said anything that built up the human spirit and was beneficial should be published. But anything that tore down the dignity of man should be banned.

Hmmm!!

John Stuart Mill "On Liberty"

". . . the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinions of others, to do so would be wise, or even right. These are all good reasons for remonstrating with him, or reasoning with him, or persuading, him, or entreating him but not for compelling him,or visiting him with any evil in case he do otherwise. To justify that, the conduct from which it is desired to deter him must be calculated to produce evil to someone else. The only part of the conduct of anyone, for which he is amenable to society,is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign."

John Milton on the question of censorship. (In Milton's Areopagitica"):

Well, the quote would just be too danged long. Summary. Milton argues against the censorship of books (in what is one of the greatest essays I've ever read) on the grounds that learning and life develop in the midst of opposition. In life, he argues, good and evil live side by side. We grow by overcoming them and freely choosing the good over the bad. Censoring books denies us the opportunity to grow in this dialectic manner of looking at opposites in order to more fully understand your own view. Books with contending viewpoints -- even when they appear dangerous -- allow us to more fully re-evaluate our own position, strengthing what is good in our beliefs and correcting what is weak or wrong.

So, Milton argues:

"I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world [via censorship of ideas we don't like], we bring impurity much rather; that which purifies us is trial and trial is by what is contrary. That virtue therefore which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evil, and knows not the utmost that vice promises to her followers, and rejects it, is but a blank virtue, not a pure; her whiteness is but an excremental whiteness . . . Since therefore, the knowledge and survey of vice is in this world so necessary to the constituting of human virtue, and the scanning of error to the confirmation of truth, how can we more safely and with less danger scout into the regions of sin and falsity than by reading all manner of tractates, and hearing all manner of reason? And this is the benefit which may be had of books promiscuously read."

Milton on the power of books (from the same essay):

"For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively and as vigorously productive as those fabulous dragon's teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men. And yet, on the other hand, unless wariness be used, as good almost kill man as kill a good book: who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the earth; but a good book is the precious lifeblood of a master spirit, embalemed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life . . ."

Somehow people have come to have no interest in books and with the help of the omnipresent firemen hostility toward books dominates the plot.

How have they become disinterested?
Fast cars, big screens, constant sales pitches that overwhelm, ear pieces with canned messages and slogans, stimulants & depressants, a myriad of special interest groups at every corner seeking "their" just rewards.

This all seems to have worn down a generation or two (prior to the setting in F451) and then the rest is history - Revised at that! The fireman ALWAYS burned rather than extinguished. Books have become the Enemy to the need for everyone being equal.

Books complicate and lie rather than inform and enlighten. Thus, it became much easier to give into the censors as opposed to working against. So, imagination and those seeking to be an individual no longer had a place in society. Mildred can not even remember where she met her own husband. Abortions, suicide, addictions, constant war, propaganda, mindless media, all became the norm in the typical household.

The scenes in the movie capture this tone when you see the children herded to the burnings. It is a real "gather around" image. The indoctrination starts at infancy and then no other lifestyle is known.






[This message has been edited by fjpalumbo (edited 11-20-2002).]

Mr.Dark:::::::

Hmm. Let's see now. Wasn't John Stuart Mills an atheist?

I know his father was...even tho trained as a Presbyterian minister in Scotland. You know what? I better go back to the encyclopedia. Even so.... I don't know if I have the sufficient amount of energy right this moment....to argue the 'value' of an atheist....and what they have to say.

By value, I mean.... in terms of being able to discern actual reality...since....actual reality includes more than what we call ordinary. Maybe once over this "cold?" I'll get something going here.....

[This message has been edited by Nard Kordell (edited 11-20-2002).]

Beware the ad hominem fallacy. The truth of what someone says is not necessarily tied to who that person is. Sometimes "bad" people say good things and good people say bad things. I know it says a good tree bears only good fruit and a bad tree bears only bad fruit, but I wonder sometimes if that is more a general maxim than an unalterable, absolute fact.

Hope you get over the cold. We like our posting here to be vigorous, right?

Wondering how some of you feel about the proposed ousting of NJ poet laureate, Amiri Baraka (Leroy Jones) in light of your on-going discussion about censorship. Read below:

NEWS
NJ NEWS
North Jersey News

Legislature's ardor to fire N.J. poet laureate cools
Thursday, November 21, 2002

By PAUL H. JOHNSON
Staff Writer

Amiri Baraka sparked controversy with his poem about Sept. 11, which many say is anti-Semitic. (PETER MONSEES/THE RECORD)

The drive to fire New Jersey Poet Laureate Amiri Baraka - accused of writing an anti-Semitic poem - appears to have run out of steam in the Legislature.

Calls for Baraka's resignation came fast and furious from all quarters two months ago as a result of the poem, which suggests Israel knew about the Sept. 11 attacks. When he refused to step aside, some legislators agreed to introduce a bill to allow Governor McGreevey to oust him.

McGreevey still supports those efforts, but several Democratic legislators said this week they have little appetite to take on the Newark-based poet.

"As far as I'm concerned, it's a dead issue," said state Sen. Ronald L. Rice, D-Essex.

"With me it's a non-issue,'' said Assemblyman Craig A. Stanley, D-Essex.

Stanley said the Legislature has more important business to worry about, such as the state's huge budget deficit, and doesn't need "to waste time and energy over an appointee that wrote a poem that some people interpreted as anti-Semitic."

At issue are these lines in the poem "Somebody Blew up America":

Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed

Who told 4,000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers

To stay home that day

Why did Sharon stay away?

The New Jersey Anti-Defamation League said Tuesday that McGreevey and other Democratic leaders promised action, and that it expects Baraka to be out of a job by the end of the year.

But some Democrats think firing Baraka would go too far.

"At one time I thought that that was the best way of dealing with his statements," said Sen. Byron M. Baer, D-Englewood, a member of the Senate Government Affairs Committee, which would have to approve any Baraka legislation before sending it to the Senate floor. "I think it is more important that there is broad repudiation of those views than removing [Baraka]."

The controversy erupted in late September, when the poet read the poem at the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation's Poetry Festival in Stanhope. McGreevey sought Baraka's resignation, but the poet refused to step down.

Some Trenton observers said the governor's demand had backfired.

"McGreevey got caught with his foot in his mouth," said Walter Fields, publisher of Northstarnetwork.com and a former political director for the New Jersey chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. "It was a stupid idea from the very beginning that you can legislate away a poet laureate."

Even if the state were successful in firing Baraka, the poet has vowed a court challenge to any effort to remove him. Such a case could drag on for months, if not years.

Baer said that in the end, it would be more effective to condemn Baraka than allow the controversy to become a battle of wills between the poet and his opponents.

"It seems to me the best way to attack bigotry; to reduce bigotry in our society is not for those who are the victims of bigotry to attack each other but to join in unity to attack bigotry itself," Baer said. "This divisiveness might get a lot of attention and be popular in some limited areas, but it is not constructive."

Assemblyman Michael P. Carroll, R-Morris, who supports firing Baraka, said it is not in the governor's interests to fire Baraka and offend his own constituents, so the Democrats won't do anything to remove the poet, but will continue to condemn Baraka.

Baraka was named to a two-year term in July. The post carries a stipend of $10,000.

For his part, Baraka doesn't think he'll be fired and is angry he has not received any money for his services. He said he would take the state to court to get paid.

"I don't expect anything," he said. "I just wish they would quit fooling around and send me the money."

If there is really....Freedom of Speech....why can't I hollar my lungs out "FIRE!" in a crowded theater?

Well, because we know the ramifications of doing so, you might say.

But I say, "Oh, really!!

Now think about it: There are a lot of ramifications out there even more destructive than hollaring FIRE! in a crowded theater...but it still goes out under the heading of Freedom of Speech. Pornography is one.

Ever talk to those "burned" on it! Psychiatric Clinics are full of people trying to regain their "minds" after years of pornography. You want a great business to get into now? I really mean it! Honestly! Get into 'pornography addiction studies! You will soon have (and will have now)...great success in the field. The future is full of promise, with clients everywhere.

No one's hollaring FIRE! here... because it's too complicated, a field of money and power!!

Across the board Freedom of Speech can be a form of social insanity. What's one of the reasons? For one...there is always a brand new generation coming up that have no idea what they are in for...what the previous generation has managed to produce as unconscious (or sometimes conscious) self entrapments, in the guise of Freedoms. That's why history....as they say...' repeats' itself. Always a new generation "oblivious" to the ways of a previous generation or generations....that fell into their own particular abyss. Trouble is their abyss possibly becomes my abyss....if I think I'm so smart that no one can tell me anything....

Green Shadow,

You offered few hints about why you posted the article of ousting Baraka but I presume you intend a discussion of how this might be considered censorship.

I'm familiar with Baraka's work and if New Jersey had taken the time to ask me I could have told them they were making a huge mistake naming him as laureate. Surely there are others who are more deserving. And the fact they backed themselves into a corner because they can't fire him without additional legislation is laughable. Why shouldn't the government be able to exercise the same right as any consumer in that when a consumer is displeased with its purchase, the consumer can ask for a refund or, at least, purchase something from the competitor?

Because that's how I see this, and, apparantly, so does Mr. Baraka in his rightful demand for payment. Firing him from his post is hardly an act of censorship. Mr. Baraka is free to publish his drivel any way he can. The state isn't stopping him. They just don't want him to be their laureate.

It's the free marketplace of ideas. Just because your idea doesn't cut it there, it doesn't mean it's been censored.

Nard,

You make some good points about pornography. Of course, someone will argue that one person's definition of pornography is another person's art. But we can all agree on what child pornography is so it's rightfully banned. Not so easy with "regular" pornography.

No, you can't yell "Fire!" in a crowded movie house unless, of course, there's really a fire. Your freedom of speech doesn't allow you to purposely say things to inflict harm. But if it's truthful, well, that's a defense in libel cases.

So you say pornography has ruined lives? I agree. I don't purchase it and can't abide anyone who does. But to seek some kind of restriction on this or satisfaction through the courts puts you in the same crowd of do-gooders who'd protect us from tobacco and fast food. There has to be personal responsibility somewhere.

Outlaw pornography? I wish. But it ain't gonna happen.

Pete

Nard & Pterran:

To continue your discussion on pornography...I find it appalling that when I check my email and find pornography junk mail. Or, when I am on AOLim that I get messages from people trying to show me their pornography. Mind you I have done nothing to solicit either of these contacts, but it is simply unavoidable. They have the right to IM me or send me emails.

It also angers me that they send it in tricky ways, with their email names appearing as "Emily" or any common name. I could know an Emily, and I innocently open the email or respond to the message and am ambushed with pure evil. It is unfortunate that I cannot seem to protect MYSELF from pornography, but with free speech you've got to take the negative with the positive.

Keli::::::Pterran:::

First: Of the little American history I do know....I find the founding fathers had different ideas about censorship than what we see now. A history scholar may differ. But I found many passages from people like John Adams and Washington, saying that once speech went beyond the compass of moral sensibility, it no longer fell under the scope of free speech they had in mind. Of course now we live in a society where many many people do not know where the dot goes for the middle of a circle. I would say its finally epidemic...

But Consider This:

In Fahrenheit 451, with all the talk about censorship...what books were worth remembering in the final scene?

[ I know. I know. It was eventually published in Playboy. That's another story altogether.] But it was first published as a short story, The Fireman, in Galaxy magazine.

The books remembered were Melville, and Stevenson, Dickens, etc etc.

I was somewhere one time when the question was asked Bradbury ... if the pornographic should remain as free speech....and, as always...kind to the most mundane and ugly...( I've heard of few exceptions...)...Bradbury tolerated this by given it the smallest 'place', and the very least in attention....

Interesting posts above. As far as the founding fathers point goes, I'd venture to guess they had no idea things could get carried as far as they have. It's become so that even strip shows are protected speech. Hardly the case, in my view.

And the Playboy issue. (No pun intended.) While it's been years since I've seen an issue, I'd venture to say the contents are fairly tame. Even so, take away the pictures of naked women and what do you have? Er, not much. So I deplore the magazine not only for its content but for its use of sex to draw a crowd, a crowd, I'd guess, that probably couldn't be bothered to read the literature published between the air-brushed pages of its idealized women.

Still yet another good point is the problem of this kind of stuff forced on us who don't want it in their lives. The spam e-mail is a good example but I have another one from just the other day. Some kid in a muscle car cruised pass my young daughters and I walking along the street. Blaring from the open car windows was some of the vilest rap music you're likely to hear. Free speech, sure, but what about my right to raise my children in a world free from that kind of garbage.

No, some of the examples we've discussed weren't necessarily what Ray meant about censorship in F451. His point, I think, was mainly the suppression of ideas, radical ideas. And I think he meant ideas that were radical because they were possibly threatened long cherished beliefs. Ideas that are considered radical today - that Jews were behind the 09/11 disaster (see the poem by Baraka referred to in the article above) or that it's good to have sex with children or to provoke a response, any response, in art because the art offends common sensibilities (the recent removal of the statue depicting a body hitting the pavement during the WTC attack) - aren't radical at all. They're just offensive. And to turn away from that kind of stuff isn't censorship at all but, instead, it's just an exercise in good judgement.

Pete

quote:

Originally posted by pterran:
... it's just an exercise in good judgement.

Pete

Pete-

While I agree with the sentiment of your post, it is the piece I excerpted which concerns me. In your argument, just whose judgment is good? Yours? The government�s? The police? The NEA? Obviously, what is offensive to you, could be beautiful to me.

For lack of a better example immediately at hand: do you think Pablo Picasso met with rave reviews when he first unveiled his cubist art? Certainly not. The cubist forms were called vulgar and worse. Today, they are considered epoch making in their originality. Imagine if someone had decided they weren't fit for viewing, and hid them away.

My point (of course) being, when you start to censor, you leave the decision to censor in another person's hands. What makes that person any more qualified than you or I to determine what should be seen or heard? I'm not suggesting I have any more answers than the next guy - I'm just suggesting the notion of censorship is a slippery slope, and once society starts moving in that direction, its difficult to change course.