Fahrenheit 451

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0:00:03.1 Natalie Dowzicky: Welcome to Pop & Locke. I’m Natalie Dowzicky.

0:00:05.3 Landry Ayres: And I’m Landry Ayres. We are back with another edition of Pop & Locke Summer Book Club and boy howdy, do we have a barn burner of a book to discuss today. [chuckle] It’s been banned, blamed and lit aflame but it still carries on. [chuckle] Joining us to discuss Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 is features editor at Reason, Peter Suderman.

0:00:31.0 Peter Suderman: Thanks for having me.

0:00:33.0 Landry Ayres: And Cato Institute Senior Fellow, Pat Eddington.

0:00:36.9 Patrick Eddington: Greetings to all.

0:00:39.4 Natalie Dowzicky: Now, I know I said this for our 1984 recording, but Fahrenheit 451 is definitely one of the most famous stories ever written and eventually adapted to a largely disappointing movie, [chuckle] to say the least, but what is it about this story that… Why does it continue to live on? Why does it… Why is it required reading for basically every middle schooler across the country?

0:01:05.0 Peter Suderman: I mean, I think there’s a bunch of reasons why this remains relevant to contemporary audiences. For one, it’s just an enjoyable, easy read, right? It moves pretty fast, it’s a short book, you can read it in just a few hours in an evening, but it also just sort of feels like it’s part of the time, right? It feels of this era in a certain way. This book isn’t about Twitter and it’s not about social media, and it’s not about cancel culture, but it doesn’t take too much of a leap to move it in that direction, right? It feels like a book about a lot of the debates that we are having in our political discourse today. This is a book with a lot of rants about speech suppression and speech suppression in various forms, and what you are and aren’t allowed to say and what it means to be an individual with anti-​social thoughts, someone who sort of has a view that is against the consensus or outside of the acceptable range of views. That sort of conversation, that sort of debate has been part of our conversation, I mean, you can see in this book for well over 50 years at this point, and it’s still very much part of the conversation today. And so, this book is a classic, in part, because it’s just sort of well-​executed and fun and enjoyable to read. It’s very passionate and sort of fiery, so to speak, but it’s also relevant, because it’s about issues and ideas that people continue to care about.

0:03:00.0 Patrick Eddington: It’s accessible, right? There’s a slice of science fiction that tends to be inaccessible in a lot of respects, and kind of has a tendency to leave people scratching their heads wondering what’s going on. This is written in a very breezy style for the most part, not a tremendous amount of jargon, and yet this whole issue of government tyranny against a backdrop of war, which is one of the things that disappointed me about both movies, although I re-​watched the 1966 version, as well as the 2018 one. And the ’66 version is clearly, vastly, more authentic, much closer to Bradbury’s vision, even though they were somewhat limited by the available props of the day in the mid-​1960s when this thing was made. But it has this feeling, at least for me, of being very dark and very stifling. You get a sense of how stifling the society was that he was talking about. For me, I think, some of the issues that stand out that maybe make the book kinda fall short for me is that you don’t get a lot of background here, right? We don’t get a lot of build-​up, essentially, to exactly how the society got to the place where it was.

0:04:21.1 Peter Suderman: I mean, you do get some sense that it’s not all that… That it hasn’t been all that long, because you do have people who remember to some extent the before times. Now, it’s not quite perfectly clear whether they remember because that’s the way it was when they were children or because maybe they heard stories from their elders, but there is some discussion about the history and English professors who are walking the train tracks, and it’s at least suggested that they at one point had gone through kind of traditional academic training as we think of it, or as Bradbury thought of it, you know, in the 1950s.

0:05:00.7 Patrick Eddington: Yeah, but there’s no sense of exactly why it all went off the rails, right? What event or series of events essentially led to this state of affairs, to this particular dystopia that we’re talking about here. So, the lack of background there, that’s one of the things that I kind of find lacking. And then what’s completely lacking from the 2018 movie is the sense of impending war, and even in the ’66 version of the movie, you only get a fleeting reference to it. This is when Montag goes into his little rant in front of all of his wife’s so-​called friends. That really had a very Stepford wife feel to it. [chuckle] I was having flashbacks to that movie as I was watching that entire segment. But there’s that aspect that is also missing for me in that regard. But kind of in the larger context, this book speaks to ultimately timeless issues about government tyranny, about suppression of speech, about essentially trying to erase the individual, about trying to create a completely homogenized society where everybody is “happy.” And I think all those things ultimately are timeless, and they speak as I think Peter said, to kind of the moment that we’re living in in a lot of respects.

0:06:24.4 Peter Suderman: I mean, if you look at the news today, I was just reading of Op-​ed pages this morning, and I am exaggerating, but only a little bit when I say that half [chuckle] of the Op-​eds and the major newspapers this morning were about bills banning or restricting the teaching of critical race theory in schools. And again, Bradbury was not writing about critical race theory or…

0:06:49.5 Natalie Dowzicky: Right.

[chuckle]

0:06:49.7 Peter Suderman: About Republican state bills to legislate teaching of how we teach race in history in K-12 or higher Ed. That’s not exactly what he was writing about, and yet he has written… He wrote this book in a way that is both quite universal and strangely specific, and so, it always feels like it applies to whatever the speech controversies of the day are.

0:07:22.5 Patrick Eddington: And I think what I found so interesting about the book, and this is another one of those classic cases where even if you have the best director and the best producer in the world, and even an all-​star cast, you can never really completely, I think, get the full flavor of a book on the screen. It’s just very difficult if for no other reason than trying to keep an audience’s attention for two hours can be a challenge in a lot of respects, unless you’ve got a lot of CGI and other things going on these days.

0:07:53.5 Patrick Eddington: But the character development that we do get is to me very fascinating, and the relationship between, such as it is, between Montag and his wife, Mildred in the book, Linda in the 1966 film. These are two people that you just really wonder how the hell they got together to begin with, and you even get that, right? I mean, there’s that one point where he asks her what was the first time we met, and she couldn’t recall it. Whereas for most couples who are truly happily married, you know exactly the moment essentially that you knew that that was the person, and so, you just… You get this sense that there’s this societal dystopia that also extends down to these relationships. And you see that in the superficiality of the relationship that his wife has with her so-​called female friends. It’s… Yeah, it’s… I don’t know, it just creeps me out in a lot of ways. [chuckle] It really does.

0:08:57.9 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah, a lot of the relationships, and especially in the book are a very distant, which is one of the reasons I wrote down, what is the purpose of the Clarisse character? So she comes in and she’s like a younger teenager-​ish, I think, and it stuck out to me, because she was actually trying to have deep conversations with Montag, and that was like the only conversations other than the long monologues from Beatty and others about what firemen do that had any sort of substance. And she just asked simple questions, well, are you happy? And just the purpose… I still can’t figure out the purpose of her other than she is mainly a tool for him to see what he is starting to pick up on about censorship and that kinda stuff, but do you guys see any other purpose for her?

0:10:02.0 Patrick Eddington: I thought she was basically a… What’s the word I’m looking for? Essentially a substitute for his conscience, and that it was essentially an awakening. And what it is that actually gets it going is a little bit fuzzy. Landry, you had something you wanted to jump in with.

0:10:20.5 Landry Ayres: Well, I just… I think that there very much is a reading in here that sort of gets at both what you’re saying, Pat, and what Natalie was saying, which is it’s… To use a sort of misunderstood and I think overwrought trope that gets tossed out a lot of the days, it is a very much a sort of proto manic pixie dream girl that we get.

[laughter]

0:10:41.6 Natalie Dowzicky: Right.

[laughter]

0:10:41.9 Landry Ayres: Where she comes into his life, and it’s like, “Do you like the Smiths?” And he’s like, “Oh yeah.”

0:10:47.7 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah. Have you looked at the flowers?

[laughter]

0:10:50.5 Landry Ayres: Yeah. And I was thinking about it because we had just… Like, Natalie had hinted at before we just read 1984, and Julia very much acts similarly to the protagonist of that book, Winston Smith. Now, I think Julia, I think mostly just for the… Because she has more time in the story to act and do things, has more agency and I think is more fleshed out, but I think Orwell and Bradbury both don’t have great track records writing female characters. [laughter] I don’t think that that’s primarily what they’re focused on per se, but I do think there is some merit in what Pat is saying for sure, about it is a reflection of his conscience, but it is kinda odd the way they toss her aside so quickly. I did think that maybe you could build up that relationship more and maybe the car crash that she dies in becomes more emotionally effective later on, but then you also get the sort of weird mirroring later on when Montag is running away, and I think he’s been tranquilized, I think, and he almost gets hit by a car as well.

0:12:06.5 Landry Ayres: So there is a sort of instance of sort of seeing that spirit awakening in him and the threat of a possible demise that also has met her. And you could also possibly think that later on towards the end of the book, when Montag has met with the sort of intellectuals and people living on the fringes of society, and they reveal to him, they’re like, “Well, we think Montag is actually gonna be caught in just a few minutes,” and they basically trot out this stranger, this fake Montag to put on a show that, yeah, we’ve arrested him and we’re gonna deal with him. You could… I mean, obviously, the state in this story has the power and drive to deal with their issues with subterfuge and ways that are not above board. You could see that maybe someone had known about Clarisse and maybe she didn’t just get into an accident and somebody hit her with the car, [chuckle] and so…

0:13:12.2 Natalie Dowzicky: Clarisse didn’t kill herself.

[laughter]

0:13:14.7 Landry Ayres: Yeah, the red string, I’m pulling it as I’m saying it, but I might be overthinking this, but it is… I did want more out of that character, and I think it’s reflective of the time it was written.

0:13:27.0 Peter Suderman: In one of the afterwards that Bradbury wrote to this book, he talks about the character of Clarisse, and he talks about adapting his book to be a play, and so, we mentioned adaptations earlier, and this book has been adapted into a couple of different movies, but it was also adapted into a stage play in Los Angeles in the early 1980s. And Bradbury himself did the adaptation, expanded the book in a bunch of ways, and he talks about being tempted to give Clarisse more and to bring her back, in part because that’s what Truffaut does in the 1966 film adaptation, is that she appears at the end. She has become one of the book people who is living in the book colony as a book, which is kind of great, right? Is that it’s a softer and happier ending in a lot of ways, a more hopeful ending. And what Bradbury says is, he toyed with the idea because he was expanding and changing the book a little bit when he moved it to the stage, but ultimately, he felt like her death was a darkness that the book needed to have. And that what he wanted was for people to see that this was in fact a dark world that didn’t always have happy endings. And I’m summarizing a little bit and sort of the gist of what he said, but he was arguing. His argument basically was, this book is about a dark world and about a dark place and her death is one of the ways through which we understand that darkness.

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0:15:07.9 Landry Ayres: There are two ways that a lot of people end up seeing the sort of danger and warning that Bradbury wanted to portray, and they’re sort of tied up in one another, but they’re from different trains of thought. There is the censorship, free speech, censoring, reading, angle, but then there is also a technophobic rise of mass media against reading, that you could read the sort of scourge of screens. And you could definitely understand how Bradbury might be like, “We gotta limit screen time for kids.”

[chuckle]

0:15:49.1 Natalie Dowzicky: No more iPads.

[laughter]

0:15:51.2 Landry Ayres: What do you make of Bradbury’s sort of contempt for mass media that’s embedded in this story?

0:15:57.8 Peter Suderman: So he, for a long time after the book was published would sort of in a way that is typical of his cantankerous style, would look at all these people saying, “This is a book about censorship.” And he’d be like, “No, it’s not. This is a book about screens and how mass media is bad.” [laughter] And it’s not quite a fully luddite, fully techno-​skeptic book. He, in one of the monologues about how mass media dumbs things down, one of the characters actually says, “Well, look you could make things that are smart in this medium.” It’s possible, right? It’s not that it’s… That the medium necessarily demands this. It’s just that as you start making products that are designed to appeal to the masses and then to the median viewer, median reader, median person, inevitably, you’re gonna send off the rough and interesting edges that come from individual visions.

0:16:56.8 Peter Suderman: And so, in some ways, this is a little bit self-​serving coming from a novelist, coming from someone who was a self-​styled kind of independent individualist. On the other hand, there’s a truth to this, and there’s in particular a truth to this in the post-​war era, where a lot of media was just… A lot of mass media was just coming online, and there wasn’t this kind of profusion that we have now of hundreds of cable channels and then thousands of Internet channels, and sort of all of this stuff that is much more individually targeted. At the time, if you were watching television, it was three networks. And those three networks made explicit decisions often basically working hand-​in-​hand with government sensors or quasi-​sensors from the FCC to produce products that were intentionally blanched, that didn’t say too much or go too far off the beaten path, because in part they didn’t want to upset the FCC, and in part because if your goal is to capture the mass audience, then the interesting stuff that happens at the edges of human society, on the fringes, the weird people, they’re not going to be part of that, right?

0:18:07.5 Peter Suderman: If you just sort of think of human… Of a nation or a culture’s acceptable idea set, it’s gonna look like a bell curve, and the stuff that’s really interesting is gonna be at the edges, and the stuff that’s really boring is in the center, and what the networks did, was they targeted the exact center of that bell curve, because that’s where the audience was, and that’s thus, where the money was from the advertisers. And in fact, the advertisers were also a big part of enforcing that sort of conformity and conformist way of producing television shows. And so, in part, you can see this book as just as a reaction to the mid-​century dominance of network television and the way it produced material that was just designed not to offend or interest anyone too much and to stay very much in a narrow lane of acceptable kind of centrist, non-​fringe-​y thought. And Bradbury just hated that because he was a cantankerous, difficult, individualistic kinda guy. And he is in some sense, like I said, it’s a little bit self-​serving, but it’s also right, because if you’re targeting the median, then what gets cut out are the ideas that are a little more interesting, a little rougher around the edges, and that are a little less popular.

0:19:31.7 Patrick Eddington: This novel was written just a little bit over a decade after the height of the McCarthy era. And this is of course the period of time when television really begins to kinda come into its own, where you have large scale of propagation of television sets and it was definitely a mixed bag in that McCarthy in the beginning, managed to really use it very effectively to scare the hell out of everybody and to accuse everybody of being a communist, right? But that same medium also turned to his undoing. It became his undoing during the Army-​McCarthy hearings. So Bradbury’s tale, I think, gives you just one side of the coin. I do wanna pick up on what Peter said about kind of the soda straw nature of major media back in the day, back in the mid ’50s and ’60s. I think that’s one of the things that the age that we live in now has made so different. Before you had essentially these filters sometimes they worked in a good way, actually bringing you something halfway decent, but oftentimes they were not giving you the full facts, they were not giving you the full truth.

0:20:56.0 Patrick Eddington: And when you have that kind of control, you can really create a very distorted society, and I think that’s exactly one of the, for me at least, one of the principle points of the book. It’s when we get into the age that we now live in, that things get a lot more complicated, a lot more interesting, because contrary to what a lot of so-​called conservatives say, there are a huge number of platforms that you can actually engage on now, engage your message out on. And I’m not gonna sit here and say that Facebook doesn’t have essentially kind of a dominant space there, but it’s not the only place that you can go. And as time goes on and I think we see more people begin to embrace more decentralized systems for the propagation of information, and I’m thinking about things like Telegram. The FBI hates Telegram. [laughter] The FBI hates Telegram for a lot of reasons, especially its encrypted nature.

0:21:56.2 Patrick Eddington: But Telegram is becoming one of these places where you’re seeing a lot more folks basically go to have these kinds of conversations and to engage in activities that some of us would agree with and that some of us would vehemently disagree with. And I think that’s… I don’t think that’s something that Bradbury necessarily could foresee. Even as bright a guy as he was, even as much of a futurist as he was in a lot of respects, I don’t think even he could really understand and predict what would happen with this thing called the Internet and how much it would change things. But even now, even now, we see efforts essentially, on the part of the major players who are in the space, Google and Facebook especially, to basically try to work with government regulators to help basically submit their existing position which is why these debates over Section 230 and some of the rest of this stuff are really so important because if we want to avoid essentially the kind of future that Bradbury is describing for us that could be ours, the more decentralized things are, the more that power thus is distributed to get a message out, the less likely a Fahrenheit 451 world becomes.

0:23:12.7 Natalie Dowzicky: I think it might be important for us to dive into kind of how censorship is democratized in this story, and also how it’s decentralized through the firemen and that kinda stuff. So how do we think… First, let’s go with how do we see the censorship as democratized throughout the story?

0:23:32.5 Peter Suderman: So Bradbury doesn’t imagine social media in this story and in one way, that’s how it feels not quite relevant, and yet, he does seem to have a real grasp on the dynamics of social media, speech crackdowns, and the ways in which the demand for speech suppression comes not always from the top, though sometimes, but often from the populists. And there’s a long bit in this book about how the firemen didn’t start burning books because the government demanded that the books be burned, the firemen started burning books because that’s what the public wanted, because the public was upset by what was in the books and wanted them to go away. And that’s, again, he’s not writing about cancel culture, but he is describing a dynamic that a lot of people have seen online and described as cancel culture, and describing what we would today call a social media mob. And he is describing this in the 1950s, which in some ways tells you about the ways that these debates have not changed in almost 70 years.

0:24:51.2 Peter Suderman: And it’s really interesting just to go back and to remember that even almost 70 years ago, folks like Bradbury who were in their times and in their own ways individualists and you might even say free speech warriors, were concerned not only about classic style government suppression of speech, sort of violations of the First Amendment that are official capital C censorship, but also about the ways in which the public, sometimes just small groups in the public, and so he is constantly in ways that would absolutely get him canceled, today taught you like both in his own writing and then through the voices of these characters in this book, he’s constantly invading against the minorities. The minorities, the minorities, they’re always upset by something, but he’s talking about the ways in which small groups, whether they’re racial or ethnic or whether they’re just sort of… They are bound together by some interest or geographic location or whatever it is, but in which small and particularly engaged in active groups band together to demand something and in this case, that something being that someone’s speech about them or someone’s speech about something that bothers and upsets their particular sensibility be prohibited or silenced somehow or another.

0:26:24.0 Peter Suderman: And it’s really kind of eerie just to sort of, to read this and realize, “Oh my goodness, this is exactly the same thing that my colleagues at Reason are writing about all the time, that folks at Cato and at Fire are just… This is the business of free speech defense today.” And it was in… It was very much the same back in the 1950s when he was writing Fahrenheit 451.

0:26:55.6 Patrick Eddington: The democratization of the use of the mob to try to hunt down one political dissident on the run, you get, in the ’66 movie, you get this car going down the street with the loud speaker saying, “Montag, enemy of the people,” essentially, yada yada yada, “Everyone come out and look for him.” And on cue, everybody comes out of their house and is looking around and all the rest of that. The power, essentially, to mobilize people to try to shut down something or to shut down someone, in this case, terminate someone who you don’t agree with, you don’t wanna have out there saying what they’re saying, speaks to a very dark authoritarian impulse that, unfortunately, is quintessentially American. And it literally goes back to the Alien and Sedition Acts. I talk about this a lot when I discuss these kinds of issues. It’s people wanna think that the founders were, essentially, all on the same page. They weren’t. The only thing they were on the same page about was getting the British out of North America. That was about the only thing they were ultimately, really all on the same page about.

0:28:11.6 Patrick Eddington: And from my perspective, the wrong people wanted the Constitutional Convention. And this centralized system of government that we have that has only become even more centralized and, in my view, fundamentally more oppressive over the course of the last century, is in some respects kind of a fulfillment, essentially, of some of the things that Bradbury and Orwell and others have written about over the course of the last several years. And a lot of our friends on the left, they don’t wanna talk about all the great things the government can do and I’m usually left scratching my head, kind of asking, “Can you name three where they’ve actually, where they’ve really actually done it well and done it in a way that doesn’t destroy somebody else’s rights along the way?” And it’s really hard to find that. And but I, to be fair, I think that the concentration of power in any entity is a dangerous thing.

0:29:09.7 Patrick Eddington: We’re struggling right now with this whole issue of the power, essentially, of a relative handful of social media companies to kind of dominate discourse in a lot of respects in the public square. And we don’t have a clean framework for dealing with that. Now, maybe that’s a good thing. But I think that in that respect, the First Amendment, when we really adhere to it, does give you a blueprint for really how things ought to be. The First Amendment wasn’t created to protect speech that we like. It was created to protect speech, period, especially speech that each one of us might necessarily disagree with. And it’s the lack of that kind of a framework, really, in the social media environment that I think is helping to fuel so much of this, the cancel culture and all the rest of these things that we’ve been talking about so far. But I think if that authoritarian impulse, which is really what I see with so-​called conservatives, people that claim to not wanna interfere in people’s lives, going after social media companies in this way, and even some people on the left going after social media companies, that’s an authoritarian impulse, fundamentally.

0:30:26.9 Patrick Eddington: When I see people on the left and the right, both raising hell about Section 230, my reaction is, “It sounds like it’s working.” It sounds like it’s just kind of fundamentally, probably working about the way that it should, if people on both poles, essentially, are kind of bent out of shape about it. But I think that Bradbury, essentially, whether he meant to or not, essentially continued to predict these kinds of debates and contests. But for me, what I see in all this classic literature, essentially, is this authoritarian impulse and it’s scary. And the more technology that you have available to you, the more technology that government has available to it, either directly, as in the case of the firemen here, [chuckle] or indirectly through companies like Facebook, Twitter, all the rest of them out there in a position to provide data either voluntarily or involuntarily through legal process, it becomes an incredible force multiplier in a very bad way for government to engage in repression. And that’s part of, at least, of the message that I get from things like 1984 and this book.

0:31:42.9 Peter Suderman: Yeah, it’s interesting you bring up Section 230. Now that you mention it, I guess I think that Ray Bradbury would end up being a defender of Section 230 in its current form because if you actually understand what it does, it’s a very individualist way of thinking about speech. It’s often misunderstood, as people talk about platform neutrality and all this stuff, but that’s not really correct. Basically what it says is, “You are not liable for speech generated by others.” And “you” can be Facebook, “you” can also be any individual one of us. So it applies to very large corporations, it applies to medium-​sized non-​profits, and it applies to individual people. But it means that, just for example, if you are posting something on Facebook and somebody says something actionable in a comment on your Facebook post, you have no liability for that. Now, it also means that Facebook has no liability for what you post or what your friend posts, etcetera, etcetera. But it is an idea that you are responsible for your own words and for your own thoughts, and that you have to take responsibility for them, but that others don’t, even if they have created a platform or a publishing mechanism of some sort that you make some use of.

0:32:54.0 Peter Suderman: The other thing that I think is really sort of interesting and striking here, just to go back to the social media mob aspect of this, is the way Ray Bradbury presents speech suppression and the un-​person-​ing that goes with it as a spectacle and as an entertainment, right? It’s not just that the hound hunts you down because it is directed by the government agents to do so it’s that it’s filmed, it’s broadcast, everyone in town tunes in to watch, and they even participate, it becomes a game a sort of something where everyone is sort of out there watching you, it’s not just the government with their surveillance drones and their smart sniffing robot dog, it’s a form of fun to watch the bad person be hunted, right?

0:33:43.4 Landry Ayres: Right. It’s the trending cancel hashtag that you see on the side of…

0:33:45.0 Peter Suderman: Yes, Guy Montag has been… Is trending… What did he say? Oh my gosh, I’ve gotta find out. And then you get to go and watch as the dog hunts down the fake Montag and jumps on him and eliminates him, but Bradbury really understood that this was not just about getting rid of people who we don’t like, and making them silently disappear, he understands that it’s frankly a way for a certain type of person, a certain type of group to bond together, because they have decided that somebody and something that that person said is now a non-​person who needs to be cast out and dealt with, and it’s a very disturbing way of looking at how societies function, but I also think it is one that we keep proving Bradbury right on.

0:34:38.9 Patrick Eddington: Precursor to Logan’s Run. Precursor to Running Man. You see the thread, you see the thread right down to the present at least in cinema.

0:34:50.8 Landry Ayres: Logan’s Run has been on the list for a while.

0:34:53.0 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah.

[laughter]

0:34:54.8 Natalie Dowzicky: It’s also very Hunger Games like too, ’cause by becoming a form of entertainment for everyone, it’s like another level of suppression, you’re adding on like this could be you if you don’t walk the straight and narrow…

0:35:08.3 Landry Ayres: That decentralization, the democratization of the mob. Yeah.

0:35:11.5 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah, exactly. And I think it’s also just… I don’t think Bradbury was seeing it as a mob necessarily, but as like, this is how the culture was in the beginning to be anti-​book and anti common knowledge, all that kinda stuff. And then it just kind of grew. I feel like he saw it as a growing into society and just permeating at that point.

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0:35:40.7 Landry Ayres: There’s a lot of… Speaking of the firefighters that I thought was so interesting, Natalie, is you hear a lot like there’s a lot of people that are very frustrated with the militarized and over-​policing and the problems with systemic policing, etcetera, but you hear a lot of times where they’re like, “Nobody hates firefighters,” and I’m like, “Well, I mean… ” I get that, I get that. They’re just people that ostensibly save people, but you could also… There are people that are like… A lot of the same infrastructural sort of baked in systemic issues probably also happen with fighting fires, where resources get diverted to places that they are more focused on rather than others, so you could think that. So I think there’s a way to see the firefighter link there, but also why Benjamin Franklin as the first one, like we were talking about the founding…

0:36:29.6 Natalie Dowzicky: I don’t get it. [laughter]

0:36:30.9 Landry Ayres: As the founding fathers, or as I call them, the founding daddies. Why Benjamin Franklin? He seemed so concerned with knowledge and sort of learning things, archetypically or that might just be the sort of mythic way that we view him, sort of get away from his cavorting nature, that was the true Ben Franklin. Why him?

0:36:54.0 Peter Suderman: I think it’s just because he founded the first organization that became, that led to what we now think of as modern firemen, and he founded the Union Fire Company, which was… People called it the Bucket Brigade, and…

0:37:10.6 Natalie Dowzicky: Ah, yes.

0:37:12.0 Peter Suderman: It sort of led to the mutual fire societies that were part of early American culture, and so because Benjamin Franklin was in some sense America’s actual first fireman, or at least the founder of the first firemen squad, he has been retconned in Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury would not have known what retconning was, but he would have understood the concept immediately, despite his clear disdain for comic books in Fahrenheit 451, he would have gotten it, right? And so what he’s done is just imagine a world in which history has been rewritten so that the first person to invent useful fire fighting has now become re-​imagined as the person who was both an American founder, so that gives… That brings the book burning version of Firemen into the founding narrative in the fictional world, and then also, it’s easier to just make it… To make this small change in history, and this is kind of a smart thing that he has done, because if you’re re-​writing history, if you’re trying to retell the story, you wanna tell as few lies as possible, and Ben Franklin was the first fireman. So why not make him the first fireman in this very different conception of firefighting, and also because he was, like I said, because he was a founding father, that associates him with the power of the founding, which in this story still maintains a kind of mythic cultural and political power that has now been transferred to the book burners.

0:38:55.1 Patrick Eddington: It was an extremely subversive act. One could argue that it may have been the most subversive thing in the entire novel, really, that kind of rewriting of history, if you will.

0:39:12.5 Natalie Dowzicky: I think it’s also like it’s an indicator to the reader or the audience, ’cause they say it in the movie too, that ’cause everyone has this glossy-​eyed view of the Founding Fathers, and no one really knows too much… We probably know too much, but no one digs in deeper than like, “Oh, these are the Founding Fathers and their heads are all together.” And I think that indicates to the reader that it’s like, “The firemen are good,” because that’s always how the Founding Fathers are framed. And I think… I just think… I just thought it was funny. I wrote in my notes, I was like, “Well, why not George Washington? [chuckle] Why not Thomas Jefferson? Why can’t they all be that way?”

0:39:48.1 Peter Suderman: Yeah, the choice of Ben Franklin associates book burning with institutional legacy and institutional permanence. It suggests that book burning has always been with us, it’s a part of who are and how we conceive of ourselves.

0:40:03.5 Landry Ayres: The idea that sort of firemen celebrate this destruction or sort of the mockery of the knowledge that books represent gets manifested in a lot of ways. When Montag brings the book of poetry out to his wife and their friend when they’re watching on the… In the parlor shows, and at one point they think that he’s making fun of it all by reading it, and they’re like, “Oh, ha, ha, ha, this is what… It’s a fireman’s ritual,” I think they call it, or something. And then something that you had noted in your notes, Peter, about how when they adapted it to the stage version they added a scene… Or Bradbury added a scene where I think it’s Beatty takes Montag to his huge, vast library of unread books that he will never read, he simply keeps them to not read them. And it got me thinking about what the purpose of unread books would be. And it got me thinking, ’cause it… They do it in a way that is sort of trying to make these books useless. Without being read, they serve no purpose. We are sort of making a mockery of them by leaving them on the shelf and sort of uplifting our own culture.

0:41:31.9 Landry Ayres: But then there’s also this idea that I’ve read about called The Antilibrary, and I think Umberto Eco has written about it, whereas a book… Or a collection of unread books, a personal library of unread books, is more of a tool. Once a book becomes read, the book itself is useless to you, it is like what a lot of people think of now, it is a marker, it is a signifier of a certain intellectualism. Whereas a collection of unread books is a marker of humility and a recognition of un-​garnered knowledge and that there is always more to preserve. So I just thought it was really interesting the way that firemen have created this culture. I could very much see if they adapted it again, like the police social media Facebook photos where it’s like, “We caught all of this in a drug bust,” and it’s a little baggy of weed in a plastic bag, and they’re like, “The streets are safe.” You could see firemen posting on social media a stack of the Chronicles of Narnia, and they’re like, “We’ve got this scum off the street.”

0:42:51.5 Peter Suderman: Yeah. The firemen’s Twitter feed is just gotta be filled with great literature. The un-​library idea’s interesting. Tyler Cowen somewhat famously likes to just read books and then leave them places. And he will just leave them in airport lounges or in restaurants or whatever, because he’s read them. And sometime he also keeps many books, but he’s one of the best read people I have ever met in my life. And part of what he does with books is read them and give them away. Yeah, that section from the play that you mentioned, where Captain Beatty takes Montag on a tour of his private library is really interesting as an expansion of the novel’s ideas, because it suggests that the ultimate way to put down a book and to insult book culture is to keep books and treat them simply as empty objects, not as expressive statements to be engaged with. And it treats them as affectations rather than as powerful ideas. And what it does is it robs them of their power, because they become as ordinary as bricks or plates, and they don’t have any kind of meaning unto themselves because they can’t have meaning until you read them.

0:44:21.8 Patrick Eddington: And yet the fear of people reading animates Beatty and the entire establishment to do what they do, right? So there’s… Ultimately there’s a contradiction in that. And there’s also the subversive aspect of Montag stashing these things away in one of the vents in his home and all the rest of that, and this idea of forbidden knowledge. And then Beatty, ultimately in one of their exchanges, talking about how all it does is confuse a person and all the rest of this. And my reaction is, “Well, at some level confusion is the beginning of wisdom.” Because if you think you’ve got it… If you think that you’ve got it all figured out, you probably don’t. You have part of the story, you may never have the whole story. But most people, I think, in society, and I think this is something that Bradbury intuitively understood, most people seek surety. They seek simplicity, they seek easy answers, they seek easy outs, and that’s exactly what the society that Bradbury describes does, it gives people easy outs. And it’s the folks that transform essentially into living books who aren’t looking for the easy out, they’re looking to actually experience the fullness of life. And this instrument of oppression is trying to essentially wipe out that entire concept, so very dark indeed.

0:46:01.5 Peter Suderman: The biggest system of state suppression and ideas and… Of state suppression of ideas and speech today, I think, is probably in China and the Chinese and blocking of the Internet and censorship of the Internet. And if you listen to Chinese state officials explain themselves about why they do this, they will offer arguments that are very much like the ones offered by Captain Beatty, they will say that those ideas just confuse people and mislead people, and that people can’t be trusted to have conflicting information. And what’s even creepier, if you think about it, is that that kind of discourse is now starting to creep into, or maybe it’s always been there because Ray Bradbury has been writing about it for… Was writing about it almost seven years ago, but it’s starting to creep into a lot of our discussion about online speech when it comes to misinformation and disinformation. This idea that in fact ideas and information need to be controlled because you can’t trust ordinary people to sort through ideas, facts and information and opinions and make judgments for themselves.

0:47:12.8 Peter Suderman: And look, there is a lot of information out there that is bad, that is wrong, that is… Or opinions that I strongly disagree with, there are people presenting things as facts that are just simply and provably not true all over the Internet. So like I’m not in any way denying that any of that exists, but we have… We are now starting to kind of… There’s a movement in the United States that is gravitating towards this idea that information that is wrong or is dangerous in some ways can harm the population and therefore needs to be suppressed either by a kind of de-​facto state operation within often social media or Internet companies or by an explicit state operation through the federal government.

0:47:57.3 Patrick Eddington: I think that impulse, frankly, has always been there. I’m in the process of reading First to Fall, which is about Elijah Lovejoy who was the first publisher essentially, abolitionist publisher, to be killed for publishing essentially a newspaper that called for the abolition of slavery. And I tend to think that there’s always been falsehood in media from the very beginning. What makes our age different is that it travels at the speed of light, it is… It used to take days for something to be transmitted in the early days of the Republic, it might have to go by courier, horseback or whatever. Once you got to the telegraph, things would move faster, but still that was something that was in the hands of a relatively few number of organizations or entities or whatever. And what makes the age that we live in just so different, and I think so difficult in a lot of ways, is this diffusion, the ability to get stuff out just instantly, globally instantly.

0:49:08.8 Patrick Eddington: It’s been transformative, it’s been transformative in some good ways, I would say, with things like the Black Lives Matter movement and police reform and a range of other issues, but it’s also been incredibly pernicious. And you have hostile foreign actors like the Russians, like the Chinese, others, utilizing this technology essentially to try to undermine not only their own opposition within their own countries, but us and other Western democracies in that respect. So it’s very much a mixed bag. But to me what makes it so much different today is just the explosion of it and the ease with which it can be employed, how easy it is to get this stuff and to make it work. And I think that in that respect, it kinda makes Fahrenheit 451 look a little quaint.

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0:50:03.7 Landry Ayres: And now for the time in the show where we get to share all of the other things that we’ve been enjoying with our time at home, this is Locked In. So Pat, we’ll start with you, what else have you been enjoying media-​wise? TV, books, movies, anything?

0:50:20.2 Patrick Eddington: So… Well, so I have just a huge, huge number of books that I’m accumulating not just for my book project but for things I wanna get to. But being the complete Star Wars lunatic that I am, I have… I wait with bated breath until about 3:01 AM every Friday morning to download the latest edition of the ban patch. Absolutely fantastic animated series, but I just continue to marvel at what Dave Filoni and Jon Favreau are able to do. The storytelling is… It’s just fantastic, it’s absolutely fantastic. It just makes me scratch my head, “Why the hell can’t the movies be this good?” And it’s like, “Oh, that’s because Favreau and Filoni are not running the movies, and if they were, it would be different.”

0:51:09.7 Patrick Eddington: And then just for the heck of it, Loki, that has been. For me it’s been a revelation because I’m not so much into the Marvel stuff, but I now understand why Tom Hiddleston is a big deal. This guy has got massive, massive talent as an actor, and he’s able to just really showcase it in this. But I can’t wait to see him in other stuff, he’s just absolutely on fire. So that’s my animated series stuff. As I indicated, I am reading, First to Fall, about Elijah Lovejoy. A very, very powerful story, another guy who went through a transition in his thinking that ultimately cost him his life in the cause of abolition and free press, so those are kind of the big things for me right now.

0:52:04.6 Peter Suderman: So I have been reading the book, the novel, A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine. It is book two of the, I’m gonna pronounce this wrong, Teixcalaan series. It’s a sci-​fi space opera series. The first book, A Memory Called Empire won I believe the Hugo and the Nebula, I could be mistaken. Oh, no. At least the Hugo for best novel. I think maybe the Nebula went to something else, but It was nominated. It is… That was her first book, and A Desolation Called Peace is her second.

0:52:39.6 Peter Suderman: They are great novels of… They’re really great sort of contemporary space operas that borrow a lot from the golden age space operas, but update them, and so Arkady Martine works in her day job as a city planner, and so there is an awful lot about cities and city bureaucracies and how they work and how they function and have internal factioning and politics within them, and how those human systems can work against each other with inside government, and then also how the infrastructure of a city can be turned into tools and plots, both for investigation and discovery and also for… Be used by political forces. It’s not a libertarian book. I’m not pitching it as like a book full of libertarian ideas, but it’s really smart actually about the way that politics and infrastructure and political structures actually sort of interact with each other. And the first one in particular is structured as a mystery, quite complex, sci-​fi mystery that involves people who are dead, but not dead, but preserved inside your head.

0:53:52.4 Natalie Dowzicky: Love a good like zombie in your head. [laughter]

0:53:54.5 Peter Suderman: Yeah, well, and then it’s not quite a zombie, it’s more like a holographic AI replica of your past self who is… So you just… Yeah, it’s delightful. If you like Iain M. Banks, if you like Isaac Asimov, these books are for you. And the new book, which came out just a few months ago, is about a first contact scenario with a species that is so alien that we can’t… That the… Our characters initially cannot figure out if the thing that appears to be language is actually language or not. So it sort of leaps ahead… It’s an interesting first contact scenario, just in the sense that it posits aliens that are truly alien and suggests that the real challenge is not, I don’t know, negotiating trade deals with them, it’s literally just figuring out how to understand their intentions or even if they have intentions at all, which I think is, since we are often talking about UFOs and aliens these days, I think actually one of the problems that has been under thought in first contact scenarios. We just don’t know how these other… Another intelligence might think and or might communicate, and she gets at that really well in her new book.

0:55:22.1 Natalie Dowzicky: For me, on the book front, I just started reading The Invisible Life of Addison LaRue. This is another World War II historical fiction, that’s like my jam. And then on the movie, TV front, I’m in season two of The Boys on Amazon. It’s like super heroes, but it’s also just kind of like they’re making fun of super heroes, and it’s quite good. It’s a little vulgar, but it’s entertaining. And then…

0:55:54.6 Peter Suderman: Do you feel like you… Like that show… Are you like… Are you enough of a comic book fan that you feel like that show actually like get all of the references because the comic book in particular that it’s based on was so deep in the superhero weeds. There was a character who was like a kind of awful old man who was based on Stan Lee, and a bunch of the characters were based on people in the actual comic book industry who had not great reputations, just as people in some cases. The book was… The series was just like a huge… It was a vehicle for barely disguised gossip about people in the then failing comic book industry, ’cause it came out in early aughts.

0:56:38.2 Natalie Dowzicky: I did not know this.

0:56:38.9 Peter Suderman: Right after Marvel had declared bankruptcy and basically the comic world had gone burst.

0:56:45.9 Natalie Dowzicky: Huh! Well, so I don’t know the intricacies of that, but I’m still enjoying the show so I guess that’s a good pitch to anyone who isn’t as engrossed to the comic book world, to that… The show is still enjoyable. And then from a movie standpoint, we’re going through a bunch of horror films with me and my housemates, because one of my housemates had never even seen Silence of the Lambs so we started there, and we’re building up, were doing… We’ve done two of The Conjuring movies, we haven’t done the most recent one that just came out in 2021 yet. We did Annabelle: Creation. We’re watching them in the correct order of the film, the time period in which the film was set rather than when they were released. And then we have Hereditary on our list as well, and I have not seen that one yet. Yeah, and that’s what’s next up on my list.

0:57:45.1 Landry Ayres: For me, I am currently… I just started a book of short fiction by Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties, very dark horror, feminist short stories, really cool stuff though. It has that beautiful… Just the last minute, short story twist that I love, and I have recently… I just bought the latest Assassin’s Creed game for my PlayStation, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, so I am running around being a viking. I have never played an Assassin’s Creed game myself before, but it’s fun. It’s fun. It’s not perfect. I had an arrow that got stuck in my hand and then the glitch just stayed, so I was in a cut scene pointing at someone and there was just an arrow sticking out of my hand the whole time…

0:58:41.9 Peter Suderman: So I’ve played a bunch of the Assassin’s Creed games, but I had skipped several of them until Valhalla, and the biggest surprise for me having skipped over a bunch of the games was that now one of the mini-​games and regular challenges is a poetry cut, like a slam poetry contest?

0:59:00.6 Landry Ayres: It’s a freestyle slam poetry rap battle.

0:59:02.3 Natalie Dowzicky: What?

0:59:02.6 Peter Suderman: Which is totally, I guess, what vikings did or something? I don’t know, it’s…

0:59:07.6 Landry Ayres: Flighting. Oh yeah, it’s a good time, it’s fun. I’ve only done it a few times. What I actually really like is there is a dice pooling strategy mini-​game, that’s really, really fun. Normally the game… Little games inside games, I’m not super into like I played The Witcher 3 and I could never… I have never won a hand in GWENT ever. It is…

0:59:30.9 Peter Suderman: Oh man, I probably played more GWENT that I played the actual Witcher 3 game.

0:59:35.7 Landry Ayres: That’s what a lot of people do. People have tried to explain to me GWENT and I’m like, I don’t get it, but the dice pooling game in Valhalla, I think is actually… It’s really simple and really fun and was tense to the end of my first round, so I liked that. And my wife is currently playing Odyssey, and she was like, “You should play Valhalla, but don’t play Odyssey because you can only have one quick save at a time, and I don’t wanna override your game.” So I’m playing Valhalla right now and then we’re gonna switch.

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1:00:12.3 Landry Ayres: Thanks for listening. As always, the best way to get more Pop & Locke content is to follow us on Twitter. You can find us at the handle @PopnLockePod, that’s pop, the letter N, lock with an E like the philosopher, pod. Make sure to follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen as well. We look forward to unraveling your favorite show or movie next time. Pop & Locke is produced by me, Landry Ayres and is co-​hosted by Natalie Dowzicky. We’re a project of lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org. To learn more, visit us on the web at www​.lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org.

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