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Part I
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The folly as prompt:
But avoid, if at all possible, reading Fahrenheit 451. . . That's [high school] about the right stage of emotional maturity for enjoying it. Reread it recently and was mortified.My reply:
There should be books for different phases on one's life. If you're going to read a book out of phase, then you have to adjust how you read, and provide that caveat -- not tell people to avoid reading if at all possible.
Fahrenheit 451 is one of the best books to give someone young at heart to show them that there are things worth saving, and that a society unaware of this can run amok.
Though the long speeches are clunky (ironic in a book with so much other prose experimentation) they provide tools to figure out what quality is.
Don't just look in books, it says, look in older art (it cites old phonographs and motion pictures, but the context of a society that has wiped up other art), old friends, in Nature, and yourself. . .
It is a book written by a man who grew up in small-town America, who would never own a car, writing at the beginning of the television -- when he wrote the short stories the book would grow out of, around 10% of US families had TV, by the time of the book, 65% did.
He looked at these rapid changes with his own eyes, not with the symbols and slogans of Progress, and saw that car culture and TV were things to be wary of, if not feared --things that would get in the way of the Great Saving which is each generation's duty.
These are just fine messages for the young, young at heart, or someone able to read in the romantic mode, a mode which requires a suspension of jaded filters (and few have more jaded filters than me. . . I can only suspend them, myself, when I read authors who gush).
For the older set -- or young people able to read in an older mode -- there is still Ivan Illich (the Catholic social critic, though the Tolstoy book of similar name will do some good), Postman, Gatto, Chesterton, Christopher Alexander, James C Scott.
But let the young have their books.
(And don't you dare make a comment about the length of this least you expose yourself completely as the philistine I already suspect you are).
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Part II
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Conservatism isn't really an ideology, it is an emotional stance. This in itself is not a criticism -- it is perfectly fine to have some attachments to what is good and beautiful. First, however, we should strive to follow Aristotle's idea of being angry in proportion to the offence. Instead, American conservatives are well trained to seek out their hit of Two Minutes Hate daily, at least. Though they've now been joined by Democrats on Twitter, that doesn't make either side one bit less unhinged. Secondly, we should first figure out what is good and beautiful. In other words, the principled conservative needs to carefully figure out what he or she is trying to conserve.
Bradbury was trying to conserve the small town Midwest of the 1920s. Features of what he was aiming for included extended families who frequently see each other, people of different economic means living in close proximity, walkablity in general, and wild areas to explore.
Contrast this with those who wanted to Make America Great Again in 2016. They were by and large trying to recreate the 1950s. But it was the 1950s that Bradbury was writing against! The 50s was the destruction of community values to feed economic growth.
I want to emphasis this fact: you can't conserve disruption. You cannot do so because eventually all sources of value are totally pilfered. This leaves the right wing fantasy -- enacting a restoration to times of value destruction -- a completely absurd project. There are many men who want to be the head of a nuclear family, but not the key wage earner for an extended family, where grandparents move in for old age, sharing opinions on child-rearing and other issues. Those men wouldn't want to be co-equal owners of a family enterprise with brothers and cousins. They wouldn't want to have their social life organized around visiting that family, sitting on porches or playing dominoes; instead, they would rather watch their shows and purchase status symbols to show off to people they only superficial know.
There is a nostalgia for the heady days when there were decades of additional exploitation and using up ahead, when everything unhurried and pure could still be thrown into the fires that feed GDP. These people don't miss the old ways; if they did, they could start practicing them. They miss what they could get from burning those things up for profits.
I think it is appropriate to give Bradbury the last word, from his masterpiece:
Somewhere the saving and putting away had to begin again and someone had to do the saving and keeping, one way or another, in books, in records, in people’s heads, any way at all so long as it was safe, free from moths, silverfish, rust and dry-rot, and men with matches.===
Another similar conversation on similar themes was held here.
