Ray Bradbury and the New Political Correctness

Ryan Holiday has an excellent article in The Observer entitled The Real Reason We Need to Stop Trying to Protect Everyone’s Feelings in which he examines the new political correctness through the lens of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451.

Holiday reminds me of something that I had forgotten about Bradbury's book: the reason book burning took off was not due to some form of censorship by government, but as the result of a popular uprising aimed at protecting people from hurt feelings. The book

begins with Guy Montag burning a house that contained books. Why? How did it come to be that fireman burned books instead of putting out fires as they always had?

The fireman have been doing it for so long they have no idea. Most of them have never even read a book. Except one fireman—Captain Beatty—who has been around long enough to remember what life was like before. As Montag begins to doubt his profession—going as far as to hide a book in his house—he is subjected to a speech from Beatty. In it Beatty explains that it wasn’t the government that decided that books were a threat. It was his fellow citizens.

“It didn’t come from the government down,” he tells him. “There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no!”

In fact, it was something rather simple—something that should sound very familiar. It was a desire not to offend—of an earnest notion to literally have “everyone made equal.” And it’s at the end of this speech that we get the killer passage:

“You must understand that our civilization is so vast that we can’t have our minorities upset and stirred. Ask yourself, What do we want in this country above all? People want to be happy, isn’t that right?…Colored people don’t like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don’t feel good about Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Burn it. Someone’s written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping? Burn the book. Serenity, Montag. Peace, Montag. Take your fight outside. Better yet, to the incinerator.”

And before you get offended, let’s clarify what Bradbury means by minorities. He’s not talking about race. He’s talking about it in the same way that Madison and Hamilton did in the Federalist Papers. He’s speaking about small, interested groups who try to force the rest of the majority to adhere to the minority’s set of beliefs.

Modern day examples of (often successful) attempts to limit free speech out of a concern for causing offense are legion. A small subset of examples includes:

1. Oxford University Student Union bans free speech magazine 'No Offence' because it is 'offensive'.
2. Harvard Professor Jeannie Suk wrote an online article for The New Yorker about law students asking her fellow professors at Harvard not to teach rape law lest it cause students distress.
3. Laura Kipnis, a professor at Northwestern University, wrote an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe —and was then subjected to a long investigation after students who were offended by the article filed Title IX complaints against her.
4. In June, a professor protecting himself with a pseudonym wrote an essay for Vox describing how gingerly he now has to teach: I’m a Liberal Professor, and My Liberal Students Terrify Me.
5. A number of popular comedians have stopped performing on college campuses, including Chris Rock; Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Maher have publicly condemned the oversensitivity of college students, saying too many of them can’t take a joke.
6. A community college student in San Bernardino protested being required to read a Neil Gaiman graphic novel in one of her classes.
7. A mom in Tennessee has complained that the bestselling nonfiction science book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, is too pornographic for her 10th grade son.
8. A Rutgers student has proposed putting trigger warnings on The Great Gatsby.
9. Controversial speakers have been either blocked from speaking, or have had their speeches protested, at colleges (including Condoleezza Rice at Rutgers and Christina Hoff Sommers at Oberlin and Georgetown)
10. Pick up artists have had their visas revoked (e.g. Julien Blanc in the UK).
11. A freshman at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill wrote an article criticizing a Literature of 9/11 course for requiring reading that “sympathizes with terrorists.” 
12. At Duke University, some students objected to Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel Fun Home, because they found it pornographic and contrary to their moral beliefs because of its portrayal of homosexuality.

As an academic, I am especially disturbed by the rise in this new political correctness on college campuses. In my opinion, my job as a teacher is not so much to teach students facts, but rather to challenge students with new ideas and in the process teach them how to think and uncover new facts for themselves. If I cannot challenge them---if I cannot be provocative---then I cannot fulfill my duty as a teacher. Indeed, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt argue in The Coddling of the American Mind in The Atlantic that the negative effects of students go much further than this.

If it were only college students who held these views, we could, as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar notes in a well argued opinion piece for Time entitled Ignorance Vs. Reason in the War on Education

just shake our heads sagely at youth’s age-old insistence on their Entitlement to Ignorance and pull out one of my favorite quotes (often attributed to Mark Twain): “When I was a boy of 17, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much he had learned in four years.”

But it is not limited to the young. I am not sure that anything can be done about this. Nor am I convinced that anything necessarily needs to be done; I suspect that this trend will, like the political correctness movement of the 1990s, be met with a disproportionate response in the other direction (even though this response may prove to be more even more objectionable than the original).

Towards the end of his piece of Bradbury and political correctness, Holiday points out that

In the 50th anniversary edition, Bradbury includes a short afterword where he gives his thoughts on current culture. Almost as if he is speaking directly about the events above, he wrote: “There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running around with lit matches.”

Being reminded of Bradbury's prescience further confirms my respect for him as an author and makes me want to seek out more of his work.