Digital Heralds and Dead Souls: Media, Thought, and Freedom

Bradbury, the prophet of a future age, warns that the great peril is not merely the loss of books. Rather, tragically, the peril is the slow erosion of the mind’s capacity to think freely. The danger begins not with fire and censorship. Gradually, with habit and the quiet surrender to noise, there is the loss of the autonomous mind. Pages grow dim beneath the flicker of screens. That ancient solitude of thought yields to the clamour of the present hour. The liberal “searches for an ethically acceptable order of human progress among civic equals without recourse to undue power.”[1]

Disturbingly, the seeker finds the search stifled when autonomy is bartered away to the constant murmur of mediated voices. Freedom of mind has always been fragile. The free mind surviving only through vigilance is yet, as Bradbury reminds us, its undoing, which comes not in sudden violence but in spectral decline. Then, the silence of the library is drowned by the hollow resonance of endless noise. To surrender to that resonance is to accept a quiet bondage. The restraint of thought is the death of liberal learning.

The Walls of Noise

Information distributed through media sources has little relevance to the productive mind. In Fahrenheit 451, the "wall" is home to the ghost in the machine.[2] Audible sounds pour forth as if the digital kērux (κήρυξ, “herald” or “public crier”) proclaimed a message vested with public authority.[3] The wall: a quasi-public square.

Mildred wanted four walls. She already had three. Walls; expensive to own. A perennial presence in the house. Media. Information. Propaganda. A constant diffusion of noise. An information gestapo. A tool of the state. Bradbury used terms such as “on one wall” and “in the other wall,” noting the constant onslaught of media: “a minute later,” then “two minutes more,” another barrage of content. [4]

A vapid flow of information has little relevance to the productive mind. In Fahrenheit 451 a colorful word construct describes the “abrupt”[5] cranial assault with picturesque images: a person drank orange juice with an animated shift to the X-ray of the beverage on its journey to the stomach; a rocket flight into the clouds plunging into a lime-green sea; and White Cartoon Clowns chopping off each other’s limbs as jet cars appear wildly circling an arena.

 A culture in decline no longer requires the availability of literature. Leonard Mead had not written in years since “magazines and books didn’t sell anymore. Everything went on in the tomblike houses at night now….”[6] The data being ingested became an intellectual sarcophagus lit only by programmed thought, not designed to nurture the liberal mind. The house dwellers “sat like the dead, the gray or multicolored lights touching their faces, but never really touching them.”[7] The mesmerizing lights shone on the dead but did not touch the soul.

The Recovery of Leisure

The productive mind actively removes the mind-numbing invasion of a media-driven wasteland. In Fahrenheit 451, “Montag reached inside the parlor wall and pulled the main switch. The images drained away…”[8] The despicable fountainhead simply ceased. The switch served as a guillotine, severing the mind from the media. The rapier penetrated the ghastly media-driven tomb, bringing to a halt the proselytizing of the state.

Productive thought requires silence. Silence begets leisure. Leisure fosters passion. The productive mind can be alone in the world but free. The noise of the daemon haunts the quiet place of the mind. The mind agitated. Agitation turns the mind into a cauldron of great discomfort. Cicero was “never less idle than when he was by himself.”[9]

In The Pedestrian gray phantoms “seemed to manifest upon inner room walls where a curtain was still undrawn against the night, or there were whisperings and murmurs where a window in a tomblike building was still open.”[10] In contrast, the pedestrian walked “through the silences, that was what Mr. Leonard Mead most dearly loved to do.”[11] As he strolled the quiet streets, he paused, "deciding which way to go, but it really made no difference; he was alone in the world."[12]

Toward Intellectual Freedom

Liberal learning is embodied by those who are “living through a transition.”[13] Learning in an environment free from external restraints is the source of true intellectual freedom and boundless opportunity.

Yet intellectual freedom is not merely the absence of restraint; it is the conscious recovery of the self from captivity to noise. The liberal mind does not surrender to the ghostly chorus of media walls but instead forges new spaces of silence, leisure, and reflection. In that silence, the mind learns to hear its own voice again.

The danger of a media-saturated age is that the imagination itself may be colonized, leaving no room for unmediated thought. But the promise of liberal learning is that even in an age of walls, digital, spectral, and unrelenting, the individual may still step outside, as Leonard Mead did, into the open air of thought. The future of liberty will belong to those who, against the tide of mechanized persuasion, dare to cultivate the stillness in which the intellect breathes free.

This essay was completed on November 14, 2014, as part of my doctoral work at Faulkner University. It was written for the course HU 7311: Understanding Humane Letters, under the instruction of Dr. Robert Woods.

Endnotes

^[1] Edmond Fawcett, Liberalism the Life of an Idea (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), xv.

^[2] This author interprets “wall” much like the large screen television, the size of a partition in a room.

^[3] This author’s assumption is that the a propo term for the 1950s is “digital” although technology may have advanced far beyond the digital by this point in time. 

^[4] Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451: A Novel, Reissue ed. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013), 90.

^[5] Ibid.  The term “abruptly” describes the roller coaster feel of the text.

^[6] Ray Bradbury, “The Pedestrian” (short story, 1951), 1.

^[7] Ibid., 2.

^[8] Bradbury, Fahrenheit, 90.

^[9] James V. Schall, The Life of the Mind: On the Joys and Travails of Thinking, 2 ed. (Wilmington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2008), 96.

^[10] Bradbury, Pedestrian, 1.

^[11] Ibid.

^[12] Ibid.

^[13] Fawcett, Liberalism, 394.

fine essay...Grade: A