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My dad predicted Trump in 1985 – it’s not Orwell, he warned, it’s Brave New World

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The ascent of Donald Trump has proved Neil Postman’s argument in Amusing Ourselves to Death was right. Here’s what we can do about it

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As Orwell’s 1984 Turns 70 It Predicted Much Of Today’s Surveillance Society

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As we rush towards an ever more Orwellian world of surveillance and censorship, perhaps we might all take the time to reread 1984 in order to better understand the world we are rushing towards.

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few years ago, I got what, for a writer of political fiction, is a dream job. I was invited by the estate of George Orwell to write a retelling of Nineteen Eighty-Four from the point of view of Julia, the lover of the protagonist, Winston Smith. The concept had been in the air for years, until its writing seemed inevitable; by asking a trusted person to do it, they hoped to nudge it in a direction that did justice to the original. They wouldn't pay me, but after I'd finished and published the novel, they would give it their support and help it find its way in the world.

It was a huge compliment but also a daunting responsibility, and I was immediately engrossed in work: rereading Nineteen Eighty-Four, sketching plans and ideas, researching the political history that drove Orwell to write his book, drafting my first pages. My opening chapter - like Orwell's - was the well-known scene of the Two Minutes Hate.

The Two Minutes Hate is a ritual in which Party members gather to watch a film of the rebel leader Emmanuel Goldstein and express compulsory rage. Regardless of their beliefs, the audience finds this an easy task. "The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate," Orwell writes, "was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within 30 seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp."

At the time I was reimagining this scene, I spent much of my day on Twitter. It was early 2021, and everyone there was chronically angry. People communicated by jeering, trading insults, hectoring, flinging accusations. The mildest disagreement could trigger a storm of ugly attacks.Any tweet might make thousands of people love bomb you, then turn on you, then fight viciously among themselves about whether you should be exalted or killed. It was like being in an abusive relationship with everyone in the world.

Michael Radford's film version of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Photograph: Collection Christophel/Alamy

Until recently, I'd seen this bruising chaos as knockabout fun. We were playing together, bonding by making fun of people, vying to craft the most annihilating tweet about the "main character" of the day. The jokes were often ingenious, and the targets of attack mostly seemed culpable. Though I had my doubts, I could mostly believe that Twitter was more good than bad.

But now I was writing all day about the Two Minutes Hate, which is eerily like the worst of Twitter. My bedtime reading consisted of histories of the rise of Hitler and Stalin, memoirs of the Cultural Revolution and the Holodomor. All these periods were characterised by the violent rhetoric, demonisation of vulnerable groups, singling out of individuals as targets, and fear of going against the mob that were increasingly normalised by online behaviour - and by the ever proliferating YouTube and cable TV channels devoted to political propaganda.

All that had changed was the rationale most commonly offered for this: that it was just a joke. Harassment was a form of joking, death threats were satire, slurs were meant ironically. With this excuse, even when a target was hurt in real life, the crime could be disowned by the people who had instigated it. They'd only been kidding around. How could their goofing, taken seriously by no one, be linked to such a tragedy?

Of course, those using these tactics are aware that kidding around is a highly effective way to incite violence. Perhaps the most infamous instance is Rwanda's Radio-Télévision Libre des Mille Collines ( RTLM). This radio station, launched in 1993, used an informal, jokey, call-in format, in which the chat was interspersed with music. It was, in the words of one journalist, "like a conversation among Rwandans who knew each other well and were relaxing over some banana beer or a bottle of Primus in a bar ... It was all fun. Some people left the bar, others came in, the conversation went on and stopped if it got too late, and the next day it took up again after work." True, all the discussion and jokes, even some songs, revolved around fear and hatred of the Tutsi minority, but the light tone made it easy to dismiss. As the Canadian ambassador to Rwanda, Lucie Edwards, later commented: "There were so many genuinely silly things being said on the station, so many obvious lies, that it was hard to take seriously." But within nine months of its opening, RTLM was directly mobilising and organising the Hutus of Rwanda to murder an estimated 500,000 to 1,000,000 of their Tutsi neighbours, hacking them to death with machetes. Women were often gang raped and genitally mutilated before being killed. At the peak of the genocide, an RTLM host jocularly scolded listeners: "You have missed some of the enemies. You must go back there and finish them off. The graves are not yet full!"

Perhaps it seems like a stretch to equate this with Fox News or TalkTV. But is it only a matter of time before the underlying threat presented by these channels becomes explicit? Hauntingly, three months before the Rwandan genocide, a group of political dignitaries, including Senator Edward Kennedy, advised that the international community should act to shut down RTLM. Had his advice been followed, the voices directing the genocide would have been taken off air, and hundreds of thousands of lives might have been saved. Even the most passionate free-speech absolutist would find it hard to oppose such a decision - especially with hindsight. But how can we know if a media outlet will ever become this dangerous? When it comes to free speech, where do we draw the line?

It's probably clear that mockery, however savage, isn't the red flag we're looking for. People make nasty jokes all the time. You might laugh while saying you'd like to see your boss thrown into a tank of piranhas, when in reality you would find it harrowing if it really occurred. One distinction that has been widely embraced on the left is that between punching up and punching down. Punching up is when you make fun of someone with more power than you; punching down is when you mock people with less. This intuitively sounds right. Anyone can ridicule Boris Johnson without worrying about the repercussions for his everyday wellbeing, but if a public figure mocks an unemployed Black man, or unemployed Black men in general, it can have real consequences. Too many people are looking for excuses for callousness and violence toward such men; indeed, they are being harassed and killed by the authorities there to protect them. Any joke at their expense is uncomfortably close to "The graves are not yet full!"

Suzanna Hamilton as Julia and John Hurt as Winston. Photograph: Moviestore/REX/Shutterstock

However, jokes that punch down are everywhere in classic satire. What else can we call the countless scenes in Don Quixote where we're invited to laugh at a mentally troubled old man being beaten viciously for his mistakes? Or the sequence in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Manabout a Black sharecropper who has impregnated his daughter, in which the act of incest becomes a surreal extended joke? Even the silly running gag "I saw something nasty in the woodshed", from Stella Gibbons's Cold Comfort Farm, is essentially a joke at the expense of trauma victims.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the insults rain down on the just and the unjust alike. Orwell's proles are ignorant and brutish; his middle classes utterly incapable of thought; while women are "always the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies". Orwell even mocks the Party's victims. In one scene, a man waiting to be tortured nervously praises the patriotism of the daughter who turned him in, while "casting a longing glance at the lavatory pan". His surrender to the diarrhoea occasioned by his suppressed terror is then played as comedy.

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Yet Nineteen Eighty-Four has been passionately embraced by survivors of Stalin and the Cultural Revolution, by refugees from North Korea. Their reaction is not "Why was this privileged outsider so disdainful of us?" but "How did he understand so well?" In Orwell's harshest passages, they have seen the unfiltered, fearless expression of their own long-hidden shame and anger.

So can we say that satire can punch down safely, as long as it expresses an important truth? Unfortunately, it's not that simple. The worst political actors - neo-Nazis, shills for dictators, terrorist recruiters - always sell themselves as brave truth-tellers. But while there are no simple rules about when satire is dangerous, there are ways to tell when satire is good foryou. A satire that makes you feel good about already having all the "right" views may be comforting, but it's not as much use as one that tangles with you, surprises, wrong-foots and makes you question what you really think.

From the time Animal Farm was written, the right wing has been keen to claim Orwell. Originally, this was because of his outspoken criticism of the Soviet Union. In the 1950s, the CIA even funded film adaptations of both Nineteen Eighty-Fourand Animal Farm, with the aim of building support for the cold war. Nowadays, the language of Nineteen Eighty-Four is used by rightwingers to indict "wokeism". Any new coinage from the left is called "Newspeak"; any attempt to acknowledge moral ambiguity is dismissed as "doublethink". With the single word "Orwellian", a college's overreaching speech policy, for example, is framed as an existential threat to the free world.

Orwell's language is used by rightwingers to indict 'wokeism'; any acknowledgment of moral ambiguity is called 'doublethink'

But Nineteen Eighty-Four wasn't a warning against a university's inclusivity statement. It was a warning about men like Trump and Putin and the violent mass movements they inspire. Men like Erdoğan, Modi, Orbán, and Maduro: events such as Duterte's mass killings in the Philippines, Bukele's mass arrests in El Salvador, Xi's ubiquitous surveillance and social credit system and concentration camps and institutionalised torture in China. Orwell's great political works speak to our current moment, when seemingly every country is infested with would-be autocrats, using the old playbooks with their lines about "enemies of the people" and "lying media" and "globalists".

When my Nineteen Eighty-Four book was announced, described as a "feminist retelling", I was treated to a personal experience of how far things had gone. The news attracted a storm of misogynist and antisemitic abuse in rightwing tweets, blogs, YouTube videos, even newspaper articles. This was long before the novel was available to be read - before I'd barely written a few chapters. Still, all the attackers were sure what would be in it: a full-throated endorsement of Big Brother. They also declared there was a plot to replace Nineteen Eighty-Four in school curricula with my book - despite the fact that it was being published in the US by Orwell's publisher and had been endorsed by the Orwell estate, two organisations that would be out of pocket were Nineteen Eighty-Four to be dropped. It's still unclear to me whether the attackers believed what they were saying. Were they lying or deluded? Or was this a real feat of doublethink - the ability to believe two contrary ideas at once - where no such distinction can be drawn?

In his essay Looking Back on the Spanish War, Orwell observes how we underestimate the risk that fascism, or "a combination of several fascisms", will prevail throughout the whole world because, "nourished for hundreds of years on a literature in which Right invariably triumphs in the last chapter, we believe half-instinctively that evil always defeats itself in the long run". This is a fatal delusion. "We have become too civilised to grasp the obvious. For the truth is very simple. To survive you often have to fight, and to fight you have to dirty yourself. War is evil, and it is often the lesser evil." We no longer have the luxury to indulge in quibbles about civility, nor do we have the time for an emotionally satisfying but futile Two Minutes Hate. We must speak, write, make jokes, argue, fight, with an eye only to what is most effective. We must organise against fascism as if our lives depended on it. They do. The threat is here; the time Orwell warned about is now.

Julia by Sandra Newman is published by Granta (£18.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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Orwellian nightmares: What I learned about today's rage culture from rewriting 1984

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'Orwellian' is an accusation increasingly levelled by both right and left but what does it mean, asks author Sandra Newman, who has reimagined Orwell's novel - and why does Orwell's dystopian classic speak so powerfully to our current moment?

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When most people think of what dystopia our society is sprinting towards, they tend to think of , The Handmaid's Tale, or the Hunger Games. These top selling, well known, and well-written titles are excellent warnings of worlds that could come to pass that we would all do well to read.

However, one lesser-known dystopian novel has done a much better job at predicting the future than these three books. Brave New World, written in 1931 by author, psychonaut, and philosopher Aldous Huxley, is well known but hasn't quite had the pop-culture breakthrough that the other three did.

This is regrettable, as it offers us a detailed image of a dystopia that our society is not only moving towards but would be happy to have.

(Getty Images)

For those who haven't read it, Brave New World is the description of a nightmare society where everybody is perfectly happy all the time. This is assured through destroying the free will of most of the population using genetic engineering and Pavlovian conditioning, keeping everybody entertained continuously with endless distractions, and offering a plentiful supply of the wonder drug Soma to keep people happy if all else fails.

The world state is a dictatorship which strives to assure order. The dictatorship is managed by ten oligarchs who rely on an extensive bureaucracy to keep the world running. The typical person is conditioned to love their subservience and either be proud of the vital work they do or be relieved that they don't have to worry about the problems of the world.

Global stability is ensured through the Fordist religion, which is based on the teachings of Henry Ford and Sigmund Freud and involves the worship of both men. The tenets of this faith encourage mass consumerism, sexual promiscuity, and avoiding unhappiness at all costs. The assembly line is praised as though it were a gift from God.

Huxley's dystopia is especially terrifying in that the enslaved population absolutely loves their slavery. Even the characters who are smart enough to know what is going on (and why they should be concerned) are instead content with everything that is happening. Perhaps more terrifying than other dystopian novels, in Brave New World there is truly no hope for change.

The similarities between the world of today and the world of the book are many, even if our technology hasn't quite caught up yet.

While the human assembly line described in the first part of the story is still a far-off fantasy, the basic concepts that make it work are already here. Today, people make choices to influence the genetic makeup of their children regularly.

Pre-natal screening has created the ability for many parents to decide if they wish to carry a disabled fetus to term or not. In Iceland, this has resulted in the near eradication of new cases of Down Syndrome in the country. Almost 100% of detected cases lead to an abortion shortly after.

Similarly, testing for a child's sex before birth is a well-known procedure that leads to a wide gender gap in many countries. Less well known is the process of sperm sorting, which allows for a couple to choose the gender of their child as part of the process of in-vitro fertilization.

The above examples suggest we're open to soft eugenics already. Imagine what would happen if people could determine their child's potential IQ before birth, or how rebellious they will be as a teenager. It would be difficult to suggest that the development of such technology would not be hailed as progress by those who could afford to use it. Huxley's visions of a genetically perfected upper caste might be available soon.

As this article suggests, some choice in baby design is already here and more will be available soon.

The characters of Brave New World enjoy endless distractions between their hours at work. Various complex games have been invented, movies now engage all five senses, and there are even televisions at the feet of death beds. Nobody ever has to worry about being bored for long. The idea of enjoying solitude is taboo, and most people go out to parties every night.

In our modern society, most people genuinely can't go thirty minutes without wanting to check their phones. We have, just as Huxley predicted, made it possible to abolish boredom and time for spare thoughts no matter where you are. This is already having measurable effects on our mental health and our brain structure.

Huxley wasn't warning us against watching television or going to the movies occasionally; he says in this interview with Mike Wallace that TV can be harmless, but rather against the constant barrage of distraction becoming more important in our lives than facing the problems that affect us. Given how stressful people find the idea of a tech-free day and how we take our pop culture so seriously that it was targeted for use by Russian bots, he might have been onto something.

Brave New World 's favorite pill, Soma, is quite the drug. In small doses it causes euphoria. In moderate doses, it causes enjoyable hallucinations, and in large doses, it is a tranquilizer. It is probably a pharmacological impossibility, but his concept of a society that pops pills to eradicate any vestige of negative feelings and escape the doldrums of the day is very real.

While it seems odd to say that we are moving towards Brave New World in this era when official policy is opposed to drug use, Huxley would suggest we consider it a blessing, since a dictatorship that encouraged drug use to zonk out their population would be a powerful, if light handed one.

While today we have a war on drugs, it is not on all drugs. Anti-depressants, a powerful tool for the treatment of mental illness, are so popular that one in eight Americans are on them right now. This doesn't include the large number of Americans on tranquilizers, anti-anxiety medications, or those who self-medicate with alcohol or increasingly legal marijuana.

These drugs aren't quite Soma, but they bear a striking resemblance in function and use.

In the book, the stability of the world state is partly based on total employment. A character informs us that automation has been purposely stalled to assure everybody can work since free time would give them enough extra time to think about their condition. Mass employment relies on mass consumption, however, and numerous systems are in place to assure everybody keeps using new products even when they don't need anything.

Consumerism is a significant element in all major economies today. While it makes sense that a company would have an incentive to keep us buying things to remain profitable, Huxley's point is that consumerism can also be used to keep us pointlessly chasing after items that we think we need to be happy as a distraction from exploring other pursuits.

While Huxley thought a dictatorship would have to condition people to want to buy new things and throw out last year's products to buy similar but newer ones, the lines and fights at Black Friday sales suggest otherwise. Or the lines for every new release of the iPhone.

And just in case you thought it was only corporations getting in on the pressure, don't forget George Bush wanted you to fight terror by shopping.

In our modern lives, a similar view on happiness as exists in the novel is developing. In his book The Happiness Industry, William Davies argues that modern capitalism has come across the concept of making happiness the only acceptable mental state and run with it to make more money. Our new found slew of Corporate Happiness Officers and self-help gurus are all designed to keep us happy, consuming, and unwilling to question the larger system in place, he argues.

This notion is summarized in his book in one, jargon-laden, sentence:
The relentless fascination with quantities of subjective feeling can only possibility divert critical attention away from broader political and economic problems.
While claims that we are redefining unhappiness as unacceptable might seem overblown, the standard manual of mental illness now says grieving for deceased loved ones more than a few days is problematic. Perhaps Mr. Davies is onto something.

Huxley expressed concern in his follow-up book Brave New World Revisited that the increasing complexity of technology and global problems had led to a concentration of power both in business and government. This concentration, he argued, not only made people more comfortable with the idea of being subjugated but also made dictatorship easier to enact.

Today, we have a higher concentration of wealth and power than ever before. In the United States, the top 1% are richer than ever, six corporations control 90% of the media, and the power of undemocratic institutions such as corporations or byzantine bureaucracies are greater than ever before. Many Americans choose not to vote and have the same influence on their government that they would if they had no right to vote.

This can lead to situations little different than that of 1984 but without the hard-totalitarian edge that came with it. In 1984 there was only one television station, and there was no attempt to hide the fact that the government controlled it. In the United States today dozens of seemingly different networks are controlled by a few conglomerates and often promote the same worldview and opinions as a result.

Huxley himself warned against this very situation when he talked about how we were approaching his dystopia back in 1958:

Well, at the present the television, I think, is being used quite harmlessly; it's being used, I think, I would feel, it's being used too much to distract everybody all the time. But, I mean, imagine which must be the situation in all communist countries where the television, where it exists, is always saying the same things the whole time; it's always driving along. It's not creating a wide front of distraction it's creating a one-pointed, drumming in of a single idea, all the time. It's obviously an immensely powerful instrument.

Despite being able to find this out or turn the channel, millions of people willingly continue to watch what might be called propaganda from friendly faces. Indeed, they love it. This soft totalitarianism is often hard to detect or state an objection to, which Slavoj Zizek argues is the point.

Huxley thought we could save ourselves, though we had to act quickly. While his concerns around overpopulation and eugenics have been shown to be bunk by the march of history, his other ideas still have merit.

In his follow up book Brave New World Revisited, he argues for the decentralization of power as a means to restore the value of democratic government to the typical person who might otherwise realize their vote is meaningless and lose faith in democracy as a result. He suggests that we can better educate people for freedom by drawing their attention to the methods of demagogues and sleazy advertisers. He encouraged those seeking freedom to move to the countryside or to establish stronger neighborhood ties in the cities to resist the pressure to only engage with others as an economic unit and not as a full human being.

He was also warm to the ideas of syndicalism and worker cooperatives, which seek to restructure workplaces to feature workers democratically managing them. He saw this as both a way to decentralize the economy and improve democratic participation.

Aldous Huxley's Brave New World was a prediction of a nightmare he thought we would be safe from for at least a few hundred years when he wrote it in 1931. By 1958 he realized he had been very optimistic. While we aren't entirely doomed to the pleasant slavery he envisioned quite yet, the march of progress continues to bring us the tools which make it ever simpler to enact. If we will make the choices needed to avoid it or if we will willingly cry out to be saved from our freedom remains to be answered.

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'Brave New World' predicted today's world better than any other novel

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When most people think of what dystopia our society is sprinting towards, they tend to think of , The Handmaid's Tale , or the Hunger Games . These top selling, well known, and well-written titles are excellent warnings of worlds that could come to pass that we would all do well to read.

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The University of Chicago Divinity School

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Fahrenheit 451 Redux: Free Thinking in the Present?

By William Schweiker

§1 The Fireman's Work
In 1953 Ray Bradbury published what is perhaps his best novel, Fahrenheit 451. Recall that the title comes from the temperature needed to ignite and burn paper. In this dystopia, American society is depicted as reduced to hedonism and the scorning of intellectuals for the sake of state control of citizens. The government has set up a program of banning and burning books and even the houses where they are found. The main character, Guy Montag, is a "Fireman," that is, one of the agents appointed to burn books. While he goes through something of a conversion, the impulse behind the government's program is that books with offensive or difficult language undermine the state's leveling of society and make people feel bad.

The details of the novel are not the subject of this column. What we need to explore is the anxiety and perplexity that are driving today's cultural and social conflicts. So, like the book this column is an exercise in social and cultural interpretation and criticism. Bradbury noted in various interviews that he wrote the book amid the McCarthy era, and so the suppression of supposed "communists," and he was motivated to write the book by a worry that mass media was destroying literacy. Today we hear similar chants against "socialism" and "socialists" even as the influence of social media spreads and the attention span of Americans seems reduced to nil. Bradbury's alarming prescience about the fate of "elites" amidst the rule of fake news and cancel culture acts as a mirror for our present anxiety, where how people feel about themselves is fueling the drive to ban and even burn books.[1] Such anxiety is easily manipulated for political purposes.

Our current social and cultural landscape is clearly in need of some decoding. Let's start with what is happening on the ground and then interrogate the deeper forces at work in this dangerous moment. We'll find, surprisingly, the attack on free thinking answered by a religious inversion of that impulse. Some anxieties and some perplexities, it turns out, are crucial for advancing a free society.
§2 Parental Misgivings
The current round of calls for banning and burning books was ignited by the recent Virginia governor's race. Glenn Youngkin (R), the eventual winner, chastised former governor Terry McAuliffe (D), for vetoing a bill that allowed parents to opt their children out from reading texts deemed too explicit. The backlash against McAuliffe's liberal stance, as the Washington Post noted in a recent story, targeted a "famous book from Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, Beloved, about an enslaved Black woman who kills her 2-year-old daughter to prevent her from being enslaved herself."[2]

The latest controversy to get sensitive white parents in an anxious tizzy is a subject not actually taught in public schools, that is, "Critical Race Theory." The charge is that CRT (we all need acronyms--saves time and thinking!) teaches white kids to hate their dear selves and these glorious and non-racist United States. CRT supposedly throws students into perplexity about the history of race in this country, and so the identity of people. Yet the anxiety and perplexity about one's identity are not only an obsession of the "Right." Consider the conscience of a "woke" culture that too often seems unwilling to engage in argument with those deemed unworthy of even being heard. Cancel culture, ironically, is also driven by anxiety about identity and a fear of perplexity. It too is a quest for being right and having clear cut answers and convictions.

Let's be clear. I am not suggesting a false equivalence between cancel culture and some of the legitimation of violent repression that happens on the right. Not at all. At issue is that in the present moment thinking about ourselves and this nation's history seems to be driven by different shades of anxiety about one's identity and moral rectitude.

What then is my point? The Firemen are returning, or so it seems. In the same Washington Post article, it was noted that following the election in Virginia, some school board members proposed burning books thought to be sexually explicit. Meanwhile, as widely reported, Texas State Rep. Matt Krause has asked schools if any of 850 books are in their school libraries and classrooms. As Bradbury knows, the driving impulse behind burning is how books make people "feel." That feeling, I am suggesting, is the desire to escape any anxiety about one's identity and a fear of perplexity about the state of our nation and its history. Yet that feeling is also what makes people open to political manipulation, a fact made obvious in recent raucous school board meetings.

What seems to be at issue, if we interrogate the current anxiety a bit further, is the volatility of such feelings, insofar as they supply the motivation that drives book burners, the Firemen, and the vanguard of woke culture. What do I mean?
§3 The Ashes of Liberty
When judgments about education are driven by anxiety and repulsion to perplexity, a culture must look out. I am not simply noting the burning of books by the Nazis or in the Reformation period the torching of Martin Luther's writings or even the many bonfires of knowledge and human expression that scar our civilization's history. (Although, to be honest those would be good to explore!) What remains obscured and hard to untangle in the current cultural conflagration is, it seems, the essential yet vulnerable nature of learning. It is, sadly, what got Socrates, wandering the streets of ancient Athens, sent to trial, and poisoned by the city.

In the so-called early dialogues, Plato shows us how Socrates provokes his interlocutors into perplexity or puzzlement ( aporia) about accepted knowledge. His purpose is to question the validity and understanding of accepted beliefs and engage in a constant search for truth through love of wisdom. By relentless cross examination, the elenchos, one is hopefully moved to interrogate the puzzle--and one's anxiety about it! --in order to clean up confusions, wipe out illusions, and come to some tentative resolution. Granted most of those early dialogues leave the speakers in an aporia. Some must have thought that Socrates was gaslighting them, making them doubt their perceptions of reality.

Nevertheless, perplexity is what fuels inquiry and the discovery of truths worth living by. For Socrates, wisdom begins with wonder in the face of perplexity, especially about how rightly to live.[3] Alas, current cancel culture and the league of Firemen are at root trying to douse wonder and save us from perplexity, because perplexity can make us "feel" bad, anxious about ourselves and the rightness of our lives. Of course, something like that sentiment led to the sentence of hemlock for Socrates.

One needs to see what is really at stake in education by perplexity. What the so-called Socratic method sought to provoke was curiosity and a willingness to question accepted beliefs, including beliefs about the gods, the glory of one's culture, and the moral goodness of one's dear self. The current rush to submit books and argument to Fahrenheit 451 is nothing less than an attack on curiosity and the demand for critical self-awareness under shared standards of truth. No wonder that forces emerge which seek political and social control by attacking what they call fake news and politically incorrect opinions. In the end, liberty will lay in ashes. It is liberty itself that is under fire, the liberty of thinking. Without the free exchange and competition between ideas, how are we to face freely our perplexities and attain, at least for the moment, solid convictions for the orientation of life?

However, the question becomes, what is the right kind or form of perplexity that can and should energize the quest for truth and wisdom?
§4 The Divine Fire of the Mind
Having moved through layers of reflection, we reach, at last, a sighting of religion in this vexing and dangerous societal moment. The image of fire is a complex one in the world's religions. Flaming Seraphim, the Burning Bush, the Holy Spirit, tongues of fire dancing on the head of disciples, the fires of Hell ( Jahannam in Islam), the fires of desire in Buddhism, and on and on. In this instance, we can see that one crucial meaning, religiously speaking, of the image of fire is purification, not only purgatory (in Dante and medieval Christian theology) but also the purifying of the mind.

Bearing this out, the religious insight presents us with an inverse meaning from the call to burn books. That call leaves folks secure in their state of cultural bias (America is, after all, the greatest nation, right?) or the conceit to assume that one has the right answers, the right values. By contrast, the religions know that all true learning is, at its deepest, not simply acquiring information, but rather a purifying of mind and shaping of character. What this nation needs now is a willingness to face perplexity and anxiety in order thereby to seek the truth about our history. Only then will we chasten our conceits and begin to purge the layers of racism that seam our history.

Enough with champions of the right and the left, the book burners and those of cancel culture. The present moment calls for a few more firemen like Ray Bradbury who are willing to light up our actual condition. Maybe more of us need to follow Socrates and dare to be perplexed and so open to new ways of thinking and living. At stake, in the end, is the possibility of free and truthful existence, as well as of peaceful coexistence among us.

William Schweiker

Columnist, William Schweiker (PhD'85), is the Edward L. Ryerson Distinguished Service Professor of Theological Ethics at the Divinity School.
See All Articles by William Schweiker

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Fahrenheit 451 Redux: Free Thinking in the Present?

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By William Schweiker §1 The Fireman's Work In 1953 Ray Bradbury published what is perhaps his best novel, Fahrenheit 451. Recall that the title comes from the temperature needed to ignite and burn paper. In this dystopia, American society is depicted as reduced to hedonism and the scorning of intellectuals for the sake of state control of citizens.

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From Our Bookshelves: ‘Fahrenheit 451’ | Arts | The Harvard Crimson

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70 years later, ‘Fahrenheit 451’ still rings an urgent alarm, and it’s not a drill.

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1️⃣ Read all six articles—two for each novel.

2️⃣ As you read, consider:

What argument does each article make about the novel’s relevance?

What evidence does the author provide?

How does each article compare to the others in terms of persuasiveness?

Step 2: Select & Justify

Choose one article that made the most convincing argument about a novel’s relevance today.

Think about why this article stood out. Was it the strength of the argument? The use of evidence? A unique perspective?

Step 3: Record & Upload to Padlet

🎥 Record a 2-minute video where you:

✔️ Identify the article you found most convincing.

✔️ Explain why this article was the most persuasive.

✔️ Connect its argument to what you’ve learned about dystopian literature and its warnings for society today.

📌 Upload your video to the designated Padlet column.

Step 4: Metacognition Reflection

To deepen your learning, include responses to two of the following reflection questions in your video:

🤔 What prior knowledge or assumptions did you have about these novels that were challenged by the articles?

📖 Did reading these articles change the way you view dystopian literature? If so, how?

🔍 How did you decide which argument was the most convincing?

💬 Did any of the articles make you reconsider your stance on a particular issue?

🌎 Which novel do you personally think is most relevant to today's society, and why?

🚀 How has this unit changed the way you evaluate arguments and analyze literature?

Step 5: Engage with Your Peers

💬 After uploading your video, watch at least two of your classmates’ responses.

✅ Reply to their post with:

One insight that resonated with you.

One question to further the discussion.

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Step 3: Record & Upload to Padlet

🎥 Record a 2-minute video where you:

✔️ Identify the article you found most convincing.

✔️ Explain why this article was the most persuasive.

✔️ Connect its argument to what you’ve learned about dystopian literature and its warnings for society today.

📌 Upload your video to the designated Padlet column.

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To deepen your learning, include responses to two of the following reflection questions in your video:

🤔 What prior knowledge or assumptions did you have about these novels that were challenged by the articles?

📖 Did reading these articles change the way you view dystopian literature? If so, how?

🔍 How did you decide which argument was the most convincing?

💬 Did any of the articles make you reconsider your stance on a particular issue?

🌎 Which novel do you personally think is most relevant to today's society, and why?

🚀 How has this unit changed the way you evaluate arguments and analyze literature?

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Link to my video: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1IMmakMwBSaJWPv9jzCl1J9NfGfVAPhY3/view?usp=drivesdk

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Video to large to send straight here. haha

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Get access to files anywhere through secure cloud storage and file backup for your photos, videos, files and more with Google Drive.

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