Ray Bradbury, the author of Fahrenheit 451, envisioned how the desire of “snowflakes” to avoid confrontational ideas would lead to book burning. Today’s alternative to flames is echo-chambering. Bradbury couldn’t predict echo-chambering but he might have discovered the reason for it.
Before we can delve into Bradbury, we need to understand what a snowflake is. Historically, the term “snowflake” was first coined by slavery abolitionists in Missouri who used this to call out their opposition. More recently, the author Chuck Palahniuk used the term in his 1996 novel . The character Tyler says the following: “You are not special, you are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everyone and we are all part of the same compost pile”. This quote as well as members of the Fight Club to giving up their personal names thematically acts as an antidote to the innate ‘specialness’ of the individual. Furthermore, by setting up the rule “You don’t ask questions”, Tyler is denying members the possibility for ‘individual expression’. But the term didn’t die with the novel Fight Club.
In 2016 the Collins English Dictionary made “snowflake generation” one of their words of the year. And following the political footsteps of its older Missouri brother, the term “snowflake” has also been used by the Far-Right to call out the left as overly sensitive and unable to deal with opposing opinions. Furthermore, the metaphorical meaning of the physical snowflake has been extended. In Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club, the two words “unique snowflake” have a synonymous meaning because no two (physical) snowflakes are precisely the same. But in the article “Snowflakes will melt in the world of work”, the writer Giles Coren also reminds how vulnerable physical snowflakes are to environmental conditions and thus offers a visual analogy for the alleged lack of resilience in the snowflake generation.
Now let’s go back to Bradbury. On the first sight, the plot of Fahrenheit 451 doesn’t appear to relate to snowflakes. The novel is set in Bradbury’s vision of the U.S. in the year 1990. As all books have been banned in this alternative world, the duty of firemen is (ironically) to burn books instead of extinguishing them. The title Fahrenheit 451 here refers to the temperature at which paper starts burning. Censorship through book-burning may remind readers of authoritarian regimes such as those of Hitler and Stalin. And Bradbury also acknowledges their role in influencing his work in the interview Bradbury Talk Likely to Feature the Unexpected. But interestingly in Fahrenheit 451, censorship wasn’t forced down by an authoritarian regime but was the wish of the people. The character Captain Beatty explains how minority and special-interest groups were increasingly protesting against controversial and outdated content they perceived in literature. He explains that long before the firemen starting burning books, most people had already stopped reading them.
Thinking back of our own world, we may recognise a similarity between Bradbury’s characterisation of minority / special-interest groups and the snowflakes in our own world. Bradbury’s reference to “minorities” may also invoke thoughts on current debates about political correctness, where the Left is criticised by the Right for being easily offended (‘a snowflake’) and the Right is criticised for hate speech. Did Bradbury predict all this political turmoil already in 1953? You may react: “So what? He predicted Political Correctness. But I don’t see anyone burning books here.” That is true. People don’t have to burn any books. The 21st century offers a far more elegant alternative. People (on both ends of the political spectrum) can simply jump into their nearest, most comfortable echo-chamber, avoiding any confrontation with opposing views. Bradbury may not have predicted echo-chambers, but he surely has identified part of the cause: When the character Beatty recounts the demise of books in the world of Fahrenheit 451, he mentions the public’s increasing demand for uncontroversial and hedonistic media. Bradbury basically depicts a societal decision to trade-off short-term gratification at the expense of long-term investments. And echo-chambers allow exactly that: instant gratification by avoidance of uncomfortable confrontations.
Properly listening to an opposing view (or reading it in a book) is challenging, at least in the short term. By acknowledging that the other person might be right, you acknowledge that you might be wrong. Being wrong isn’t a nice feeling. And science can back that up. A paper in the journal Nature argues that evolution has actively selected for people who are overconfident about being right. When our ancestors were in competition for resources, overconfidence was advantageous because it “encouraged individuals to claim resources they could not otherwise win if it came to a conflict; stronger but cautious rivals will sometimes fail to make a claim”. In other words, accepting opposing views may feel like a loss because in the past it has caused our ancestors to actually give up resources.
But traits that maximised survival in hunter-gatherer times can often cause problems in our modern environment. Bradbury depicts this in the following: People, who are continuously exposed to instant-gratification media stop taking the time to think. The consequence is a decline in original thought.
Following the protagonist Guy Montag, we learn that original ideas aren’t bound within books. He realises that it’s not the book itself that is valuable but the book is symbolic for making a long-term investment. And what is another long-term investment? Exposing yourself to opposite ideas and opinions. It isn’t comfortable in the short term but gives you access to more diverse knowledge in the long run. Without diversity in thought, originality becomes very improbable. Bradbury perfectly embodies this notion with the following quote: “The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless. We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black loam.”
But paradoxically snowflakes destroy the justification for their existence. Teaching people that they are special and that their opinions are unique is supposed to incentivise them to express such ‘unique opinions’. But in reality, giving them an inflated sense of uniqueness just legitimises their innate tendency to avoid confronting opposing views. As we can see from the novel Fahrenheit 451, people won’t create any original thought without exposure to opposing views. Instead, they will just reiterate opinions they have been exposed to in their echo-chambers (“flowers trying to live on flowers”). This is why on social media, you are bombarded with people re-posting, re-tweeting or slightly re-editing content they found in their echo-chambers, but you barely encounter anything unique. And this is why in politics you can often already predict what somebody is going to say based on their political affiliation.
Even so, “don’t be a snowflake” or “avoid being easily offended” is hardly new news. The term snowflake is pejorative, so nobody voluntarily identifies as a one. But snowflakes are only an extreme manifestation of a larger trend: We are becoming obsessed with facilitating a safe space for expression to the extent where it is socially inadmissible to disagree with what is being expressed. The possibility to express yourself is more important than the substance of the expression itself.
We can see the emergence of this snowflake culture here at our universities (also at Bath). Lectures respond to any student participation with something like “That’s a good point.” Indeed, many lecturers only praise their students to encourage more participation, but does this noble cause come at the expense of even more echo-chambering? Doesn’t this attitude by lecturers just validate the preconceived beliefs students entered the university with? Isn’t it paradoxical how when we envision critical thought, we picture a young person speaking out against the status quo set by older generations, but we simultaneously ask the older generation to refrain from teaching younger people how to be critical of their own views?
Let’s go back to Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club. We are quick to dismiss Tyler’s rule “You don’t ask questions” as atrocious and hence condemn any limitation to the freedom of expression (characterised by Tyler’s anti-snowflake culture). But we don’t condemn any questions that are designed to support what we already know or believe (snowflake culture). I came across an illustration of this during the questions session following Maggie Oliver’s recent talk about the Rochdal Grooming Scandal. Someone in the audience asked her whether Austerity made people more vulnerable to sexual exploitation. Obviously, the answer to that question is yes and arguably the question also allowed Maggie Oliver to expand on the details of ‘how’ Austerity put people at more risk. But overall, this brought nothing new to the table. The audience consisted mainly of SPS (Social & Policy Sciences) students who are drilled every day with the actuality that Austerity makes people more vulnerable. In other words, the question was a reiteration of the narrative that we are being taught in class.
So, what can we do about all of this? In an interview Greg Lukianoff mentioned how with the commercialisation of higher education and increases in tuition fees, university administrators developed the urge to offer students a ‘comfortable experience’. Linking being comfortable to being right, we can see how the slogan “The customer is always right” has translated into university practice of “We can’t offend any student”. But universities should also recognise that they aren’t just offering a service but also a product. If students leave university without critical thinking or the ability to come up with original ideas, universities may have sacrificed the quality of their product in favour of a more comfortable service.
Originally published here: https://unibathtime.co.uk/2021/01/29/spotting-the-snowflake-paradox-in-the-novel-fahrenheit-451/.
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