"Let Us Leave Philosophy to the Physicists"

"If you don't want a house built, hide the nails and wood. If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such a thing as war. If the government is inefficient, top-heavy, and tax-mad, better it be all those than that people worry over it. Peace, Montag. Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damn full of 'facts' they feel stuffed but absolutely 'brilliant' with information. Then they'll feel they're thinking, they'll get a sense of motion without moving. And they'll be happy, because facts of that sort don't change. Don't give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy."

Ray Bradbury - Fahrenheit 451 (1953)


More than even other Science Fiction classics, Fahrenheit 451 has proven shamefully prophetic in its portrayal of future (read: current) American society, and down through gradients of decreasing similarity, worldwide modern culture as a whole. While literally (pun intended) burning books never caught on (a few fundies aside) before megabauds killed the cellulose star, Bradbury's vision of the West's gradual cultural suicide and our ever-constricting -
- hey, look at the kitty! -
- attention spans has only grown truer with every decade. If you scoff at Mrs. Montag playing Mad Libs with her imaginary "family" in the wall and refusing to even listen to anything other than ever more digested reader's digest digest digests, then what do you think you're doing on Facebook and Twitter?

But the quote above seems to miss its mark. Perhaps after nearly seventy years even Bradbury's prescience is beginning to wear thin and incongruities begin to appear in the Seldon Plan. It certainly held true up to the nineties and slightly after Y2K. Politicians (and all public figures) struggled to out-bland each other and the public could not be less interested in the res publica. Generation Snowflake, on the other hand, could not be more politically involved. In their nu-Victorian safe space wonderland, even uncrossing your legs on the subway or turning down the air conditioning is a political action. They all plan to rule the world with their special interest sociology degrees.

Bradbury seems to have failed to predict the degradation of the humanities and social sciences by postmodernism's winning recipe of pseudo-intellectual autocracy based on baseless, impenetrable gibberish. Whenever and wherever academia becomes a tool for fabricating moral clout by argumentation instead of a structure for analyzing the real world, when its mercenary applications overshadow its intellectual honesty, it also begins to enjoy a much wider popularity. The public suddenly finds itself deeply invested in those socio-economico-politico-academic disciplines promising unending self-justification for upholding the superiority of those born the correct sex or the correct skin color or proclaiming the correct sexual orientation.

And lucky for them, facts of that sort don't change. You can never go wrong declaring that the Emerald City is really green and everyone but yourself has lost their glasses. When you begin with such conveniently undisprovable assertions as "epistemic privilege" your chauvinistic diatribes become as simple as winning a trivia contest. All you have to do is remember the words to your favorite song:
Women are oppressed
Because women say they're oppressed
And being oppressed, they'd know best
Ipso ipso
PWND!!!

Now we're back to Ray Bradbury being one clearsighted son of a witch. His basic statements still hold, because modern pop-philosophy and pop-sociology are noncombustible data; they're the conversation-ending arguments against which no-one dares argue. And the media love it. They feed the public a constant stream of plucky underdogs standing up to some trivial social slight or another.

On the other hand, if you've the cojones to tangle with the slippery stuff which brings on melancholy, you'd be looking at naturalistic explanations. Examine the evolutionary roots of human behavior, or the interplay of individual self-interest from a game theory perspective, the harsh realities in whose light no-one ends up looking very angelic for long. The public demands to be distracted from such unpleasant realizations. They'd rather have discussions about which personal pronouns each of them prefer, the most simplistic all-consuming narcissism available. They'd rather have the words they hate, the books they hate, the people they hate, declared hate speech and hate mongers and burned.

It is science which offers the tools of social growth, the boards and nails, the worrisome hard decisions. Snowflake social activism is the obfuscating trivia providing a sense of motion without moving.










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P.S.
As for the title, I first saw it here, but it's apparently from here.