Front Porches

“No front porches. My uncle says there used to be front porches. And people sat there sometimes at night, talking when they wanted to talk, rocking, and not talking when they didn’t want to talk. Sometimes they just sat there and thought about things, turned things over… they didn’t want people sitting like that, doing nothing, rocking, talking, that was the wrong kind of social life. People talked too much. And they had time to think. So they ran off with the porches.”

This is from Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, and if anyone knows me and has been to my house, they know why I like this text. The book was written in 1950 and it paints a futuristic picture of an America that has censored truth and knowledge from itself and traded it for titillation and entertainment, such as in their beloved TV parlors (rooms with wall-to-wall interactive television). They seek amusement and noise over almost everything else.

I wasn’t around in 1950 to see America then, but it’s easy enough to tell that we have moved further in the direction of 451’s America. Although not everything was on point in this book (people still talked on landline phones in the novel!), some things are scarily close to the entertainment and technology we cherish 57 years later.

Perhaps some of these ‘predictions’ were in the making already and he simply saw the seeds. Like our need for quick and flashy information, that is usually of no use outside of Trivial Pursuit; and the need to live vicariously through entertainment video games and fantasy football, and television shows that we speak of the characters as if their acquaintances.

But perhaps the eeriest concoction of Bradbury’s imaginative foresight picks up on America’s felt need to be eternally amused, in the literal sense of the word (a – not, muse – think). In 451, people don’t want to have to stop and think; they want no silence so they have buds (they’re called seashells in the book) they put in their ear that gives them perpetual noise. They have these ear buds in even while they’re driving or sleeping or doing just about anything. If anyone lives in the same country I do, I don’t need to spell out how this invention of Bradbury’s imagination has become a reality.

This book was written to serve as a warning flag to what technology’s affect might be on our society’s desire for entertainment. But reading it today it looks more like a roughly carved out pathway that we’re continuing to walk down. Most alarming to me today is that the Church, who is called to think and look differently, is blindly following our culture down this steep path of entertainment. When will we start asking questions?