On pleasure and titillation

Ask yourself, What do we want in this country, above all? People want to be happy, isn’t that right?... That’s all we live for, isn’t it? For pleasure and titillation? And you must admit our culture provides plenty of these.

Contemporary life seems all about "pleasure and titillation."  Everywhere we turn, society now offers more and more avenues for "pleasure and titillation."  Sometimes, that pleasure and titillation comes from enjoying how others are humiliated.  This approach to "pleasure and titillation" has become so popular that 63 million voters elected that kind of an entertainer to the Oval Office!

I seriously doubt that this "pleasure and titillation" was what the founders stated as our inalienable rights to the pursuit of happiness.  But then, the writer was Thomas Jefferson, who continued to own slaves and defend his ownership even when his buddies were freeing their slaves.  I suppose Jefferson knew about "pleasure and titillation" through owning humans and raping them!

Ray Bradbury predicted with uncanny accuracy (except the physical act of book burning) how our madness for "pleasure and titillation" will end up.

Fahrenheit 451 also speaks of, and to, a culture that was becoming more superficial and philistine, in which television screens cover entire walls, where, in the words of the fire-chief Beatty: ‘School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, languages dropped, English and spelling gradually neglected… Life is immediate… Why learn anything save pressing buttons, pulling switches.’ Bradbury had expressed his disquiet at ‘the great centrifuge of radio, television, pre-thought-out movies, and so forth. Give us no time to “stop and stare”.’

Bradbury, who to me was always a social commentator disguised as a science fiction writer, wrote Fahrenheit 451 well before the age of flat screen TVs that seem to cover entire walls, and before anybody had even imagined a smartphone.  The book was published in 1953!  Here we are in 2018, discussing how philosophy courses have been dropped from the curriculum.  Language proficiency is no longer a mark of an educated person, it seems.  Spelling is old-fashioned.  Nobody wants to stand and stare, and think.  Because, after all, thinking could possibly lead to unhappiness.  We want, demand, pleasure and titillation. Now, dammit!

Of course, the irony of ironies is that Fahrenheit 451 was first published in a serialized form during the early and struggling years of the very symbol of pleasure and titillation: Playboy magazine!

Contemporary life is increasingly about momentary happiness.  Instant gratification seems to be our collective motto.  Therefore, not a moment shall be spent in deep thinking, which requires people to turn away from the flat screens on the walls and the bright screens in their hands.

The pleasure from reading Fahrenheit 451 is certainly not titillation!  It is profound bliss.

The author of the essay writes, echoing my own thoughts on Fahrenheit 451:

Forever trying to be the optimist, Ray Bradbury couldn’t but help demand vigilance about the future. He was like Orwell: a progressive who banefully acknowledged man’s flawed nature, his timeless thirst for power, forever wanting to push people around and tell others what to do and what to say. And, as with Orwell, Bradbury recognised that tyranny is at its most potent when it’s superficially most benevolent, when it dresses up coercion and censorship in kindly, caring language. A society that believes it paramount to keep its citizens safe, happy and comfortable for the greater good can not, and will not, tolerate dangerous words.

Fiction makes us worry about down the continuum, if the trends continued along in the same direction.  After all, as the old Chinese saying goes, "if we don’t change the direction in which we are headed, we will end up where we are going."

I know am not always happy. I am happy about it!

The other day, I swung by the box-store-that-liberals-hate in order to use the free blood-pressure reading machine.  The reading was all in the clear.  Any medical professional will be happy to see such numbers for pulse and blood-pressure.

I was relieved.  Because, I worried that my unhappiness and stress would have hiked up the numbers into unhealthy territory.

Yep, as many posts in the pasts have made it abundantly clear, I walk around with my own quota of stress and unhappiness.  Life in the ashram for this hermit is not simply eternal bliss.

The good thing is that many, many years ago, I figured that it will be very, very, very rare for a human to be stress-free and happy.  I mean truly stress-free and happy.  Which meant that happiness is something that emerges from and within the context of stress and unhappiness.  Of course, I have blogged about that very idea too; I wrote, for instance, when thinking about Tolstoy's Anna Karenina:

Happy families are those that are able to be happy despite their own versions of unhappiness.

Thus, when a student remarks that I always look too damn happy in my office, he has no idea how much of a validation it is for me that happiness is like a gorgeous lotus in a dirty pond.  The stress causing agents are all around me and yet, according to that student, I look happy all the time.

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With such a view of life, is it any surprise that I have never been a fan of strategies to create happiness?  The Bhutanese king's Gross National Happiness is merely an intellectual exercise for me.  But, beyond that intellectual idea, if it were to be designed as a public policy, I will be stressed and unhappy ;)

Why?  Because I don't want anybody telling me what happiness is.  I don't want any intrusion into life as I design it for myself.  I am happy, even with my unhappiness; what's your problem?

Why all this rant on a spring day, you ask?

Because, one of my daily go-to-websites had a link to this essay, with a lead that spoke to me:

Mood-tracking apps, chief happiness officers, positive psychology: When did being miserable become socially unacceptable?

So, of course, I read that essay, which is a review of a book titled The Happiness Industry. And now I am all the more suspicious about this "happiness" that everybody wants to maximize!

The reviewer writes:

Davies warns against the alliance that has developed between political authorities and academic researchers as well as those between economists and psychologists. I am usually in favour of interdisciplinary work. But Davies is right when he says that the notion of "happiness" has moved from being, as he calls it, a pleasant add-on, to a measurement useful in the business of making money – and at the expense of increased control over your life.

Exactly.

To be stressed, unhappy, to worry, to panic, all within a reasonable bound, are all very much part of being human.  Imagine if your taste buds all of a sudden can only feel the sweet taste and nothing else.  You will miss out on the subliminal lime in the cheesecake, the bitterness of dark chocolate, the tartness of an apple, the salt in the potato chips.  Life is not sweet happiness all the time.

At the Guardian, ahead of a debate, Davies writes:

We need to accept that people often have reasons to feel happy or unhappy, and that those reasons are as important as the feelings themselves.  Recognising this would lead us to focus on institutions that grant people a voice that is heard, both as individuals and as groups, and less on the vagaries of sensation and sentiment.

Thanks to "big data," we are now well on our way to slicing and dicing what makes people happy and then--here's the important thing--to manipulate us into being happy:

This data-led approach to understanding people under the guise of improving our happiness is leading to an expansion of surveillance capabilities to which we acquiesce. Big business and the state are able to condition our responses. So comes a seismic shift in the power balance between the individual and big business and more worryingly, between individuals and the state. We are, it seems, sleepwalking into the world of Larkin's "Essential Beauty", in which adverts depict "well-balanced families" but "Reflect none of the rained-on streets and squares". As Davies implies in this readable, disturbing book, being depressed by the human condition will no longer be socially acceptable, or even an option.

Perhaps you think, "what hyperbole!"  Think again.  One of the ideas that Ray Bradbury explored in Fahrenheit 451, which was published way back in 1953, was this: the government in a future society decides that people reading books makes them unhappy.  Hence, the job of the "fire fighter" was to torch any book that was found, and to apprehend the book owner.  Remember?  Aha, you never read the book, did you?  Did you at least watch the "Thug Notes" in the previous post, where he provides a summary and an analysis?

Happy now?

Just burn the damn books. Who needs them anyway!

Fahrenheit 451 is one of my favorite books that I like to discuss with students.  In my initial years of teaching it seemed like quite a few students were aware of the book.  Now, it is increasingly rare for a student to know what I am referring to.  And it worries me all the more that we are getting closer and closer to the society that Ray Bradbury described in that profound story.

Back in the day, it was relatively easy to know which books would make me think more about life, and which ones would merely entertain me. I loved those potboilers, too.  But, perhaps it is because I am getting old that I worry that everywhere I turn it is nothing but potboilers that are read, if at all books are being read. 

Reading this New Yorker essay by George Packer on a rainy and cold winter day does not help either.  Maybe I should not have thought about reading and, instead, as in Fahrenheit 451, I should have simply been watching television.  After all, it is reading that makes one agitated and depressed, right?

Packer's essay is all about Amazon, which Jeff Bezos started as an online bookseller. One might think that Amazon did wonders to book selling and reading, by making available a gazillion titles at the click of a mouse button and at low prices, and with the Kindle reader that gets a reader the book within minutes of buying it online.  One would think that such a democratization, where the middlemen are axed out and one could even self-publish books, would be nothing but a win for the consumer. Right, George?

Bezos is right: gatekeepers are inherently élitist, and some of them have been weakened, in no small part, because of their complacency and short-term thinking. But gatekeepers are also barriers against the complete commercialization of ideas, allowing new talent the time to develop and learn to tell difficult truths. When the last gatekeeper but one is gone, will Amazon care whether a book is any good? 

In the old model, publishers, editors, and consumers too, cared about what was being printed and read. An army of people, so to speak, celebrated the good quality ones, and people like me then knew that Fahrenheit 451 was a must-read. Now, Amazon has been nuking those elitist gatekeepers.  "Will Amazon care whether a book is any good" as long as the widget it sells brings in the dollars and cents?

Several editors, agents, and authors told me that the money for serious fiction and nonfiction has eroded dramatically in recent years; advances on mid-list titles—books that are expected to sell modestly but whose quality gives them a strong chance of enduring—have declined by a quarter. These are the kinds of book that particularly benefit from the attention of editors and marketers, and that attract gifted people to publishing, despite the pitiful salaries. Without sufficient advances, many writers will not be able to undertake long, difficult, risky projects. Those who do so anyway will have to expend a lot of effort mastering the art of blowing their own horn. “Writing is being outsourced, because the only people who can afford to write books make money elsewhere—academics, rich people, celebrities,” Colin Robinson, a veteran publisher, said. “The real talent, the people who are writers because they happen to be really good at writing—they aren’t going to be able to afford to do it.”

I have had a love-hate relationship with Amazon, as I do with most corporations, for a number of reasons, including the worry that its model might really push us into the dark world where nobody reads books and even if they do, well, Fifty Shades of Grey is no Fahrenheit 451.

Unlike the old elitist gatekeepers of this literary world,

A former Amazon employee who worked in the Kindle division said that few of his colleagues in Seattle had a real interest in books: “You never heard people say, ‘Hey, what are you reading?’ 

Maybe it is that I am fast becoming an old curmudgeon. But, I like to believe that I am worried about all these not because I am getting old but because these are issues we--as a people--are not thinking through.

And so the big question is not just whether Amazon is bad for the book industry; it’s whether Amazon is bad for books.

Do us all a favor: get yourself a paper-copy of Fahrenheit 451 and read it. Now.

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Ray Bradbury dies at 91. His writings will live on--unless we burn 'em!

Heard on NPR that Ray Bradbury died. 

In his memory, and as thanks to him, am re-posting the following old one from my own blog:

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Based on Ray Bradbury's warning, I imagine that books engage in self-immolation when Jersey Shore is on!

Crisis in economy, environment, health? Nah! Just watch TV and enjoy!

Not that different from politicians creating their own reality--we get the government we deserve!  Hey, Ray Bradbury, you were so right with your predictions of wall-to-wall television screens making people happy while ...

What watching "Jersey Shore" does to books?

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Based on Ray Bradbury's warning, I imagine that books engage in self-immolation when Jersey Shore is on!

Are "1984" and "Animal Farm" read anymore?

Many moons ago, when I felt like I was at ideological crossroads, knowing not whether I should hang a left, it was George Orwell who guided me along through Animal Farm and 1984 ... granted, it has been years since I read them, and would flunk a test on those two books because I have lost track of the nitty gritty details.  (Editor: you are a faculty with lots of "free" time!  What prevents you from reading them now?)

Then, later on, as a faculty I have every once in a while quoted from Orwell's essay on Politics and the English Language, whenever I felt the urge to really "lecture" about writing.  But, any time I bring up Orwell in a classroom environment, that name does not seem familiar to students.  And when I ask about 1984 and Animal Farm, well, no luck there either.

In fact, it is the same story with Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, Crime and Punishment, ....

I am beginning to think that there is something odd going on.  I mean, if the purpose behind requiring students to read works in literature is to help them understand many aspects of society, so that they can then be responsible and productive citizens, shouldn't Animal Farm and Fahrenheit 451, for instance, be books that college students ought to be familiar with?  In fact, shouldn't these be required readings at the high school level?  So, what do students then read in literature classes anymore, if books like the ones I am ranting about are no longer in the canon?  Spiderman? :P)

Or, are my expectations inconsistent with ground-level reality, whatever that might be?  But then as a university faculty, well, am I not supposedly living in that ground-level reality?  There is something seriously wrong here ....

The physical book in a digital world .... melts away ....

Jason Epstein reviews, in the NY Review of Books, the inevitability of digitization, and concludes:

My rooms are piled from floor to ceiling with books so that I have to think twice about where to put another one. If by some unimaginable accident all these books were to melt into air leaving my shelves bare with only a memorial list of digital files left behind I would want to melt as well for books are my life. I mention this so that you will know the prejudice with which I celebrate the inevitability of digitization as an unimaginably powerful, but infinitely fragile, enhancement of the worldwide literacy on which we all—readers and nonreaders—depend.

Epstein's description of books melting away triggers in my mind images of the firemen from Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, and the machine/dog that is used to sniff out and track down the protagonist, Guy Montag. 

It is not the digitization that worries me at all--after all, without the binary digits, this blogging itself won't be possible!

It is Bradbury's bottom-line in the shockingly accurate prediction of how anti-intellectual we will become, surrounded by television screens and disconnected from society ..... that is worrisome.  Every time a huge gazillion inch high definition television set is purchased, it further pushes us into a hedonistic life.  A hedonistic life where nothing else matters.

Now, in an existential framework within which I mostly approach life, well, I am absolutely ok with whatever people want to make of their lives--I suppose my worry stems from the high probability that the hedonism is not a result of informed decision-making.  And it is not based on being well-informed because, hey, that HD TV means no reading or thinking.  After all, as Bradbury notes in Fahrenheit 451, thinking makes people depressed :)

Reaching Fahrenheit 451

Looks like it is time to worry about the Fahrenheit 451 world, than to waste our energies on global warming or the Swine Flu.

Remember Ray Bradbury's masterpiece of a work, Fahrenheit 451?  It is a world where technology is so advanced that everything is fireproof, and the job of firefighters is to burn books!  Because reading books makes people sad and depressed.  And, so what do people do instead?  Why, it is advanced television, of course.  Every wall in every home is nothing but a television screen in this Bradbury imagined dystopia future.

Well, that future has arrived, or is rapidly arriving.  According to Intel:

by 2015 there will be 12 billion devices capable of connecting to 500 billion hours of TV and video content. ....

"TV is out of the box and off the wall," Intel's chief technology officer Justin Rattner told BBC News.

"TV will remain at the centre of our lives and you will be able to watch what you want where you want.

"We are talking about more than one TV capable device for every man and woman on the planet. People are going to feel connected to the screen in ways they haven't in the past," said Mr Rattner.