Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953) is commonly taught as a parable about the dangers of censorship, and that’s true, to an extent. But Bradbury’s classic stood witness to a deeper crisis. He feared a near-future with a technological regime designed to entertain, with the unspoken goal of captivating the senses and squelching the memory. Bradbury’s dystopia was a totalitarianism of the moment. With no power to recall the past and thus no future ahead, all one could do was tune in to the screen, the arena of the now.

Early on, fireman Guy Montag, the hero, struggles to compose a coherent thought but he just can’t, having no body of recollections to which to join his sensory perceptions: 

One drop of rain. Clarisse. Another drop. Mildred. A third. The uncle. A fourth. The fire tonight. One, Clarisse. Two, Mildred. Three, uncle. Four, fire. One, Mildred. Two, Clarisse. One, two, three, four, five, Clarisse, uncle, fire, sleeping tablets, men, disposable tissue, coattails, blow, wad, flush, Clarisse, Mildred…

Montag’s thoughts run like that for some time, before he spits out: “I don’t know anything any more.” He is fragmented.

Montag’s is the voice of despair, but his words are the ignition of his inner flame. Subsequently, Montag betrays his office by committing portions of Ecclesiastes and The Apocalypse of John to memory. He ends up on the run, the authorities on his heels. When he reaches safety, beyond the net of screens, the ancient words rev up his mind and draw up his own past, available again for recollection. Earlier, Montag and his wife Mildred tried but failed to remember the moment of their meeting. “When did we meet? And where?” Mildred doesn’t know. Now, in the free air, “I remember,” Montag declares. “Chicago… That’s where we met.”

Fahrenheit 451’s vision of the future is dark, but in many ways our present is darker still. There is no hint, for instance, that Montag is surveilled by his devices. Bradbury, like many of his generation, fretted over mass culture, but today we face a more alarming enemy in Big Tech’s merger with the state and the emergence of a social credit system. This is more frightening than merely amusing ourselves to death (though the latter is certainly a prelude to the former).

Bradbury is not the first to reflect on media’s effect on memory. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates tells the story of King Thamus of Egypt, who welcomed the inventor Theuth to his court. Theuth displayed many things to him. Some pleased Thamus, others not. But one invention received his firmest censure: the invention of letters, on the grounds that, instead of strengthening memory, as proposed, they would “create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.”

There is a mysterious relationship between the powers of memory and media. Media are designed, on some level, to relieve the mind of at least some of its labor. Writing makes negligent the oral transmission of lore and transfers memory to the text. But even in that milieu, memorization survives. Not long ago, a schoolboy would memorize a poem or a clip of scripture. The role of the memory may have been diminished, but its accomplishments were still a point of pride.

Few have thought more deeply about this relationship than Neil Postman (1931–2003). In The Disappearance of Childhood (1982), he reflects on how the printing press reshaped politics, education, adulthood, and the activities of the mind. The machine, being by nature a mass medium, demanded a mass public. None was available, so one was made. Doing so was not easy, he says. It required defining what an average enlightened adult should be capable of reading, which in turn required reorganizing learning to accomplish it. The manner in which one raised one’s children was changed to move them along the path of what was deemed suitable for them to master.

Childhood was reinvented as an apprenticeship into the broad public of letters and demanded that young ones obtain certain habits of mind. “Book learning,” Postman explains, “requires of the young a high degree of concentration and sedateness that runs counter their inclinations…. Quietness, immobility, contemplation, precise regulation of bodily functions, become highly valued.” Self-mastery is the fertile soil of memory. In the new world of book learning, the basic conditions of memory were altered but ultimately left intact.

With mass culture’s deemphasis on literacy, Postman feared we would witness the disappearance of childhood and adulthood. The new media of sight and sound demanded nothing from the viewer, so any person at any age could participate. The mental differences between adults and children would be obscured, opening the gates to barbarity and heralding the arrival of a new being, the “Adult-Child.” As for memory, the cast of mind that underwrites the world of letters would disappear. 

This, obviously, has all come to pass, and it has only accelerated in the digital age, as Postman also foresaw. In 2011, scientists at Columbia University found that Google use led to “lower rates of recall.” In 2016, researchers in the journal Memory found that “as we use the internet to support and extend our memory, we become more reliant on it. Whereas before we might have tried to recall something on our own, now we don’t bother.”

The dominance of social media has made this crisis more acute. A 2022 study available in the Library of Medicine reports, “Daily social media [is] linked to worse everyday memory functioning in adulthood.” This confirms what scientists found in 2018 for the Journal of Experimental Psychology, that study participants “without media consistently remembered their experience more precisely than participants who used media.” The authors remark that both groups enjoyed their experiences—but only one group effectively remembered what those even were. 

Whether or not the Phaedrus was on Bradbury’s mind when he wrote Fahrenheit 451, he answers it. When Montag flees the city to the country, where the regime’s power is looser, he joins a group of wandering tramps who are in fact old intellectuals in disguise. They are the people of the Great Books, we might say, but with a twist. They are book burners, too. To avoid the wrath of the authorities, they have memorized the old texts and cast them into the flame. In this wandering society, one’s identity is one’s commemorated text. Montag walks beside The Republic, The Meditations, and Gulliver’s Travels, and comes into the fold as Ecclesiastes. After centuries of memory’s wandering, it returns to its rightful place in the mind of man.

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Shortly after that, the War begins. In mere moments, the cities of the world are laid to waste by nuclear hellfire. The system, and all those integrated into it, are blown away. But not all is lost. The fire within the intellectuals rises.

I recently read these closing passages on a train back from New York to Charlottesville, with my wife by my side, nine months pregnant, awaiting our third child. With the threat of global war hanging over us, there was little hope to be found in Bradbury’s nuclear cleansing. It also struck somewhat of a false chord. Bradbury’s salvation by academics is a tired dream. As one friend told Montag, “There’s lots of old Harvard degrees on the tracks between here and Los Angeles.” We are meant to imagine men like Lionel Trilling and Jacques Barzun wandering the wastes. These were brilliant and humane men, no doubt, and exquisite products of the literary age. But in the end, their kind failed. And where are their descendants? Nowhere.

To whom, then, can we turn? If resistance is anywhere today, it’s among parents keeping the flame alive for their children. Those who make small but hard choices to limit media in their home, or sacrifice a second income to teach their own children, remain a hidden but vital force for memory’s endurance. Particularly religious families, who, weekly, daily, or hourly, answer the divine call to remember. I applaud the work of any intellectual who joins the fight. But as I survey the field, these humbler soldiers making the sacrifice to restore memory to its proper place will be the force for memory’s return, or none at all.