Posts Tagged ‘censorship’

            Ray Bradbury’s famous novel Fahrenheit 451 is a story about a society in which books are illegal and the job of firemen is to burn books.  It has often been misunderstood as a protest against government censorship because it was published in 1953 during the height of the anti-Communist movement in the United States led by Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House on Un-American Activities Committee.  This superficial political reading of Fahrenheit 451 misses the depth of Bradbury’s critique of modern mass society, its technology and its false view of the nature of happiness. Read the rest of this entry »

My last post was inspired by the following quotation from G. K. Chesterton.  “Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable.”  I reflected on how we criticize sins in others that we aren’t susceptible to but excuse those which we are more inclined to commit.  I also pointed out how strongly Jesus condemned this kind of self-justifying personal hypocrisy. 

This time I’d like to look at the issue of institutional hypocrisy or the way in which political “liberals” and “conservatives” often agree on evils but find different ones excusable.  Read the rest of this entry »