I'll center on rights for equality in Fahrenheit
451. If the novel reveals anything about equality that suggests people
should be equal, it may be just that someone who disagrees with the status quo and the
firemen and the government should be treated the same as someone who agrees. Clarisse
and the old woman who dies with her books are not treated as
equals.
For the most part, though, the novel suggests that
the desire to make everyone equal, at least intellectually, is a negative. According to
Beatty, books were originally banned because special interest groups, namely minorities
of all kinds, complained every time something offended them. To make every book
inoffensive is, of course, to make them all equal. And that is a bad
thing.
Equal treatement under the law and the equal right
to free speech are essential, but the watering down of intellectual thought in the
interest of not offending anyone, is undesirable.
The
government in the novel wants everyone to think alike, and wants everyone to be
simplistic. Books that disagree can change this.
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