Trivial Pursuit

August 06, 2025

A. J. Culp

Recently, I read Fahrenheit 451. I had always meant to read Ray Bradbury’s 1953 dystopian classic, but somehow never got round to it. So, when Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens dedicated an edition of The Minefield[i] to it, it was the nudge I needed.

What surprised me was its prescience. Known often as the book about book burning, Fahrenheit 451 is far more profound, and haunting, than this would suggest. On the surface, the story does seem to speak of authoritarian regimes that suppress thinking. But, as the book eventually reveals, the authoritarian measures, such as book burning, only arise from the people’s wishes. These are simply the administrative measures required to maintain people’s desire: a life of pleasure and ease. Fahrenheit 451, it turns out, is a book about society based on personal pleasure.

The result of this, as Bradbury shows, is not necessarily what we might expect. It is not the enlargement of life through leisure, which is to say, the pursuit of bigger goals and grander adventures and more generous acts of charity. Instead, it is the shrinking of life, the increasingly smaller and more inwardly focused life.

And the way in which this is created is not, in the first place, authority structures; those only preserve it. The place where it begins is in the trivialising of life. By constantly bombarding people with trite pleasures, they are kept in a state of stupor. It is literally a life of fun parks and personalised media. At home, people have ‘parlour walls’—screens scrolling endless trivialities tailored to the person watching. They also have ‘seashells’—personalised devices affixed to one’s ears, streaming non-stop audio attuned to the person’s preferences. The effect, en masse, is a population of zombies, of people plugging into personalised media and pulling out of reality.

Sound familiar? Back when Bradbury wrote the book, this reality seemed like a far-fetched fantasy. Today, it is so commonplace as to go unnoticed. If Bradbury got anything wrong, it was the extent; things have gone much, much further than he had imagined. But where his insight remains prophetic is in the ultimate effect. It is not just that we now live in the so-called ‘attention economy’,[ii] where powerful corporations seek to capture our attention for financial gain. Nor is it the fact that the effect of this is ‘stolen focus’,[iii] the creation of a generation of humans who are trained in inattention. No, the true issue is with what happens when humans pursue trivial personal pleasure as a way of life.

In a sense, then, Fahrenheit 451 reads like a parable for the Christian view of human sin. From the Church Fathers, such as St Augustine, up through the Reformers, such as Martin Luther, Christian tradition has viewed fallen humanity as homo incurvatus, the ‘inward-curved human’. Since sin causes people to look more and more inwardly, to their own pleasures and desires, humans caught in the thrall of sin descend into self-love rather than love of God and love of neighbour. The ancient Greek myth of Narcissus, from which we get the term narcissist, is a powerful image of the effects of this: the increased love of self leads to the destruction of self.

To my mind, the reason Fahrenheit 451 is so haunting is because of what it shows about the relationship between attention and affection. It shows, in essence, that attention is affection. What we attend to not only reveals what we care about, it also shapes what we care about. Attention cultivates affection.

Yet if this is true, we live in ominous times. We live in an age when people’s attention is, en masse, being trained upon trivial things, which means our affections are as well. We increasingly love and adore trivial pleasures rather than ultimate things. A good example from the book is Mildred, the wife of Montag, the main character. She is perpetually fixated on the screens on the ‘parlour walls’ and the audio piped through the ‘seashells’ into her ears. And her conversation, in essence, is just her parroting those things. Her life is like that of a zombie, shuffling around the house with a distant gaze and repeating nothings. The only time she is roused from her stupor is when something punctures it, such as when Montag asks her to consider questions of life’s meaning and purpose.

As Christians, this should be deeply troubling, for it represents the arch-undoing of humanity. The picture of Mildred is the very anti-type of the Christian vision of human flourishing. And yet today this picture is not the exception, but the rule; you can find it nearly anywhere you go: on buses and trains, in parks and beside pools, and even on beaches and mountain trails. Just this week, when I picked up my son from soccer training, I came across a modern-day Mildred. I was leaving the public park, a beautiful space bathed in the lights of the sporting fields. As I drove through the car park toward the exit, there was a man walking toward the park. He seemed oblivious to everything beyond his phone and ear buds, zigzagging this way and that across the car park. As I passed by, he wandered quite close to our car, nearly into the path we were travelling. This suddenly punctured his bliss, which, as with Mildred, upset him very much: he raised his hands and shouted at me as I drove by. He was so lost in his little world that it never occurred to him that he might have wandered out into traffic.  

In contrast, a figure more closely resembling the biblical picture is Clarisse, the girl who starts Montag on his own journey of awakening. She is curious and joyful, delighting in the beauty and mystery of life. As the Fire Chief says about her, ‘She didn’t want to know how a thing was done, but why’. In contrast to the small, pale life lived by Mildred, Clarisse lives a big, bright, and joyful life—a life that is ever growing and expanding. Clarisse, it seems to me, is a type of Lady Wisdom as found in Proverbs 8. That figure, too, is portrayed as a little girl frolicking and delighting in creation, which, in Proverbs, is portrayed as a playhouse built for her by her father in heaven. Her life is characterised by awe and wonder.

I suppose what surprises me most is how we, as the Church, have offered so little resistance to this life of triviality. We have given ourselves over to the same dehumanizing media and personal-pleasure culture, acting as if they were innocuous. We have rarely exercised our prophetic voice, calling out this culture for what it is, or cultivated our priestly role, reviving the ancient practices of the Church which train attention and cultivate desire on ultimate things. If we do, we will find ourselves less like Mildred and more like Clarisse.

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