Ray Bradbury famously said there’s more than one way to burn a book. More specifically, he said, “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.” I can’t help thinking of this when I consider the draining of resources from the humanities at U.S. colleges and universities, which has been going on for far longer than the current high-profile attacks on higher ed in general.

One way to burn books without actually, physically burning them is to make them not matter. One way to make them not matter—at least not in people’s perception, which is where mattering resides—is to inculcate the view that the arena where they have always been assumed to matter the most should rightly and actually be devoted to job training, to preparation for “the real world” of practical, workaday, utilitarian concerns.

As for why anybody would want to do this, I think that, aside from the fact that on one level it’s simply the inevitable result of the American materialistic hustle mentality generating its own destiny by programming its collective mind with its own assumptions—in other words, curling back and cannibalizing itself—there’s the other fact that books are dangerous. Bradbury was right in Fahrenheit 451. If you spend any amount of time, but especially a slow and extended period of your life, reflecting on why and how things, people, the world, and especially you, yourself, really are the way they are, and have come to be the way they’ve come to be, and could perhaps be different—if you do this, it introduces an element of unpredictability into your life, and through you, into the life of the world. This unpredictability is the “liberal” in a liberal education, its freeing (liberating) effect. To some extent you are, in effect, deprogrammed from the cult of the culture into which you were born. This is dangerous to the established order.

Because all cultures really are cults. To be born is to be brainwashed. How do you know what’s good or not, what’s right or not, what’s especially or particularly right or desirable about the way your family and society does things and views things, if you’ve never questioned it—or if you’ve never even arrived at the point where you can recognize its mental matrix of a worldview as something that can be questioned, something assumed and projected onto reality instead of something given and self-evident? One way of gaining this self-distance, not the only way but a time-tested one, is to engage with books slowly and reflectively, to learn about history, and language, and literature, and psychology, and societies, and religions, and artistic traditions, along with economic systems, and political systems, and intellectual movements, and science, and technology, and the rise and fall of civilizations and their worldviews, and the way different peoples have understood everything in vastly varied and different ways—and thereby to be jolted out of a spell that you didn’t even know had been cast over you by your birth culture.

If reading books really has its way with you, if it really does the thing it’s capable of doing in its own unique way, it calls into question things that you didn’t realize were subject to questioning. And through this, it punctures a hole in the sacred canopy of your private cosmos. All bets are off. Who knows how your understanding of yourself and the world might change, and how your way of acting in the world might change along with it?

To the powers that be—the ruling political and other powers of the world thus called into question—this is not a welcome development. Free agents are troublesome because they upset the established order. Reform movements are fine as long as they stay within the established and invisible boundaries of collective assumptions and approved norms. But when they go beyond that, when they invoke some of the beating of those Lovecraftian black wings of mysterious powers from beyond the far rim of the known universe, they’re disallowed. As David Bowie’s oddly half-sympathetic Pontius Pilate says to Jesus in Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, “It's one thing to want to change the way people live, but you want to change how they think, how they feel…It's dangerous. It's against Rome. It's against the way the world is…It simply doesn't matter how you want to change things. We don't want them changed.” Nor is this rejection of real change, and the accompanying self-regulating and self-repairing action of the existing order that accompanies such rejection, something that’s carried out by the ruling political powers alone. Everyday people contribute to it as well. Jack Nicholson’s character famously and quite effectively articulates this in Easy Rider: “It’s real hard to be free when you are bought and sold in the marketplace. Of course, don’t ever tell anybody that they’re not free, because then they’re gonna get real busy killing and maiming to prove to you that they are. Oh, yeah, they’re gonna talk to you, and talk to you, and talk to you about individual freedom. But they see a free individual, it’s gonna scare them.”

So again, to return to the original point: There’s more than one way to burn a book. You can just make them not matter. And a motivation for making them not matter could be to defuse their potential for upsetting the established world order.

What if there were a world full of books, but they were neutered because the official centers of learning and education had been led, forced, and/or convinced to decenter them in the interest of propagating the very outlook and assumptions that prop up a nation’s, culture’s, or civilization’s political and economic power structures? What if books were simultaneously ubiquitous and, as far as their real, deep purpose and potential goes, useless? “You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture,” said Bradbury. "Just get people to stop reading them."

(Addendum: What if the desire to wake up through books proved to be inbuilt, a kind of burning core of ineradicable motivation? And what if it therefore didn’t actually go away, but just went underground and then resurfaced elsewhere—perhaps, say, in a blooming, burgeoning field of new gatherings outside the official/institutional centers of learning and education, where it was actually liberated by this separation from institutions tied to the ruling political and economic powers? What then?)

(Disclaimer: I typed the above paragraphs in a kind of rush and don’t even know what sparked them. Just listening to a train of thought that started speaking on its own. So YMMV, in a big way.)