Thoughts on Ray Bradbury's "The Veldt"

In his 1951 short story collection The Illustrated Man, the iconic science fiction writer Ray Bradbury. I read Farenheit 451 relatively recently and I want to "make up" for a childhood without his writings by turning to an arbitrary choice I found at my local library. Onwards and upwards. "The Veldt" (it has its own wikipedia page) has a history prior to the short story collection in which it was included. It was first published under the title "The World the Children Made", in September 1950.

The story takes place in a family home with numerous - an abundance - of "modern" technologies, mostly electronic devices which seem to alleviate members of the family from performing (or performing as extensively) household work such as cleaning, cooking and other "typical" demands. The focus is on an nursery room where the two children, Peter and Wendy, evidently spend much of their time. The room is a virtual reality room in which the person's thoughts appear (by some mental telepathic-electronic interface?) on the screen-walls of the room. The father and mother, George and Lydia, become concerned by what they consider to be an excessive amount of time in this room. The father suggests that a psychologist be called to the house to examine the children to determine if they are healthy and well. As the story progresses, the reader confronts the fact that the parents are dead and the children are living comfortably in the nursery, and the psychologist got to the house too late (these are "thoughts" on the story, not a review of it).

I am reading this story over 60 years after if first appeared and I am struck by the critical eye which Bradbury seems to cast toward consumerism and technology. While it is clear - can it be presumed to be obvious? - that Bradbury is not a technophobe or a critic of technology per se, but I do think in this short story he presents a view that can be fruitfully situated within an academic space in which Catholicintellectuals and allies have overlapped their conversations.

Critical themes seem to run through the text. First, is critique of consumerism. The parents and the children have an abundance of gizmos and gadgets that seem to be cutting edge and provide to them a kind of lifestyle that an in-your-face acknowledgment of the temptation of material things. That critique seems to be embedded within a second critique of technology that underscores the social effects of an over-reliance on modern devices which depersonalizes relationships and weakens the "typical" bonds of family and presumably other relationships that constitute the broader foundations of a social and political order. A second theme seems to be a clash between the parents and teh children. The parents and the children seem to represent not only generational divisions but also represent two stances toward technology. The parents are ambivalent toward the role of technology, even though they have for the most part embraced the role. The children have fully embraced technology, or a stance toward technology which embeds them within it. I think that Bradbury raises an additional themes of autonomy and identity in relation to technology. There is the attempt to reassert the autonomy of the person separate from technology by the parents; the children's autonomy seemed to be obscured by their connection or addiction to it. Additionally, the identity was obscured by technology. Whereas the parents again served to re-assert an identity that was separate and dominant over the gadgets and gizmos of their home, that distinct personal identity de-coupled from the technology with which they interacted seemed to be rejected by the children, who represented a kind of human identity which was closely coupled to the nursery, which represented both a consumerist ethos and a technological existence that is something toward which to exercise caution.

What can a Catholic take from "The Veldt"? I think that a Catholic can begin a fruitful engagement with the virtues and vices. There are challenges to prudence and temperance while also examples of a form of gluttony. I think also that the Catholic can gain some traction by using Bradbury's story to engage with the themes of the conversations about technology that Catholic intellectuals have been participating in for a while now. The story provides a Catholic with a rich, fertile ground to explore and meditate on questions of the person (anthropology) and the modern technological society. Let the excavation begin.