Martian Chronicles Ray Bradbury's Martian Thesis

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RULE: Clearly Bradbury's personal editorial concerns expressed through literary symbolism / philosophy in the aforementioned chapter (and others) deals with the issue of individuality vs. conformity. And there are legal essays that deal with majority vs. majority, including the essay "Neutral Principles and Some First Amendment Problems" by Robert H. Bork, former Solicitor General of the U.S., former Federal Appeals Court Judge and once nominated (unsuccessfully) for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. In his essay Bork argues that according to one aspect of the "Madisonian" model, in "wide areas of life majorities are entitled to rule for no better reason that they are majorities" (Bork, 1971, p. 2). But also, the model offers a "counter-majoritarian premise… [in that] there are some areas of life a majority should not control," Bork goes on. Some areas of life under the Constitution should be guided by "individual freedom," Bork insists, "and coercion by the majority in these aspects of life is tyranny" (Bork, p. 3).

Bork writes, "Majority tyranny occurs if legislation invades the areas properly left to individual freedom," and "Minority tyranny occurs if the majority is prevented from ruling where its power is legitimate" (Bork, p. 3). Bork's most poignant assertion associated with majority vs. minority issues makes a great deal of sense when reading The Martian Chronicles; he stated (p. 3) that "…neither the majority nor the minority can be trusted to define the freedom of the other." Only through the U.S. Constitution (being fairly and objectively instituted into the discussion, e.g., constitutional theory), can the issue of majority and minority freedom be defined.

APPLICATION: The wrongheaded, viciously immoral will of the majority was also brought out in chapter 17 of the Chronicles ("Usher II") through the burning of Edgar Allan Poe's books. The reason why books were burned? "…The great majority" was "afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves" (Bradbury, p. 134). Judge Bork asks (p. 1), "When is authority legitimate?" And Bork insists that authority is not necessarily legitimate just because a majority on a court; rather, power arises when "any court either exercises or declines to exercise the power to invalidate any act of another branch of government" (Bork, pp. 1-2).

CONCLUSION: Bork writes (p. 1) that the nature of the U.S. Constitution will change, "often quite dramatically, as the personnel of the Supreme Court changes," and in the same context the behavioral dynamics in The Martian Chronicles changed when the values and actions of a majority of those intruders changed from what had been there previously. Albeit arrogant, the majority in these stories left one world before it blew up in order to put its wrongheaded majoritarian stamp on another world.

Works Cited

Bork, Robert H. (1971). Neutral Principles and Some First Amendment Problems......