The response to Al Gore’s new book helps prove his point.
By Matt Singer
Monday June 4, 2007
Halfway through The Assault on Reason, former Vice President Al Gore’s new book, I felt an unusual emotion: sympathy for the George W. Bush of 2000, who was clearly in over his head debating Gore.
Fortunately, I could return to normalcy by considering the mainstream coverage of the book’s release. The burning questions had nothing to do with Gore’s thesis, his evidence, or the connection between them. No, forget the text; we’re looking to the subtext: Is Assault a veiled announcement that Gore is running for president? And, more importantly, is he slimming down for the run?
If anything, the media’s coverage of the book’s release has only confirmed one of its central arguments which is that the for-profit media underplays crucial issues, while focusing on Britney and K-Fed, Jen and Brangelina, TomKat, and heinous crimes with white female victims. Combined with a right-of-center political movement that barely even pretends to deal with the facts anymore, America is now stuck in a war we never should have waged with no end in sight. And no one is seriously acting to confront global warming. And we’re torturing people. And there’s massive corruption in the way federal contracts are handed out. Now if this was all Assault added to the mix, it would simply be a retread of dozens of books, hundreds of articles, and millions of blog-posts over the past half dozen years. (Granted, it would be a well-written retread with an impressive byline.)
Fortunately, Gore takes us down some other interesting roads, dabbling in psychology, neuroscience, the rise of mass media, information theory, and more philosophers than most Americans know exist.
His forays into these realms provide an explanation into the power of television and the 30-second spot (we’re wired to track visual movement), the all-consuming focus on threatened white women (combine white domination of the media world with an ingrained empathy for victims with whom we identify through demographic similarity), and why democracy and capitalism are better than tyranny (all of us are smarter than any one of us).
Gore also manages to reframe the totality of these issues away from a common handful of explanations given (“Bush is dumb,” “Bush is evil,” “the rightwing built a movement with infrastructure”) and instead emphasizes an underlying core problem shared increasingly (and unfortunately) by much of the country as a whole. That problem is a decline in the use of reason to make decisions.
Fortunately, the Vice President appreciates the scope of his diagnosis. With the anti-Bush books of the last few years, the prescriptions and available remedies have often been assumed to be easily at hand:
Agitate. Elect new leaders. Hell, maybe impeach the guy.
The problem is that none of that would do the trick. Our current President is clearly not helping the disease, but he’s ultimately a symptom, not the cause. In an already widely quoted passage, Gore writes, “It is too easy and too partisan to simply place the blame on the policies of President George W. Bush. We are all responsible for decisions our country makes. We have a Congress. We have an independent judiciary. We have checks and balances. We are a nation of laws. We have free speech. We have a free press. Have they all failed us?”
Ironically, it is only as the evidence mounts of Bush’s failure that it becomes clear that Bush alone is not to blame. Even after a change in leadership, the Congress still refuses to shut down the disastrous war in Iraq. Impeachment is a remedy intended to remove a President who has failed a nation. What’s the remedy for a nation that has failed itself?
The explanation for much of what has happened leads back to the rightwing movement that has grown by leaps and bounds since its inception four decades ago. One solution, which Gore briefly considers, is simply to establish a countervailing power to balance the marketplace of ideas. The problem is that much of what is flawed with the right are not necessarily the ends, but the means. When it’s the tactics themselves that are threatening (the politicization of reportage and policy-making), how does fighting fire with fire actually solve the problem?
The good news is that Gore does actually see a solution emerging—a new set of liberal institutions (liberal in the classical sense) that reward reason, encourage dialogue, and promote sound decision-making. The institutions are the emerging online media ranging from citizen-written blogs to YouTube to social networking communities like Facebook and MySpace.
It comes as no surprise to anyone familiar with modern American media that the publication of The Assault on Reason was interpreted as a sure sign of a well-plotted return to the campaign trail. But check those chicken entrails again, mighty mystic Maureen Dowd: quoting the Federalist papers has not been a feature of Presidential campaigns in some time.
Assault hardly reads like a typical campaign book. It’s a call for America to return to its Enlightenment roots. The original polymaths who ended the Dark Ages and launched the Era of Reason didn’t fight for reason in order to become kings, but rather to unseat them. If anything, the same point is clear in Gore’s book. We don’t simply need a new President. We need to reboot the system. And at this point, the man who used to be the next President of the United States is finding it easier to hit the switch from the outside.
Matt Singer is the CEO of Forward Montana, a youth-driven political non-profit, and one of the front-pagers at Left in the West, a political blog covering state and national issues from a Western perspective.
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Comments
Talk about an assault on reason!
— mwavro - Jun 9, 12:35 PM - #Blaming Republicans for the (the politicization of reportage and policy-making) shows the Vice President’s total lack of understanding of the role of information in public policy.
The politicization of policy- making is the formation of policy through the market place of ideas. Maybe Professor Gore should take time away from teaching J-School and sign up for some political science courses.
Excellent review. Balanced and nuanced. Good job. Makes me want to buy the book. Al Gore for president. Makes sense to me.
— remoran - Jun 9, 02:22 PM - #mwavro: this “The politicization of policy- making is the formation of policy through the market place of ideas” is laughable. The marketplace of ideas can still be dominated by money and influence, just like any other market. If only two ideas on an issue are presented, that doesn’t equal an open and welcomed debate by any stretch of the imagination. Politicization also assumes there is no such thing as authority of expertise. I’d suggest before you tell one of the top political minds in the country to “sign up for some political science courses,” you take a look at some W. Richard Scott, and focus on authority within rational-legal structures like bureaucracy. Long story short, politicization means technical issues, many of which would be better handled by specialized experts within bureaucratic structures, go from being judged on the facts of the case to being judged on how the case is presented in a political context. It’s the sort of politicization you’re advocating that leads to, for example, disclaimers in science textbooks telling kids not to believe what’s in the chapter on evolutionary biology. That sort of issue has no place in the political debate, because there is no inherent political question involved—either you’re willing to accept reality as the basis for positions, or you aren’t and, if you aren’t, then you’re not really employing reason, are you?
— JR - Jun 11, 03:59 AM - #mwavro – I’m not sure if you were going for po-mo or not, but your word usage, grammar, and punctuation rendered your response to my review incomprehensible.
In fact, as I make clear in the review, Gore does not solely blame Republicans for the decline in the use of reason in decision-making.
As for political science courses, I’ve yet to meet many folks who actually get into the sausage making and think that their time studying poli sci served them a great deal in their understanding of the process.
remoran — Thanks for the kind words.
— Matt Singer - Jun 12, 12:51 PM - #Video book report on THE ASSAULT ON REASON:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=P6nTAR2MVYQ
Please spread it around!
And: the full list of Ecolanguage videos on YouTube:
http://youtube.com/leearnold
— Lee A. Arnold - Jul 21, 02:20 PM - #