Al Gore’s new book, The Assault on Reason deals with some of the same themes this blog does, however, Gore does it in a very different way than I do. For once I agree with Gore, reason is slowly being diminished in America. Surprisingly though, Gore does not mention post-modern thought, atheism as an avenue to rejecting moral absolutes nor does he mention the fad of non-judgmentalism in society as possible explanations for the decline of rationalism. Rather the perpetrators of the “assault on reason” are the Bush administration, others who reject the hard “science” of global warming, and insofar as I can follow, the American public in general. The excerpt from the book that I read was littered with rhetoric like “reason, logic and truth play a sharply diminished role in society”, and other popular expressions taken from the revolution and ratification era in America’s history. This is hilarious, because if there are two things the cultural left in general, and Al Gore for certain does not understand it is 1) reason and 2) the political thought of the founding fathers.

For starters, to understand what Gore is saying we have to define his terms, unfortunately the reader has to do this because he does not. Two important points must be understood, what is ‘reason’ in Gore’s mind and 2) who is perpetrating the ‘assault’ on reason and how are they doing it. Gore claims that the Bush administration was being irrational when they relied on “falsehoods as the basis of policy, even in the face of massive and well-understood evidence to the contrary.” This is certainly historically inaccurate but put that aside for a moment. Gore is implying that the Bush administration lied and/or had ulterior motives for going into Iraq. What he is describing is not a break down in the reasoning abilities of anyone, but something altogether different from reason; he is trying to describe the motives of the Bush administration. Unfortunately he commits a logical fallacy in doing so, assuming that because untruthfulness of the Bush administration is a possible explanation for there being no WMD’s that it is the only possible explanation. Gore then goes on to give examples of how our citizenry is no longer “well-informed”, then claims that our system was designed and dependent on a well-informed citizenry. Once again, this is not even in the realm of logic or reason. I suppose I would agree that a “well-informed” citizenry would be nice, but you are dealing with knowledge, or lack thereof, not the reasoning abilities of American culture at large. As for the contention that our democracy “relies on the wisdom of a well-informed citizenry”, this is simply untrue, our system was set up by men who were fully aware of the effect uneducated masses could have on a country. One of their greatest fears was of Demagogues and how quickly they could turn a democracy into a dictatorship. In turn they set up plenty of protections to guard against these sorts of things (i.e. Electoral College, representative democracy…). Gore then goes on to bash contemporary media outlets such as television and radio. There have been quite a few studies on the relationship between the decline of modern thought and the television set, and in some circumstances they are persuasive, but what Television really represents is a preference for emotion over rationality, not necessarily the decline of rationality. Two naked reasons why Gore hates Television and exhorts America to start reading newspapers; 1) “when the controversy over my sighs in the first debate with George W. Bush created an impression on television that for many viewers outweighed whatever positive benefits I might have otherwise gained in the verbal combat of ideas and substance.” Oh poor Gore, if only Americans were able to look past charisma and articulation and focus on his so-called substance and ideas he would have certainly defeated Bush, probably by a landslide. I love George W, but come on Gore if you couldn’t come off as smarter than Bush II in the 2000 election, you got to be an idiot. Second reason that Gore wants people to read more newspapers; radio and television are dominated by conservatives, who portray Gore as an idiot, to the print media Gore has become their favorite environmental, and now only has good things to say about him.

So apparently television and the Bush administration are huge obstacles for American society to regain its ability to reason. If these seem too simplistic or maybe even dumb, that is because they are. But most of the time when you try to disguise a political diatribe as an intellectual/scholarly/philosophical work, it is dumb. Thanks for the input honorary philosopher/meteorologist/scientist/professor Gore, but you are about ten years to late explaining to people that modernity and emphasis on reason are in decline among western thinkers at large, and thus on western culture. Unfortunately your book is not going to contribute anything to the conversation that has not already been touched on by others, and either rejected or expanded on, in more lucid discourse. I know next to nothing about science, so I kept my mouth shut when Gore put out an Inconvenient Truth, but as Gore ventures into philosophy and government, I finally understand why the outcry amongst the scholarly community was so strong, when he put out An Inconvenient Truth. To describe Gore as an amateur in these fields would be generous, and in sum, some of the strongest evidence I have seen that America’s reason is declining is the very fact that Gore has a following.

Gore can’t help but show his true colors and writes that, “In order to reclaim our birthright, we Americans must resolve to repair the systemic decay of our public forum… We must stop tolerating the rejection and distortion of science. We must insist on an end to the cynical use of pseudo-studies known to be false for the purpose of intentionally clouding the public's ability to discern the truth.” Isn’t that just scary? So much for the so-called marketplace of ideas that Gore praises earlier in his book. Gore does not want academic discourse or debate; he wants to suppress any ideas that conflict with global warming. Gore was wrong about the internet, he didn’t invent, but he may have reclaimed his engineering stripe for me, he has almost single-handedly invented global warming.

As far as the lip service he gives to the history of this country and the fathers of our democracy an analogy is appropriate. Sometimes when you take an idea or thought out of its original context and move it to a separate society the insanity of it, shows itself. I would love to see Al Gore explain to Thomas Jefferson, James Madison or Alexander Hamilton how it was necessary for the government to restrict its citizens from driving vehicles, force them to take public transportation, restrict the commerce of America by restricting where they could drill for oil, how long they could keep their factories running and forcing them to cost inflating industry techniques. When the founding fathers (pretty hard core libertarians I might add) asked, “why is all this necessary”, Al Gore would look at them and say “because if we don’t the polar ice caps are going to melt and then the entire earth will flood killing all humanity in the process, if humans don’t just overheat and explode before that.” This does not exactly sound like someone who should be the spokesman for reason, does it?