November 12, 2007 | Volume 4, Issue 3
Reason Reigns
HSR reviews Al Gore's latest
Seven years after Al Gore conceded the presidential election he has more fans around the globe than ever before. HSR reviews his most recent book, giving us more insight to “the guy who used to be the next President of the United States.”
The Assault on Reason
by Al Gore
Penguin Press, 2007
For several years, Al Gore jokingly introduced himself to audiences, deadpan, as the guy who used to be the next president of the United States. Never mind the decades of public service; thanks to hanging chads and butterfly ballots, Gore was a political has-been. Not anymore. Although the electoral memories remain, Gore is now known as the suave Google investor, an Apple Inc. board member, an Oscar award-winning documentary star, a Nobel Peace Prize- winner, and a leader in the effort to save the planet from global warming. Gore is now, as some have punned, the Goracle.
Still, he is also a politician at heart, which can be a red flag: Too many books written by politicians fall trap to self-aggrandizement or score-settling, or they overflow with dull anecdotes. Thankfully, The Assault on Reason avoids these traps. There are some personal anecdotes, sure, but they serve to either illustrate or amuse. For instance, in making a larger point the psychology of fear, he writes about how, growing up on his father’s farm, he learned to hypnotize a chicken, and learned how much he could and cannot do before awaking the chicken.
Not as didactic as its title may suggest, and not as angry as it could be, Reason is passionate, defiantly optimistic, and, one could say, reasoned. Gore’s central thesis is that as television became the dominant method of mass communication over the past 50 years, it vanquished the power of the written word. Television, he writes, specializes in sound bites and the bombardment of all our senses; the printed word specializes in communicating abstract ideas and rigorous logic. When an average Americans spends 4.5 hours per day slumped on couch passively watching television, democratic power no longer resides with those with the best-reasoned arguments. It resides with those most adept at exploiting the inherently non-logical medium of television. And control in this one-way medium, with its high barriers of entry and high economies of scale, is limited to a select few with political power or money. To put it another way, instead of the Federalist papers or Lincoln-Douglas debates steering the public policy debate, we have Fox News.
Not to quibble about a few passages out of an entire book, but Gore’s case weakens when writing on maximizing democratic and ideological diversity. He entirely credits New Deal-era legal constraints with preventing the radio from evolving into a powerful, cynical, political manipulation tool in the United States, as it did in Latin America and Europe-not accounting for systemic social and economic dynamics. He writes nostalgically of the Fairness Doctrine and refers to its abolition as a disaster. The Fairness Doctrine called for the government to deign the number of sides each issue had, which ones were reasonable, and what was fair. Does he want the “obscenity”-obsessed Federal Communications Commission, under the Bush administration, to hold that power?
Gore also documents the Bush Administration’s assault on reason. He synthesizes the sad tale of its stroking and exploiting of fear-as opposed to appealing to reason-to sell the Iraq War agenda and its domestic agenda. The book reaches its crescendo with chapters on global warming and the existential democratic crises of signing statements, rendition, torture, the unitary executive theory, and the Patriot Act-the latter he refers to as this generation’s Gulf of Tonkin Resolution). Most successful is the passion in these chapters. He beckons the mythologies of Lincoln, of the World War II generation, and of Winston Churchill to summon the reader to action to meet the moral imperatives of these times.
Gore concludes on a logically optimistic note. He sees a burgeoning democratic power, assuming net neutrality remains the law, in the decentralized internet, with its blogs, wikis, online organizing, and YouTube. The new electronic medium remains, after all, primarily print-based, with video serving a complimentary role. With virtually zero barriers to entry, and with greater options for two-way communication, the internet provides greater opportunity for all citizens to engage in the national discourse (see: The student walkouts over the immigration bill in spring 2006; grassroots fundraising by the Barack Obama presidential campaign). The tools are here, Gore tells us. It is up to us-you, me, all of us-to use them, and to bring our logic.