★★ (2.2 of 5)

• Full Title: The Assault On Reason
• Author: Al Gore
• Year: 2007 (mine was library hardcover)
• Pages: 273*
• Genre: Political Culture
• Publisher: The Penguin Press
• ISBN 978-1-59420-122-6 (hardcover)
• Wikipedia page
• Author’s Wikipedia page

(* not including index, notes, acknowledgements)

 

Summary

Former U.S. Vice President (and Senator, and presidential candidate) Al Gore explores how the “marketplace of ideas” — foundational to a functioning democracy — has eroded in recent years, due to a coordinated assault on reason, logic, and critical thinking.

Ch. 1: Covers the science of how humans (physically and phychologically) react to fear and misinformation, how memories shaped by fear are fundamentally different from regular memories. Of course it follows that people will participate poorly in democracy if they’ve been mentally trained to fear things — immigrants, equality, terrorists, progressive tax rates — that aren’t true imminent dangers.

Ch. 2: The insidious combination of fear with dogmatic faith (he uses the word as a synonym for religious dogma rather than its primary definition, “belief without evidence”) — whereby people already trained to value dogma over reason can be more easily worked over by politicians peddling fear. There’s also a section on the unlikely right-wing coalition (anti-tax and anti-regulation businesspeople combined with foreign policy hawks and religious fundamentalists) that uses these tactics.

Ch. 3: How wealth and power intertwine, and how that affects the flow of information and public debate.

Ch. 4: The increasing ease of propagating lies.

Ch. 5: The increasing concentration of authority in the executive branch, at the cost of individual liberty/power.

Ch. 6: This chapter felt different, as if it had been written as a separate longform essay on national security. Its primary thrust is that so much of the policy sold as “for our national security” actually works against our national security interests.

Ch. 7: Entire chapter devoted to the “carbon crisis”, by which he means our ongoing climate catastrophe.

Ch. 8: Like ch. 5, this one concerns the concentration of authority in the executive branch, including the weakening of Congress and the judiciary.

Ch. 9: Focuses mostly on the internet, and how it has the potential to re-connect citizens with the marketplace of ideas.

 

Points For...

Much of the book is sound, and the writing clear enough — none of this is dense or heavy reading. There are clear, quotable portions. For example:

“When fear and anxiety play a larger role in our society, logic and reason play a diminished role in our collective decision making.”

—page 48

There were a surprising number of accidental predictions of the 2016 TAINTUS election (remember this book is from 2007):

“In an atmosphere of constant fear, the public is more likely to discard reason and turn to leaders who demonstrate dogmatic faith in ideological viewpoints. These new demagogues don’t actually offer greater security from danger, but their simplistic and frequently vitriolic beliefs and statements can provide comfort to a fearful society. Unfortunately, the rise of these leaders serves only to exacerbate the decline of reason and further jeopardize our democracy.”

—pages 43-44

 

Points Off For...

For starters, I immediately disagreed with one of Gore’s underlying premises: that television is the cause of much of the present divorce from reason. On page 15, he correctly identifies some of the other alleged “causes” as symptoms, but then he fails to notice that TV (and its accompanying changes in the way information is spread) is also a symptom. So closely attached to capitalism and the existing socio-economic order, Gore can’t begin to imagine that it’s this very order (along with religion’s long history of magical thinking) that laid the groundwork for television and marketing to undermine our collective reasoning abilities.

Despite actually making good points about the shift to television, most of the introduction comes across as fear of advancing technology; I think it’s Gore’s choice of phrasing that does this — he uses many of the same words (“kids today...”) as those who are simply afraid of any new technology.

In the rest of the book, he unfortunately uses the Bush 2 administration as examples of his points. Not only does this make a 12-year-old book seem severely dated, but it sounds a lot like a bitter loser in a recent election complaining that the winners are damn liars and subverting democracy (of course, he had lost a close recent election and the winners are damn liars and subverting democracy). Anyone not already on Gore’s side won’t notice that he uses those only as examples of current assaults on reason, but instead will see the entire book as a sad partisan attack.

And for my tastes, there were too many fawning references to “the Founding Fathers”, to whom Gore attributed absolute benevolence and wisdom in the creation of the United States, something he also does with the founders of modern capitalism, never admitting (or possibly even realizing) how much of the problem he’s discussing comes from that quarter.

For a book written by an almost-president, I would have expected better editing. In several places, it’s clear that paragraphs were moved around at the last minute and no one remembered to change the transitions. There are also several places where he’s just said something, but then forgot and said it again a page or two later — as in the following example:

“They paid actors to make phony video press releases and paid cash to some reporters and columnists who were willing to take it in return for positive coverage.” —page 126

“They also paid actors to make phony video press releases and paid cash to some commentators who were willing to take it in return for positive treatment.” —page 127

At times, I caught him playing fast-and-loose with facts — which we’ve come to expect from politicians, yes, but in a book specifically about logic and reason, and bringing public discourse close to an ideal of reasonable accuracy, I would expect a bit more care. For example: the number of Iraqi and “War on Terrorism” prisoners of war who are supposedly innocent:

• Page 150: “an estimated 70 to 90 percent of them [were] mistakenly charged.”
• Page 157: the Red Cross “estimated” that 70-90 percent were “mistakenly detained”.
• Page 158: “more than 90 percent” “were innocent of any charges”.
• Page 208: “99 percent of whom were innocent of any connection to terrorism or violence against our troops”.

So, was it 70-90 percent, or more than 90, or 99 percent? Were they mistakenly charged or mistakenly detained? Innocent of “any charges” or innocent of any connection to terrorism? This happens to be the instance that caught my eye, not because I knew the actual number, but because I noticed Gore using different numbers and phrases at different times. In the notes at the end, the first two instances are attributed, but the “more than 90” and “99 percent” did not have any backing source. My question then automatically becomes: Which other figures or facts were mistakenly (or intentionally) fudged in this book? It casts doubt on the veracity of all numbers and alleged facts herein.

 

Conclusion

Had I read this in 2007, it might have felt more "up to the minute", but today it seems very old. After a full Obama administration and what seems like an eternity of TAINTUS’ lies and incompetence, I can’t bring myself to get very emotional about the debacles of the early 2000s. (I didn’t hear of this book back then and I would have been too busy to read it anyway, and in fact only got it because it was a dollar or less at a library book sale.) It now seems hopelessly dated, and at points incredibly naive in the light of current Republican enabling of TAINTUS. The multiple editing and factual errors looks like the book was rushed to print without much care, probably hoping to get soundbites onto TV before the 2008 election — which negates several of the main points of the book.

Still, the core of Gore’s arguments — and his intentions — are sound. We are, I think, increasingly living among people who consider “alternative facts” (lies) on an equal footing with facts, and a great number of figures in authority don’t mind stepping around the Constitution to push their own authoritative views, and I don’t think it’s getting any better any time soon.

 

 

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