Review: The Assault on Reason by Al Gore
The Penguin Press (NY 2007) $25.95
reviewed by Gregg Mosson
Former Vice
President Al Gore’s The Assault on Reason is a well-researched
exploration of the diminishing existence of debate in America in the age of television. He outlines how debate exists at the core of
democratic theory and structure, and wonders whether or not democracy can
survive its extinction.
Is America
retreating to a pre-Civil Rights era, or to a McCarthy-like bunker mentality in
response to a new Cold War? Or is the
U.S. just overreaching with security measures, as during World War One when the
Sedition Act enabled U.S. law enforcement to round up pro-union workers in the
name of protecting war-serving industries?
It seems so. This book compiles
copious research alongside psychological and media theory to outline the
decline of debate in America—and how this has fed into the War on Terrorism—in
cool, reasoned prose.
Policy advocates,
lawmakers and concerned citizens everywhere of all political persuasions should
read this book. The book is not always
right, but the ideas are profound and provocative. It requires set-aside quiet reading time, for Gore’s book is an
extended rational argument, combining academic and conversational prose, a
style that may not reach the electronic culture he is arguing against.
The Assault on
Reason also is an extensively documented indictment
of the Bush administration’s disregard for the U.S. Constitution and the
checks-and-balance system of government. While Gore’s focus may seem partisan to some, Gore cites facts
already well-reported in news outlets about federal wiretapping, U.S. torture,
and the conservative “unitary executive theory” behind it all. These facts should alarm conservatives and
libertarians also. The unitary
executive theory states that the President’s constitutional war powers can
trump all congressional law. This
spurious theory side-steps that the U.S. Constitution specifically gives the
President a veto power over laws, not a Get Out of Jail free card to
ignore them.
These two issues—the government’s
security-minded assault on U.S. Constitution and the diminishment of public
debate are intertwined—argues Gore, because the checks-and-balances core of the
U.S. Constitution is precisely designed to require debate and compromise in
government. Institutionalized public
debate is what distinguishes America from past monarchies and present
dictatorships. Governmental debate is
safeguarded by the institutions of checks and balances as well as by the
constitutionally-protected “free press.”
From this
perspective, diminished public debate represents a social crisis. The long-term cause of declining debate in
America, says Gore, is that for the last 50 years, electronic culture has eclipsed
print culture.
U.S. Sen. Robert
Byrd of West Virginia noted on the floor of the Senate—on the eve of the 2003
U.S. war against Iraq—that the chamber “was, for the most part silence,
ominously dreadfully silent.”
As a former Senator
himself, Gore notes from experience that lawmakers are too busy raising money
for pricey television advertising to participate in, or even listen to,
legislative debates. This was not the
case in the 19th century, when legislators like Henry Clay made
their reputations through congressional oratory.
The second-half of
the 19th century also is known as a gilded age of congressional
graft, and so one cannot simply blame today’s loss of debate on political
corruption. Television advertising
today is so expensive, argues Gore, that policy is driven by the agenda of
political donors who can fund 30-second TV sound-bites. These sound-bites themselves diminish
debates, as also does the social science of advertising used for political
campaigns.
What Gore calls
“Democracy The Movie” is broadcast to hide this fundamental expensive and
corrupt marketing structure. How to
defeat wealthy interests and reform this system remains a question before and
after this book is digested.
Its central thesis
however is that the creation of the printing press in Europe and the subsequent
rise of print culture itself created the culture of debate and therefore U.S.
democracy. The exchange of ideas
through print and pamphlets led to the founding of the U.S. and shaping of the
U.S. system, which institutionalized debate through the structure of
checks-and-balances.
The eclipse of mass
print culture and the rise of television and movies in the 20th
century have empowered an oligarchy of media owners, says Gore, who now shape
public debate through exclusive broadcasting and expensive gate-keeping for
political ads. As a result Thomas
Paine’s Common Sense, if broadcast today, would only appear on C-Span’s
Book TV. Few watch that.
Of course rational
arguments in print did not always equal rational and just societies, as U.S.
slavery and the U.S. Civil War testify.
Nevertheless, print as technology is much cheaper and more democratic,
argues Gore. Print promotes an exchange
of ideas even between the pamphleteer and established publications.
TV has replaced
two-way print culture with one-way electronic broadcasting. It also has intertwined advertising and
content. This electronic culture
thirdly has created a more instantaneous, responsive, and therefore
less-contemplative population. Watching
TV is passive, while yes absorbing and immediate, as the phrase “couch potato”
suggests.
The confluence of TV
culture and TV information, says Gore, is why U.S. political debate has
died. This is why according to numerous
polls, 50 percent of Americans still believe Iraq’s former leader Saddam
Hussein was involved in the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. This often-cited poll data remains
disturbing. It lends credence to Gore’s
argument that reasoned debate has fled the body politic today, because people
are passive consumers of electronic information, rather than critical thinkers
about the events of Sept. 11.
The book’s final
chapter praises the Internet for enabling interactive, two-way public
communication again. Gore sees the
Internet becoming the next major new media.
Are today’s blogs like yesterday’s political pamphleteers? Beyond this, Gore offers no solutions.
His book is a call
to take arms against the sea of troubles.
There must be local- and state-based ways to make political campaigns
less expensive. There must be methods
to make media more open to diverse viewpoints and especially to diverse
ownership.
How can norms of
debate begun in print culture be transferred to post-print mediums? This is a good question for everyone to ask. “Be the Media,” says the independent media
movement that began with the Internet.
Not a bad idea.
In addition, how can we all promote reading, writing, and thinking? Without public debate as the norm, non-public interests will debate and determine the 21st century.