The Assault On Reason
By Ben Miles
Reading former vice president Al Gore’s latest book, The Assault on Reason, is very much like scanning a textbook written by an affable and impressively informed university professor. The initial impression is a workbook with emphasis more on the work to be done than on the book to be read. But as one negotiates the 273 pages that comprise nine chapters, an introduction and conclusion, an index, and twenty-nine pages of chapter-by-chapter notes, the read becomes an absorbing one. It’s not that Reason doesn’t require discipline from its audience; the sheer vastness of topics seems, in fact, at times to defy comprehensibility.
We begin at Johannes Gutenberg’s press, which, according to Gore, facilitated the fifteenth-century Renaissance period while laying the foundation for The Enlightenment. A quantum leap takes us into Marshall McLuhan’s ideas of “hot” and “cool” media and through the psychological notions behind attachment theory. There are side trips to the Geneva Conventions, Barry Glassner’s Culture of Fear concept, and the mechanics of mass persuasion. In whittling the complex treatise to a pointed and singular focus, Gore throughout his book allows the reader to see the light at the end of this polemic tunnel.
Beside his terms as vice president, Gore is known as an author of books on ecology: Earth in the Balance (1992) and An Inconvenient Truth (2006). In Reason, Gore is concerned with our political environment. As he’s done in the past with the rain forest and the ozone layer, Gore lists and laments the dangers threatening to destroy our democracy. Among these carcinogens that attack freedom are the systematic utilization of fear and misuse of religious faith; the distracting culture of entertainment; and the concentration of power that exists within the national media and executive branch of the federal government.
In the concluding portion of Reason, Gore refers to Fredrick Douglass and reiterates what the great abolitionist “suddenly understood: the essential connection between literacy and liberty, ignorance and ‘fitness’ to be a slave.”
Some pundits have made favorable comparisons to Gore’s Reason and Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” pamphlet. Gore’s accomplishment is not only replete with common sense; it is also an admirable scholarly accomplishment.