The Assault on Reason

Al Gore “The Assault on Reason,” Thorndike Press (Large Print), 2007, 479 pp.

This book, published in 2007, was written before any credible thought was devoted to the possibility that Trump could become president.  Yet one of its main tenets, the contempt for truth and manipulation of facts in service to whoever the current president is, is remarkably contemporary.  Bush Jr and his war on evil along with his ignorance of climate change as well as Obama’s less than truthful drive for single-payer medical care are two most recent stands-out of this phenomenon, along with the associated erosion of the system of checks and balances: think executive order.  All of these activities bypass reason; the author claims it is an assault on reason.  

Gore argues that the gruesome acts of torture committed at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq “were a direct consequence of the culture of impunity — encouraged, authorized and instituted” by President Bush and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. And he writes that the violations of civil liberties committed by the Bush-Cheney administration — including its secret authorization of the National Security Agency to eavesdrop without a court order on calls and e-mail messages between the United States and other countries, and its suspension of the rights of due process for “enemy combatants” — demonstrate “a disrespect for America’s Constitution that has now brought our republic to the brink of a dangerous breach in the fabric of democracy.”

Gore’s central argument is that “reason, logic, and truth seem to play a sharply diminished role in the way America now makes important decisions” and that the country’s public discourse has become “less focused and clear, less reasoned.” This “assault on reason,” he suggests, is personified by the way the Bush White House operated.  Gore says that the administration ignored expert advice (be it on troop levels, global warming or the deficit), to circumvent the usual policy-making machinery of analysis and debate, and frequently to suppress or disdain the best evidence available on a given subject so it could promote predetermined, ideologically driven policies.

Doubts about Saddam Hussein’s pursuit of weapons of mass destruction were sidestepped in the walk-up to the war: Gore says that uranium experts at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee told him “there was zero possibility” that aluminum tubes acquired by Saddam Hussein were for the purpose of nuclear enrichment, but felt intimidated from “making any public statement that disagreed with the assertions being made to the people by President Bush.”

And the Army chief of staff Gen. Eric K. Shinseki’s pre-invasion recommendation that several hundred thousand troops would be needed for a successful occupation of Iraq was similarly dismissed. “Rather than engaging in a reasoned debate on the question,” Mr. Gore writes, administration members “undercut Shinseki for disagreeing with their preconceived notion — even though he was an expert, and they were not.”

Moreover, Mr. Gore contends, the administration’s penchant for secrecy (keeping everything from the details of its coercive interrogation policy to its National Security Agency surveillance program under wraps) has dismantled the principle of accountability, even as what he calls its “unprecedented and sustained campaign of mass deception” on matters like Iraq has made “true deliberation and meaningful debate by the people virtually impossible.”

Gore points out that the White House repeatedly implied that there was a connection between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, between the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and Iraq, when in fact no such linkage existed. He observes that the administration “withheld facts” from Congress concerning the cost of the Medicare prescription drug benefit, which turned out to be “far higher than the numbers given to Congress by the president.”

When Mr. Gore turns to the larger cultural and social reasons behind the decline of reason in America’s marketplace of ideas, he is less convincing. For instance, his argument that radio was essential to the rise and reign of Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini (“without the introduction of radio, it is doubtful that these totalitarian regimes would have commanded the obedience of the people in the manner they did”) is highly suspect.

Gore’s conviction that the Internet can help re-establish “an open communications environment in which the conversation of democracy can flourish,” ignores the more troubling aspects of the Web, like its promotion of rumor and misinformation alongside real information, and its tendency to fuel polarizing, partisan warfare.

My Notes:

Pg. 97ff:  Disturbing Trends:

The disclosure that our government at Abu Ghraib had been routinely torturing captured prisoners—and was continuing to do so as official policy—provoked surprisingly little public outcry.

Similarly, the disclosure that the executive branch had been conducting mass eavesdropping on American citizens without respecting the constitutional requirement that it obtain judicial warrants—and was continuing to do so—caused so little controversy that the Congress actually adopted legislation approving and affirming the practice.

The majority of citizens were led to approve and endorse the invasion of a country that did not attack us and posed no threat to us, redeploying troops from the pursuit of the terrorists who actually did attack us.  The war on Iraq was portrayed as an epic struggle between good and evil; President Bush sought to cloak his policy of unprovoked war in the garb of religious faith, he described the war as a ‘crusade.’  In fact, one of the generals in charge of war policy, William G. Boykin, went on a speaking tour of conservative evangelical groups in his spare time to declare—from the pulpit, in uniform—that our nation was in a holy war as a ‘Christian Nation battling Satan.’  (This was the same General who helped organize the use of abusive treatment of prisoners in Iraq).

Pg. 12:  The O.J. Simpson trial was not an unwelcome departure from the normal good sense and judgment of our television news media.  It was merely an early example of a new pattern of serial obsessions that periodically take over the airwaves for weeks at a time. 

Pg. 16:  Our Founders’ faith in the viability of representative democracy rested on their trust in the wisdom of a well-informed citizenry, (at least those eligible to vote), their ingenious design for checks and balances, and their belief that the rule of reason is the natural sovereign of a free people. 

Pg. 28:  The American experiment was based on the possibility in human affairs that the rule of reason could be sovereign.  The age of print begat the Age of Reason which begat the age of democracy.  The democratic logic inherent in these new trends was blunted and forestalled by the legacy structures of power in Europe.  But the escaping migrants to America carried the potent seeds of the Enlightenment and planted them here as expressed in “We the People”.

Pg. 36:  The media news division—which used to be seen as serving a public interest and were subsidized by the rest of the network—are now seen as profit centers designed to generate revenue and, sometimes, to advance the larger agenda of the corporation that owns them.  There is no distinction between news and entertainment. 

Pg. 49:  Leadership means inspiring us to manage our fears.  Demagoguery means exploiting our fears for political gain.

Pg. 88:  It may well be that the global epidemic of fundamentalism—Muslim, Christian, Hindu, and Jewish, among others—has been partly caused by the dizzying pace of technologically driven change.  This unprecedented globalizing tsunami has disrupted many age-old traditional patterns in families, communities, markets, environments, and cultures all around the world.  As people cling ever more firmly to their religious traditions, they can become more vulnerable to ideas and influences that reason might filter out in less fearful times.

Pg. 122:  In the 2005 Florida Schiavo affair, religious conservatives pressured the president and Senate majority leader to call a special session of Congress to pass a bill that would force reinsertion of a feeding tube to artificially keep Terry Schiavo in a vegetative state alive.  However, the overwhelming majority of Americans in both political parties told the president and the majority in Congress that they strongly disagreed.  The episode’s blowback demonstrated the limits of the coalition’s radical strategy.  In extreme cases, it turns out, the public finds the dangerous mixture of religion and politics repugnant.

Pg. 159:  The 1886 Supreme Court decision Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad has been cited for decades to uphold the proposition that corporations are, legally speaking, ‘persons’ and thus protected under the Fourteenth Amendment. 

Pg. 185:  It is now clear that virtually all the arguments that George Bush Jr. first made for an invasion of Iraq were all based on falsehoods. 

Pg. 357:  The human population quadrupled in the twentieth century from 1.6 billion in 1900 to 6.6 billion today and the fundamental relationship between the human species and planet Earth because of new technologies has dramatically increased. In 2007 scientists, for example, reached a consensus that global warming is increasing the destructive power of hurricanes by as much as one-half of a full category.