1 post tagged “the assault on reason”
Yeah I can't believe it either. Time printed an excerpt from Gore's new book The Assault on Reason (geeky aside here, Time can your CMS not figure out that <i> tags aren't really part of the title).
I would encourage you to read the excerpt. I'll start with what I don't agree with:
Faith in the power of reason—the belief that free citizens can govern themselves wisely and fairly by resorting to logical debate on the basis of the best evidence available, instead of raw power—remains the central premise of American democracy.
I would agree that the Founders believed in the power of reasons, but this is not the central premise of our democracy. I would say, the rule of law and the protection of inalienable human right is the central premise of American democracy. The Founders trusted people to act in their own interests, not necessarily to be reasonable. Now for the part I couldn't agree with more:
The chamber was empty because the Senators were somewhere else. Many of them were at fund-raising events they now feel compelled to attend almost constantly in order to collect money—much of it from special interests—to buy 30-second TV commercials for their next re-election campaign. The Senate was silent because Senators don't feel that what they say on the floor of the Senate really matters that much anymore—not to the other Senators, who are almost never present when their colleagues speak, and certainly not to the voters, because the news media seldom report on Senate speeches anymore.
and later:
The potential for manipulating mass opinions and feelings initially discovered by commercial advertisers is now being even more aggressively exploited by a new generation of media Machiavellis. The combination of ever more sophisticated public opinion sampling techniques and the increasing use of powerful computers to parse and subdivide the American people according to "psychographic" categories that identify their susceptibility to individually tailored appeals has further magnified the power of propagandistic electronic messaging that has created a harsh new reality for the functioning of our democracy.
I know I'm on the edges of fair use, so I won't quote anymore. I may not agree with some of Vice President Gore's conclusions, but I agree with his premise. Political discourse among the citizenry is dead, and news show shouters (sometimes politely referred to as "pundits"), a news media obbesed with celebrity for celebrity's sake and all of us who go along consuming - well everything - are culpable.
Having only read the excerpt I don't know if the rest of the book turns into a political polemic that paints the right as the architects of this or if it is more even handed laying the blame across party lines where it belongs. I can't imagine I can keep my red state status if I actually buy the book, so I guess I will wait till it comes to the LTSG library.
