The Assault on Reason

The Assault on Reason
Author(s)	Al Gore
Language	English
Publisher	Penguin Press
Publication date	May 22, 2007
Pages	308
ISBN	1594201226
OCLC Number	81252666
Dewey Decimal	973.931 22
LC Classification	E902 .G67 2007

The Assault on Reason is a 2007 book written by former U.S. Vice President Al Gore. In the book, Gore argues that there is a trend in U.S. politics toward ignoring facts and analysis when making policy decisions. He heavily criticizes the George W. Bush administration for its actions in furthering the "assault on reason", and also the Congress, the judiciary, and the press for being complicit in the process. Gore also suggests the average citizen must be proactive in "restoring democracy". He expresses hopes that the medium of the Internet will supersede television and what he argues is its inherent bias, creating a "marketplace of ideas" that has not been present since the replacement of the printed word with mass media.

The book ranked number one on the New York Times Best Seller list for hardcover nonfiction during the first four weeks of its release, and was on the list top 35 for fifteen weeks. Actor Will Patton narrates the audio version.

Plot

Publisher Comments:

This book was a political and intellectual bomb. Many of the ideas inside it were original (at least to me). Al Gore’s essential point was there has been an assault on the marketplace of ideas in this country. Ideally, we would have a country where people would come up with an idea, and we would debate it to figure out the best choice. This would happen at all levels of our society and our government. Gore argues that this is what the framers of our constitution envisioned. The written word was the best way to spread an idea, to debate an idea. This is why our founding fathers were so crazy about protecting freedom of speech, freedom of the press. Back in the day, this was the case, hundreds of writers spewing forth many different ideas in dozens of newspapers, pamphlets and letters all across the country. Congress was supposed to be place where all the “idea men” met, argued, debated, and figured out the best course for our country.

Gore argues TV killed this. This is a pretty crazy idea. TV is a one way medium, and only 5 major corporations control almost all the television, radio and newspaper stations. He argues when a person watches TV, they stop thinking and arguing with the viewpoint expressed. Aggregate that effect across millions and millions of people and you have a population which has lost the ability to debate ideas. This has powerful implications across our country: for one, there is allot of misdirection. The public is told to freak out about inconsequential matters, but ignore real threats. The public can’t see the difference. Some of Gores’ examples include the public’s attention on the Casey Anthony trial, Natalee Holloway’s disappearance, Britney Spears and Kfed’s relationship, while ignoring global warming. The public is being manipulated; and the public is letting it happen. Gore gave one stark example of this manipulation in elections. When he ran for congress in the 70’s, his political team said to him: “we are going run this TV ad, your opponent will run this counter ad, we will wait 8 days, run this counter ad and your approval rating will go up 8 points.” He approved it; they did it, and that is exactly what happened. Wow. This means there are people in this country who view public opinion as a commodity which can be bought and sold; and their right.

The book is not all negative. The hope Gore offers for our country’s future is: the internet. The internet is a two way medium, where anyone can voice an opinion: cheaply and easily. His hope is that the TV age is just a in between time between print and the internet. I think he is right. The book was written in 2007; in the five years since we have seen the country wake up more and more and I think the internet has a big part in that.

A visionary analysis of how the politics of fear, secrecy, cronyism, and blind faith has combined with the degration of the public sphere to create an environment dangerously hostile to reason.

At the time George W. Bush ordered American forces to invade Iraq, 70 percent of Americans believed Saddam Hussein was linked to 9/11. Voters in Ohio, when asked by pollsters to list what stuck in their minds about the campaign, most frequently named two Bush television ads that played to fears of terrorism.

We live in an age when the thirty-second television spot is the most powerful force shaping the electorate's thinking, and America is in the hands of an administration less interested than any previous administration in sharing the truth with the citizenry. Related to this and of even greater concern is this administration's disinterest in the process by which the truth is ascertained, the tenets of fact-based reasoning-first among them an embrace of open inquiry in which unexpected and even inconvenient facts can lead to unexpected conclusions.

How did we get here? How much damage has been done to the functioning of our democracy and its role as steward of our security? Never has there been a worse time for us to lose the capacity to face the reality of our long-term challenges, from national security to the economy, from issues of health and social welfare to the environment. As The Assault on Reason shows us, we have precious little time to waste.

Gore's larger goal in this book is to explain how the public sphere itself has evolved into a place hospitable to reason's enemies, to make us more aware of the forces at work on our own minds,and to lead us to an understanding of what we can do, individually and collectively, to restore the rule of reason and safeguard our future. Drawing on a life's work in politics as well as on the work of experts across a broad range of disciplines, Al Gore has written a farsighted and powerful manifesto for clear thinking.

Book reviews

The May 21, 2007 review in Publishers Weekly states:

“

[Gore] argues, the 'open and free public discussion and debate... central to the operation of our democracy' that has always been supported by a free and accessible press is now threatened by television, with its one-way, entertainment-oriented communication and concentrated ownership, coupled with political exploitation of the mass media to instill a 'politics of fear.' Drawing from diverse disciplines, including history, neuroscience, and immune system research, and philosophers ranging from Aristotle, Adam Smith, Thomas Paine, Frederick Douglass and Hannah Arendt, Gore argues that the decentralized, text-oriented internet, which empowers individuals to form communities and publish their own video clips, is 'perhaps the greatest source of hope for reestablishing an open communications environment in which the conversation of democracy can flourish.

”

Michiko Kakutani, in a May 22, 2007 review for The New York Times, wrote:

“

Part civics lesson, part political jeremiad, part philosophical tract, The Assault on Reason reveals an angry, impassioned Al Gore — a far cry from the carefully scripted, earth-tone-wearing Al Gore of the 2000 presidential campaign and the programmed “creature of Washington” described in the reporter Bill Turque’s 2000 biography of him, “Inventing Al Gore.” Much the way that the movie “An Inconvenient Truth” showed a more accessible Al Gore — at ease with himself and passionate about the dangers of global warming — this book shows a fiery, throw-caution-to-the winds Al Gore, who, whether or not he runs for the White House again, has decided to lay it all on the line with a blistering assessment of the Bush administration and the state of public discourse in America at this “fateful juncture” in history. ... In “The Assault on Reason” Al Gore excoriates George W. Bush, asserting that the president is “out of touch with reality,” that his administration is so incompetent that it “can’t manage its own way out of a horse show,” that it ignored “clear warnings” about the terrorist threat before 9/11 and that it has made Americans less safe by “stirring up a hornets’ nest in Iraq,” while using “the language and politics of fear” to try to “drive the public agenda without regard to the evidence, the facts or the public interest.”"

”

Joe Conason, in a May 22, 2007 review for the Los Angeles Times, wrote:

“

In 'The Assault on Reason,' [Gore] lingers over those well-worn topics and others, employing the same didactic method that used to provoke irritation or even ridicule during his hotly contested presidential campaign. Yet Gore's professorial style, with its touches of sarcasm, omniscient tone, erudite asides, and yes, its occasional exasperated sighs, elicits a different response today than it did seven years ago. Many of the same publications that once poured scorn on him now offer up paragraph after paragraph of admiring prose.

”

Alan Ehrenhalt, in a May 27, 2007 review for The Washington Post, wrote:

“

The Assault on Reason is a serious work by an intelligent man with an incurable habit of calling more attention to himself than to the ideas he wishes to communicate. It is worth reading, but it is maddening. In one respect, however, it is entirely satisfying: Unlike virtually all other books bearing the names of prominent politicians, this one raises no serious questions about its authorship. Only Al Gore could possibly have written it."

”

David Brooks, in a May 29, 2007 column for New York Times, wrote:

“

Gore’s imperviousness to reality is not the most striking feature of the book. It’s the chilliness and sterility of his worldview. Gore is laying out a comprehensive theory of social development, but it allows almost no role for family, friendship, neighborhood or just face-to-face contact. He sees society the way you might see it from a speaking podium — as a public mass exercise with little allowance for intimacy or private life. He envisions a sort of Vulcan Utopia, in which dispassionate individuals exchange facts and arrive at logical conclusions. This, in turn, grows out of a bizarre view of human nature. Gore seems to have come up with a theory that the upper, logical mind sits on top of, and should master, the primitive and more emotional mind below. He thinks this can be done through a technical process that minimizes information flow to the lower brain and maximizes information flow to the higher brain."

”

Michael C. Moynihan, in a June 12 2007 review for Reason Magazine, wrote:

“

The Assault on Reason reestablishes Gore as America’s premier besserwisser and moral scold: the politician who both warns that we are scaring people to death and argues that Manhattan will soon be submerged beneath the Atlantic."

”

Gideon Haigh, in a June 2008 feature piece for The Monthly, criticised the book's lengthy subtitle:

“

For Al Gore's assault on prose, The Assault on Reason amply suffices: nothing is added by How the Politics of Fear, Secrecy and Blind Faith Subvert Wise Decision-Making, Degrade Democracy and Imperil America and the World except the sense of a Nobel Prize fashionably squandered.

”

Awards

• 2007 Quill Awards: History/current events/politics

External links

• The Assault on Reason - Powell's Books
• Covers, Table of Contents, Excerpt (starting from the Chapter One), and Index - Amazon.com
• Long book excerpt (before the Chapter One) - TIME
• Different long excerpt (starting from the Chapter One) - ABC News
• A short further excerpt
• Interview and short book excerpt - NPR
• A Critical Review by Timothy Bossard