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Book Excerpt: The Assault on Reason
Not long before our nation launched the invasion of Iraq, our longest-serving Senator, Robert Byrd of West Virginia, stood on the Senate floor and said: "This chamber is, for the most part, silent—ominously, dreadfully silent. There is no debate, no discussion, no attempt to lay out for the nation the pros and cons of this particular war. There is nothing. We stand passively mute in the United States Senate."
Why was the Senate silent?
In describing the empty chamber the way he did, Byrd invited a specific version of the same general question millions of us have been asking: "Why do reason, logic and truth seem to play a sharply diminished role in the way America now makes important decisions?" The persistent and sustained reliance on falsehoods as the basis of policy, even in the face of massive and well-understood evidence to the contrary, seems to many Americans to have reached levels that were previously unimaginable.
A large and growing number of Americans are asking out loud: "What has happened to our country?" People are trying to figure out what has gone wrong in our democracy, and how we can fix it.
To take another example, for the first time in American history, the Executive Branch of our government has not only condoned but actively promoted the treatment of captives in wartime that clearly involves torture, thus overturning a prohibition established by General George Washington during the Revolutionary War.
It is too easy—and too partisan—to simply place the blame on the policies of President George W. Bush. We are all responsible for the decisions our country makes. We have a Congress. We have an independent judiciary. We have checks and balances. We are a nation of laws. We have free speech. We have a free press. Have they all failed us? Why has America's public discourse become less focused and clear, less reasoned? 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. This premise is now under assault.
American democracy is now in danger—not from any one set of ideas, but from unprecedented changes in the environment within which ideas either live and spread, or wither and die. I do not mean the physical environment; I mean what is called the public sphere, or the marketplace of ideas.
It is simply no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse. I know I am not alone in feeling that something has gone fundamentally wrong. In 2001, I had hoped it was an aberration when polls showed that three-quarters of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for attacking us on Sept. 11. More than five years later, however, nearly half of the American public still believes Saddam was connected to the attack.
At first I thought the exhaustive, nonstop coverage of the O.J. Simpson trial was just an unfortunate excess—an unwelcome departure from the normal good sense and judgment of our television news media. Now we know that it was merely an early example of a new pattern of serial obsessions that periodically take over the airwaves for weeks at a time: the Michael Jackson trial and the Robert Blake trial, the Laci Peterson tragedy and the Chandra Levy tragedy, Britney and KFed, Lindsay and Paris and Nicole.
While American television watchers were collectively devoting 100 million hours of their lives each week to these and other similar stories, our nation was in the process of more quietly making what future historians will certainly describe as a series of catastrophically mistaken decisions on issues of war and peace, the global climate and human survival, freedom and barbarity, justice and fairness. For example, hardly anyone now disagrees that the choice to invade Iraq was a grievous mistake. Yet, incredibly, all of the evidence and arguments necessary to have made the right decision were available at the time and in hindsight are glaringly obvious.
Those of us who have served in the U.S. Senate and watched it change over time could volunteer a response to Senator Byrd's incisive description of the Senate prior to the invasion: 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.
Our Founders' faith in the viability of representative democracy rested on their trust in the wisdom of a well-informed citizenry, their ingenious design for checks and balances, and their belief that the rule of reason is the natural sovereign of a free people. The Founders took great care to protect the openness of the marketplace of ideas so that knowledge could flow freely. Thus they not only protected freedom of assembly, they made a special point—in the First Amendment—of protecting the freedom of the printing press. And yet today, almost 45 years have passed since the majority of Americans received their news and information from the printed word. Newspapers are hemorrhaging readers. Reading itself is in decline. The Republic of Letters has been invaded and occupied by the empire of television.
Radio, the Internet, movies, cell phones, iPods, computers, instant messaging, video games and personal digital assistants all now vie for our attention—but it is television that still dominates the flow of information. According to an authoritative global study, Americans now watch television an average of 4 hours and 35 minutes every day—90 minutes more than the world average. When you assume eight hours of work a day, six to eight hours of sleep and a couple of hours to bathe, dress, eat and commute, that is almost three-quarters of all the discretionary time the average American has.
In the world of television, the massive flows of information are largely in only one direction, which makes it virtually impossible for individuals to take part in what passes for a national conversation. Individuals receive, but they cannot send. They hear, but they do not speak. The "well-informed citizenry" is in danger of becoming the "well-amused audience." Moreover, the high capital investment required for the ownership and operation of a television station and the centralized nature of broadcast, cable and satellite networks have led to the increasing concentration of ownership by an ever smaller number of larger corporations that now effectively control the majority of television programming in America.
In practice, what television's dominance has come to mean is that the inherent value of political propositions put forward by candidates is now largely irrelevant compared with the image-based ad campaigns they use to shape the perceptions of voters. The high cost of these commercials has radically increased the role of money in politics—and the influence of those who contribute it. That is why campaign finance reform, however well drafted, often misses the main point: so long as the dominant means of engaging in political dialogue is through purchasing expensive television advertising, money will continue in one way or another to dominate American politics. And as a result, ideas will continue to play a diminished role. That is also why the House and Senate campaign committees in both parties now search for candidates who are multimillionaires and can buy the ads with their own personal resources.
When I first ran for Congress in 1976, I never took a poll during the entire campaign. Eight years later, however, when I ran statewide for the U.S. Senate, I did take polls and like most statewide candidates relied more heavily on electronic advertising to deliver my message. I vividly remember a turning point in that Senate campaign when my opponent, a fine public servant named Victor Ashe who has since become a close friend, was narrowing the lead I had in the polls. After a detailed review of all the polling information and careful testing of potential TV commercials, the anticipated response from my opponent's campaign and the planned response to the response, my advisers made a recommendation and prediction that surprised me with its specificity: "If you run this ad at this many 'points' [a measure of the size of the advertising buy], and if Ashe responds as we anticipate, and then we purchase this many points to air our response to his response, the net result after three weeks will be an increase of 8.5% in your lead in the polls."
I authorized the plan and was astonished when three weeks later my lead had increased by exactly 8.5%. Though pleased, of course, for my own campaign, I had a sense of foreboding for what this revealed about our democracy. Clearly, at least to some degree, the "consent of the governed" was becoming a commodity to be purchased by the highest bidder. To the extent that money and the clever use of electronic mass media could be used to manipulate the outcome of elections, the role of reason began to diminish.
As a college student, I wrote my senior thesis on the impact of television on the balance of power among the three branches of government. In the study, I pointed out the growing importance of visual rhetoric and body language over logic and reason. There are countless examples of this, but perhaps understandably, the first one that comes to mind is from the 2000 campaign, long before the Supreme Court decision and the hanging chads, when the controversy over my sighs in the first debate with George W. Bush created an impression on television that for many viewers outweighed whatever positive benefits I might have otherwise gained in the verbal combat of ideas and substance. A lot of good that senior thesis did me.
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.
As a result, our democracy is in danger of being hollowed out. In order to reclaim our birthright, we Americans must resolve to repair the systemic decay of the public forum. We must create new ways to engage in a genuine and not manipulative conversation about our future. We must stop tolerating the rejection and distortion of science. We must insist on an end to the cynical use of pseudo-studies known to be false for the purpose of intentionally clouding the public's ability to discern the truth. Americans in both parties should insist on the re-establishment of respect for the rule of reason.
And what if an individual citizen or group of citizens wants to enter the public debate by expressing their views on television? Since they cannot simply join the conversation, some of them have resorted to raising money in order to buy 30 seconds in which to express their opinion. But too often they are not allowed to do even that. MoveOn.org tried to buy an ad for the 2004 Super Bowl broadcast to express opposition to Bush's economic policy, which was then being debated by Congress. CBS told MoveOn that "issue advocacy" was not permissible. Then, CBS, having refused the MoveOn ad, began running advertisements by the White House in favor of the president's controversial proposal. So MoveOn complained, and the White House ad was temporarily removed. By temporarily, I mean it was removed until the White House complained, and CBS immediately put the ad back on, yet still refused to present the MoveOn ad.
To understand the final reason why the news marketplace of ideas dominated by television is so different from the one that emerged in the world dominated by the printing press, it is important to distinguish the quality of vividness experienced by television viewers from the "vividness" experienced by readers. Marshall McLuhan's description of television as a "cool" medium—as opposed to the "hot" medium of print—was hard for me to understand when I read it 40 years ago, because the source of "heat" in his metaphor is the mental work required in the alchemy of reading. But McLuhan was almost alone in recognizing that the passivity associated with watching television is at the expense of activity in parts of the brain associated with abstract thought, logic, and the reasoning process. Any new dominant communications medium leads to a new information ecology in society that inevitably changes the way ideas, feelings, wealth, power and influence are distributed and the way collective decisions are made.
As a young lawyer giving his first significant public speech at the age of 28, Abraham Lincoln warned that a persistent period of dysfunction and unresponsiveness by government could alienate the American people and that "the strongest bulwark of any government, and particularly of those constituted like ours, may effectively be broken down and destroyed—I mean the attachment of the people." Many Americans now feel that our government is unresponsive and that no one in power listens to or cares what they think. They feel disconnected from democracy. They feel that one vote makes no difference, and that they, as individuals, have no practical means of participating in America's self-government. Unfortunately, they are not entirely wrong. Voters are often viewed mainly as targets for easy manipulation by those seeking their "consent" to exercise power. By using focus groups and elaborate polling techniques, those who design these messages are able to derive the only information they're interested in receiving from citizens—feedback useful in fine-tuning their efforts at manipulation. Over time, the lack of authenticity becomes obvious and takes its toll in the form of cynicism and alienation. And the more Americans disconnect from the democratic process, the less legitimate it becomes.
Many young Americans now seem to feel that the jury is out on whether American democracy actually works or not. We have created a wealthy society with tens of millions of talented, resourceful individuals who play virtually no role whatsoever as citizens. Bringing these people in—with their networks of influence, their knowledge, and their resources—is the key to creating the capacity for shared intelligence that we need to solve our problems.
Unfortunately, the legacy of the 20th century's ideologically driven bloodbaths has included a new cynicism about reason itself—because reason was so easily used by propagandists to disguise their impulse to power by cloaking it in clever and seductive intellectual formulations. When people don't have an opportunity to interact on equal terms and test the validity of what they're being "taught" in the light of their own experience and robust, shared dialogue, they naturally begin to resist the assumption that the experts know best.
So the remedy for what ails our democracy is not simply better education (as important as that is) or civic education (as important as that can be), but the re-establishment of a genuine democratic discourse in which individuals can participate in a meaningful way—a conversation of democracy in which meritorious ideas and opinions from individuals do, in fact, evoke a meaningful response.
Fortunately, the Internet has the potential to revitalize the role played by the people in our constitutional framework. It has extremely low entry barriers for individuals. It is the most interactive medium in history and the one with the greatest potential for connecting individuals to one another and to a universe of knowledge. It's a platform for pursuing the truth, and the decentralized creation and distribution of ideas, in the same way that markets are a decentralized mechanism for the creation and distribution of goods and services. It's a platform, in other words, for reason. But the Internet must be developed and protected, in the same way we develop and protect markets—through the establishment of fair rules of engagement and the exercise of the rule of law. The same ferocity that our Founders devoted to protect the freedom and independence of the press is now appropriate for our defense of the freedom of the Internet. The stakes are the same: the survival of our Republic. We must ensure that the Internet remains open and accessible to all citizens without any limitation on the ability of individuals to choose the content they wish regardless of the Internet service provider they use to connect to the Web. We cannot take this future for granted. We must be prepared to fight for it, because of the threat of corporate consolidation and control over the Internet marketplace of ideas.
The danger arises because there is, in most markets, a very small number of broadband network operators. These operators have the structural capacity to determine the way in which information is transmitted over the Internet and the speed with which it is delivered. And the present Internet network operators—principally large telephone and cable companies—have an economic incentive to extend their control over the physical infrastructure of the network to leverage control of Internet content. If they went about it in the wrong way, these companies could institute changes that have the effect of limiting the free flow of information over the Internet in a number of troubling ways.
The democratization of knowledge by the print medium brought the Enlightenment. Now, broadband interconnection is supporting decentralized processes that reinvigorate democracy. We can see it happening before our eyes: As a society, we are getting smarter. Networked democracy is taking hold. You can feel it. We the people—as Lincoln put it, "even we here"—are collectively still the key to the survival of America's democracy.
144 Comments so far
Show AllAl - you should have been our president in 2000. All is forgiven. Please come back.
voxclamantis - nice name!! - I agree with all but the comments on Rove. We need nothing like a Rove or a Goebbels and yes they are both the same. They use fear and character assassination lies and deception to accomplish any given task. We do not need such a person for the so called progressive movement. I think what is more true is that there are too many of us (Americans) who are standing in our own feces waiting for someone else to come along and lead us. I say wake up and lead yourself. The real reason there is no organizing principle is because there is no such thing as a progreesive movement. The term itself is too generic to be anything of any force. Typically a "movement" has a single focus and can be sustained long enough to make a change on a specific issue. This is why there are so many different groups (NGO's) whose focus is either a single issue or relatively narrow objective. These groups are successfull in making changes as well. There are conservative and liberal groups of this nature as well. Looking at things from this perspective one can see how the thinking is the same. What is truly needed is a complete overhaukl of the way we think and operate socially today. Real change can be affected with 3 simple changes to the way we live.
1) Fund education equally based upon the number of students per district rather than the property taxes collected from a given district.
2) Remove entirely the private funding of elections and publicly fund elections across the board at all levels of government.
3) Implement a fair tax (NOT the FairTax) across the board for sales and income taxes. 10% for everyone if you make $1 or $1 billion, it doesn't matter - as everyone pays the same. ALL earnings would be equal as well whether it is from the Dow Jones or from McDonalds.
If this is done then we can say we are the land of equal opporunity without being hypocrites we currently are.
Whoa!
While I see Gore as a postive force in our nation ...
I think we have to remember that Al Gore stood silent when the farce of Election 2000 was challenged and only ONE Senator would have been required to move the investigation and stop the automatic approval of the hideous results.
I'm also rather mystified as to Al Gore's selection of Liebermann as his VP.
A questionable choice which is obvious today and should have been obvious to Gore at the time.
Also, I have to applaud Al Gore for his work on Global Warming, but he also has had OIL company backing.
Nor do I see Al Gore much discussing "Who Killed The Electric Car?" -- or advocating the mass production of ELECTRIC CARS which could be commenced immediately.
Americans need to reclaim control over our natural resources.
Why is OIL in the hands of a few private families?
Let's hear Al Gore on these questions, PLEASE--!!!
an excellent book related to this topic is
"The Death of Discourse," showing how well
protected is the Right to Free Speech for
commercial purposes, rather than political
purposes.
And I didn't know there was a second edition
published in 2006.
Al Gore should have been the president since 2000.
Lets get behind him in 2008.
"the present Internet network operators have an economic incentive to extend their control over the physical infrastructure of the network"
I first started posting on the internet on the Yahoo message boards. I found it so educational that I've never looked back. I believe that the process of opening your mouth and proving you're a fool is extremely valuable in encouraging people to improve their knowledge of the world. Television absolutely discourages this; the internet encourages it. When Yahoo closed its message boards, I felt in some way that they were discouraging independent thought. Certainly, I felt discouraged. Fortunately, I've found other venues for spouting. Gore is on the right track on this one. Network providers have the ability to squelch independent thought should they choose to do so, simply by allowing no venue with which to comment.
Dear Al
Welcome to CommonDreams, the interactive democratic forum of the future. The most passionate and best informed political minds in our country meet here to debate, argue, pontificate and commiserate, to praise and condemn all kinds of ideas, to respect and belittle each other in a free for all of ideological chaos.
We didn't change the votes of 20 establishment democrats in the Senate the other day, though we did put them on our hit list. John Yoo and others have begun to take note of the "liberal blogs" with mild alarm, so we are not altogether toothless. Still, I have no idea how the radical disparity which is our unique charm gets batched up and directed to the goal of political whallop. Half of us are ready to exit stage left in the next election, or just give up on this dumb country altogether.
The sleep of reason, according to the Goya print, produces monsters, and I mean nasty, formidable monsters like Carl Rove, big oil and the Iraq occupation, the Machiavellian PR monsters you describe. Most of us (Americans) lapsed into narcolepsy long ago, and I'm afraid we aren't going to wake up. On this blog we talk long and loud about what we should all get together and do, but we have no organizational principle to make our excellent marketplace of ideas into more than a howling of progressive monkeys.
We need a Carl Rove of intelligence and common decency. Care to apply?
When ballots fail, bullets fly. This is the unfortunate outcome when an out of touch insensitive, exploitive (criminal) ruling class's equations that attempt to balance between maximum exploitation and peasant revolt fails. The bone grindings become too strong to ignore. The apathetic awake from their slumber, but unreasoned and enraged like a beast. Civil war is hell on earth, the sleep of reason its sire.
Smart, visionary, brave, speaks truth to power -this is what a leader sounds like.
America, and the world, need Al Gore. Al's decision to reject bitterness and put one foot in front of the other on the path of truth telling after the selection of George Bush as President is changing the world.
Join http://www.algore-08.com/, demand that he run for President. Our future depends on it.
TV is the idiot box, the boob tube, and the requirements of TV are basically to fabricate lies, advertisements that hide the truth. As HL Mencken said, in the long run, perhaps, we'll reach a point in human progress where denying the truth will be a crime, and not only a crime but a dishonorable act.
Maybe he was thinking about the Internet, in the long run.
Skepticism is the mother of truth, and that only comes about in two way communication.
And the Senate was silent because they're basically a gang of corrupt office seekers who wouldn't know the truth if it shat on them. Robert Byrd an honorable exception, of course.
Neoconned ~
I can accept two of your three suggestions, but the funding elections is not something I'm ready to sign over to the tax-fattened politicians of the country.
My proposal would instead make illegal any "soft" money, along with any money in the name of a corporation, organization or non-human entity. Political contributions need to be limited to those made by singlular and identifiable human beings!
Anything else, is and should be recognized as ~ BRIBERY!
Regardless of party of political ideology, no one should promote or accept the ability of corporations, industries, PACs, unions, or any other group to hand over funds to any party or candidate. If people, you and me, individuals, want to support and promote a candidate, then they should do so publically and verifiably.
As to this article; Mr. Gore has no credibity with me what-so-ever. His personal consumtive excesses bespeak his lip-service to any ecologically driven cause. It just fits his political needs, so he helps build a crisis-driven bandwagon. He's old news, with old thoughts, and no ability to gather or maintain interest on a national level.
For those of you so caught up with his charm and charisma ~ don't look at his words, look at his actions.
What has he DONE besides criss-cross the globe in private jets while not luxuriating in his luxury estate that uses 24 times the typical household energy use??
He talks a good line, but does he actually do anything to make a change?
Al Gore is currently the only person who is electable who would get us out of Iraq and make the necessary changes to impede global warming. In short, Al Gore is the only hope for the world. Please please run, Mr. Gore. This time you would win.
I like Al and believe he would be an excellent person to serve as president. He represents a rare opportunity to choose a leader whose vision represents a unified policy toward the environment, growth oppotunities in the economy through green technoligies, and an energy policy that would reduce our use of imported oil, reduce our balance of payments defecite and strengthen our economy. For the reasons described by Al in his essay this opportunity will very likey not be taken advantage of. The public will choose some divorced philanderer (not that I have anything against divorce or philandering), but a self-proclaimed Christian who will promise to uphold family values and crusade against homosexuals and abortion.
Al has defined the problem very insightfully, but he offers no real suggestion for a solution to the problem. There probably is no solution to the problem. There will always be individuals willing to do almost anything to obtain power, and why would candidates stand up and try to talk reason to the public when high priced 30 second spots will command the short spanned attention of the voter whose head is plugged into the cathrode ray tube? Occasionally candidates do attempt to rely on truth and reason, but they are ignored and defeated rather quickly. With the media now giving those who possess and hunger for power easy access to control the hearts, minds and wills of the populace, how will the populace ever break free from the hold over them?
I guess I am one of those people Al is referring to who has lost faith that government will ever respond to the needs of the people at large, as opposed to the interests of big business, American companies who want cheap labor and access to third-world resources, and war profiteers. I haven't lost faith in the government so much as I have lost faith in the ability of my fellow man to wise up and understand he is being played for a chump.
@PDFee, uh, Al Gore flies United, not private jets (I sat next to him one x-country flight, and learned that he goes through security like the rest of us). The private jet thing is destructive misinformation brought to you by you-know-who (and it's not Voldemort).
Gore annoys: I'm not sure if his last two paragraphs are helpful to Google, and not Verizon.
( Contrast Gore's "internet" commentary, with say that of Chomsky. ) Gore seems to be an apologist for supply side. a man of not enough action, at the most appropriate time, Maybe as he grows older he'll grow more bold and effective: "F*3k the constitution - we need a rewrite!"
Gore was just as much of a bad choice as Bush in 2000.
We;ll now we know that Al can talk the talk--what we still don't know if he is willing to walk the walk.
Like all the other presidentiial wannabes Al, your mantra should be "actions speak louder than words" instead of "money talks, bullshit walks".
Thank you, Al Gore. We needed this.
The great political divide of the century might be between people who accept enlightenment reason and people who openly reject it. It is a divide that cuts soundly across old partisan lines.
I know progressives as well as conservatives who accept reason, and although they disagree on countless points, they share a common ultimate goal of making people everywhere better off by applying principles of scepticism, logic, and empirical testing. Of course, the ideas of one side will turn out to work better than the other's in practice, but both will work better than any conclusions reached without enlightenment reason.
Enemies of reason also exist on both the right and the left. On the right we find the religious fundamentalists, who embrace hopelessly outdated dogma because it makes them feel safe and has served them well in the past. On the left we find the postmodernists, who believe that the concept of reason must be fundamentally flawed because it has not yet produced a classless global utopia.
Reason is defined by its fallibility. It is founded upon the ability to reject a deeply held belief because you have found another that you believe is a better approximation of the truth. The truth is ultimately unknowable, but it does not matter, because we are obliged to act upon uncertain ideas.
I have to agree with Chico who says:
Big Al ! You have every right, and indeed a mandate, to go right now to the White house, order our military home to arrest boy bush, nullify everything he did, and assume the presidency. First on your agenda, withdrawl from all bogus oil wars, and an apology to the world.
Anything short of this won't cut it. Don't be afraid. The only thing I'm fearful of is YOUR fear of doing this. We're not civilized right now. Fix it, Mr. President."
______________
I also believe that our government can't hide the truth forever.
The main reason I voted for Clinton when we were first running against Big George was because I was told Al Gore was one of the only candidates besides myself who thought that the JFK case was a crime of cover-up. I was very disappointed that Clinton has held back over a million documents from the people about the case but in spite of that we now have the proof of the cover-up which was the beginning of a new Height on "The assault On Reason" that we are trying to deal with today.
But don't just take my word for it because you can use the Internet and google "George Bush and the JfK assassination".
During all these years the media has avoided the issue with speculations on all the groups who had motive and all the different guys who claim that they shot JFK.
All that this guess work does is keep us from first getting justice about the bigger crime of the cover-up which not only is an assault on reason but also is what keeps us from ever finding out if possible who all shot JFK.
This will be a monumental break through in our political future and I think we can handle the truth.
Run Al run... we got um now!
Jim Glover jimglover@verizon.net
neoconned and bandido:
People concerned with being informed by and large turned off their television sets in November of 2001 when the information blackout predictably rolled across America like dust from the collapsing towers. We simply went elsewhere for ours news and opinion, to the proactive jungles of the internet. Something inchoate and new seems to be forming here, out of a collective chemistry that does seem disorganized and a bit ineffectual right now. Still, a global tsunami of information is bringing people together, and we have to put our hopes on it since we are so utterly disorganized in other ways.
I guess my wish for a benevolent Rove is like asking for a benevolent Hitler. Of course we don't need his manipulative evil. But we do need political efficacy, and you can't say Rove is not a past master of that. What to do? Do we believe that some kind of viral ubiqity of morality and intelligence will reach critical mass and replace the traditional machinery of power? I don't know. I agree that real education is crucial, since large numbers of blind people behave as you might expect. I am very alarmed at American insularity and dumbness in the face of the urgent need for change.
conscience:
I felt the same way about Gore in the 1990s when he voted for the first Gulf War. He is not our knight in shining armor, and I think we are best off not to be looking for one of those. Increasingly, for all his contradictions and past screwups and misjudgements (Lieberman! My god!) I have come to see him as a sincere and reasonable voice devoted to the common good, and it is hard to argue against the desperate need we have for that right now. The secret to Gore is his reasonableness. Reasonable people, unlike Bush and his dogmatists, are aware that reason itself is fallible, and frequently change their minds.
All those calling for Gore to run for office seem to have forgotten his medeocre perfomrance while in office and his positively apalling "me-too" response to Bush's campaign while running for the presidency.
Gore was able to write the insightful article above ONLY because he isn't running for office.
Read the vacuous Edwards Piece below this one to see what Gore would sound like if he were running for office.
Dear Mr. Gore,
Only the people who read will be reached by this article. I think you need to make more video clips of your views. More people will be reached, and it would not hurt any to get your face out there a wee bit more.
Al Gore is right! The evidence that this was a bogus war was there before Bush ever took us to war! It wasn't hidden anywhere it was out in plain sight for everyone to read if anyone had cared to. I would not have found it if it had taken any large amount of research to find (I worked in those days and didn't have the time I do now that I am retired). It was in our local newspaper that there was no proof that Saddam Hussein was connected to 9/11. And I likewise read that the UN Inspector's could not find any evidence of WMD's in Iraq. The rest came from observing our President! George Bush was 'to hot to trot' to start a war (or as Barbara would say beating the drums of war to hard). He harped daily on the subject like he does now on Iran. It all looked contrived and orchestrated then. Like he was trying to convince a wry public this needed to be done. He didn't seem interested in even trying diplomacy! He had that 'kick ass' attitude that neocoms have become infamous for. So, a lot of us have always been against the war from the very beginning. I tried at the time to tell women I worked with of the lies that were being used. But, it did no good! I was called 'unpatriotic', 'anti-war', 'a bleeding heart liberal' along with several other names by the war hawks. People were in the war mood. Even some Democrat's I knew were all for the invasion. Someone was going to pay for 9/11 even if it was the wrong people! So, the American public is ultimately responsible for this disaster. We allowed ourselves to be sucked in by a charlatan. We allowed him to much power with our freedoms. We ignored the wrong he was doing. We are the only ones who are going to be able to fix the mess too!
I miss the big lug.
What an insightful article.
This is a really smart and interesting piece, as only Al Gore can write. He hits on a lot of current intellectual themes, "ecology of information," the role of reason and speechmaking in a democracy, etc. but I am torn between loathing and liking his "TV bad, internet good" message. I don't think it is that simple really. Look at the amount of capital going into sites, not to mention policing those sites like YouTube. Anytime something potentially revolutionary comes about, someone woth capital or power is there screaming about it. Look at Napster. Look at OLGA. Look at the Pentagon's ban of YoutTube. Maybe networked democracy is taking hold, Al, but the material and physical access to that network is often curtailed by the same powers who won't air MoveOn's message.
Excellent article by Al Gore. He's right on target with all of his points. The ironic thing, however, is that it was the 1996 Telecommunications Act which was signed into law by Clinton, that significantly deregulated the media ownership rules and we are living with the consequences right now.
Big Al ! You have every right, and indeed a mandate, to go right now to the White house, order our military home to arrest boy bush, nullify everything he did, and assume the presidency. First on your agenda, withdrawl from all bogus oil wars, and an apology to the world.
Anything short of this won't cut it. Don't be afraid. The only thing I'm fearful of is YOUR fear of doing this. We're not civilized right now. Fix it, Mr. President.
Speaking of silence, why did Al Gore stand passively by while the 2000 election was stolen from him? Why didn't he raise hell, and rally the people, like the people were rallied in the Ukraine during a similar election theft? If the political discourse has gotten strange since 2000, Mr. Gore has played a role in the beginnings of that strangeness.
neoconned said: "3) Implement a fair tax (NOT the FairTax) across the board for sales and income taxes. 10% for everyone if you make $1 or $1 billion, it doesn't matter - as everyone pays the same. ALL earnings would be equal as well whether it is from the Dow Jones or from McDonalds."
Wrong!
If you're making $15,000. or $65,000./yr., 10% of your pay as taxes means a hell of a lot more to you than 10% of a $1,000,000. or $5,000,000 income earner's pay does to them. Low-to-medium wage earners spend a significantly higher percentage of their earnings on living expenses than do high-wage earners; or you could say that high-wage earners have a much larger percentage of discretionary income left over than do low-to-medium wage earners.
This is why a progressive income tax along with a sales tax is much more equitable than any combined flat or "fair" tax. One way to make things more fair is to eliminate the loopholes and deductions available to high-wager's that cannot be taken advantage of by those who earn less.
I wonder.......does anyone think Dubya could write anything remotely close to this?????
My God people, we truly have a retard in office.
Hey exdem... I'm not so sure about falling in love but I certainly love the commentary and the name voxclamantis!! It means the "voice of one crying out" and this one surely has some good things to say.
voxclamantis said "Do we believe that some kind of viral ubiqity of morality and intelligence will reach critical mass and replace the traditional machinery of power?"
Actually I do beleive something of that sort will take place soon. As you yourself have said "I am very alarmed at American insularity and dumbness in the face of the urgent need for change." Well that urgent need will become more and more obvious as time goes on. So eventually people who typically behave as sheep will see that they are being led to slaughter even if it is as they pass through the entrance to the slaughter house. So soon I think there will be a sea change in the way people think about life. We cannot continue to live as if we are not part of our natural surroundings. Gore has to do some real soul searching though if he does run. Will he take the money that he got in the past or will he remain unbought as he presently is? If he does run that remains to be seen. As for me there are a few candidates in that category of unpaid for by big corpo's - Obama, Kucinich, Gravel, and possibly even Huckabee but his lack of belief in evolution may hurt his chances outside of the Republican party.
And you've just now figured this out, vbratt??
Great Article...too bad no one will read it.
Maybe if Britany had his love child, he could read it to the paparazzi
has anyone ever read carl sandburg's bio on lincoln? gives a whole different perspective on how things haven't changed.
An insightful article? Mostly lifted - the TV parts, anyway - from "Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television," Mander, 1978. Mr. Gore skips the Brainwashing chapter, which is the most pertinent, however, because even he, like most of us, either refuse to believe we CAN be brainwashed, or that brainwashing is just a "myth," or that no corporation would ever be so evil as to brainwash us all...
And what is the result? We're greedy, hollow, surface, inattentive, dispassionate, impulsive, illogical... just like, say, most commercials. We are literally programmed 4 and a half hours a day to buy more, get more, get famous, et al. We're programmed to fear the coming thunderstorm (StormWatch!), the local fire, or the "missing child," but not the government's shredding of the Constitution, or the secret No Fly List, or foreigners who don't hate our freedoms, just the bombs we use to spread them.
The "Me" generation is still playing video games and attending rock concerts and doing drugs - they never "matured" because TV told them not to. And they raised a generation of greedy self-servers whose mission in life is to acquire more of everything. For themselves. Commonwealth is a curse word, and actually working, as opposed to manipulating other peoples' money for a percentage, is anathema.
The other, "conservative" "Me" generation - they, too, are brainwashed to buy buy buy, but their brainwashing occurred during the 700 Club and The Gospel Hour. So they, too, are programmed to want more, but also to pray, hate gays and foreigners, and adopt stem cells.
The question then, is: is it possible to counteract tens of thousands of hours of constant bad information infusion?
He was already elected President once -- he should be President right now. Sure Nader was a far better candidate but who's won is who's won.
You know things are bad when Gore starts to look good
Not only is Al Gore the best prospective candidate on the national scene, he is the best candidate.
Please run, Al, run!
It is difficult to read the article by Mr. Gore and not feel agonized. Not by the argument he presents, which is insightful, but by the search for the true heart and mind of Al Gore. He is the same man that has argued for the continuation of the Electoral College, a check on the democratic impulse. He is the same man that surrendered the presidency to Mr. Bush rather than threaten the democratic illusion. Seemingly, Mr. Gore was more concerned that we simple-minded citizens would see the potential subversion of democracy exploited by Bush and company and think democracy over if he took the matter to court. The fact of the matter is that it would have restored some sense of faith in government had we seen that theft on the highest levels would not be tolerated. An abridgement of our very limited rights to choose a government was allowed by Mr. Gore in his failure to challenge the election results, and his failure allowed the Bush gang to perform the same subversion of democracy in 2004. By all evidence, the election process in 2008 will be the worst yet.
Mr. Gore should also discuss his role in the New Democratic Leadership Council and its stance on becoming a more corporate friendly Democratic Party. It is hard to imagine a true concern for democracy, the voice of the people, the protection of the internet, the protection of the environment from a man who played such a key role in the NDLC. Mr. Gore is clearly a bright man. Perhaps the brightest we have had on offer for our highest office in some time. But I fail to see evidence that he will put into practice the ideas he expresses in the media.
I would also take issue with the romantic notions of the printing press and ages gone by. A printing press was by no means a cheap entrance into the marketplace of ideas. In fact, the MARKETPLACE of ideas is just what we have lived by in this country since the Constitutional convention, wherein proportional representation was first set at such a high bar as to make individuals surrender their power in democracy in much the way that Tom Paine had warned against. Read the constitution and consider the power of one person representing 30,000, and then consider again who far we are from that number today. We have no contact with our representatives in government. They are not our neighbors or our friends. They have never seen the vast majority of us face to face, let alone gotten to know us and our concerns. They are an elite, far removed from the control of the people, easily purchased by monied interests. Easily convinced, if need be, that they are doing the right thing because they are so far removed from the voices of dissent. The debate that reaches the ears of the representatives is a debate of those able to afford their ears and it has been that way long before the invention of television.
Mr. Gore is a member of the American aristocracy, fabled not to exist in our "government by the people." I am pleased by his article, but all the more disgusted to think on the decisions he has made in his recent political life when his understanding is so deep, his ability to display compassion for democracy so moving. Run for office, Mr. Gore. Turn back NAFTA. Check corporate power. Nationalize the internet. Lead a no-holds-barred assault on our system of campaign finance. Please, prove to me that you are the human being you are CAPABLE of being. Until then, I will read your articles with a true agony of conscience.
Slightly off topic, but, I think I'm falling in love with voxclamantis...sigh....
Gore reminds us that some in Washington are not the imbeciles they play on television. He, and undoubtedly a number of current members of Congress, understand the deterioration of the US political system and are disturbed by it. But as PJD notes, when faced with the pressures that accompany a campaign, they generally revert to their imbecilic characters and start spouting gibberish again.
As for public financing of elections:
The airwaves belong to us, the people. The broadcasters should be required to bid, every 5 years, for the use of the frequency/channel, the revenue to be used for paying for political ads, OR, they be required to offer FREE broadcast time, in prime time, to candidates; and candidates who accept the free time are banned from buying broadcast time.
run al, run.
All I can offer to this debate is a rather personal quote from my favorite author....maybe it will stir some thought...
-------LOGIC AND OTHER MALE PERVERSIONS--------
The revival of group hatreds in this country has dismayed and even frightened me ever since it began in the late 1960's.
Back in my high school and college days, in the late 1940's- early 1950's, we all remembered Hitler very well, and only partly because he looked like Charlie Chaplin. Teachers taught us that Hitler was terrible, not because he hated the "wrong" group, but because hating any group is illogical, unscientific and leads ultimately to violence.
Sometime when I was busy and didn't notice, Political Correctness took over Academia and they stopped teaching that. They started teaching that Hitler was terrible because he hated the wrong group, but it's okay to hate other groups.
Logic has nothing to do with it; logic itself has become suspect (just as happened in Nazi Germany).
This rebellion against rationality originally intended to make Radical Feminism and its doctrine of male fungibility respectable, and it succeeded, at least in the major media, but it also made fungible group hatred respectable in general. Now the anti-Semites and all the other hate mongers have begun crawling out from under their rocks, and Academia does not have the ammunition to argue against them. Academia cannot argue the rational principle that hatred of any group does not make sense; they dumped logic (as a "male" perversion).
The argument between Left and Right now consists only of debates about which groups we should hate.
-Robert Anton Wilson
TSOG: The Thing That Ate The Constitution and other everyday monsters pg 99
New Falcon Publications 2002
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Until those on the "Left" or from the "Prolgressive" movement take RESPONSIBILITY for the damaging effects of the Politial Correctness movement and theory there seems little ground to stand on when calling for an infusion of reason into the modern debate.
It's pretty simple to identify a problem, especially a gordian knot of a crisis like this.
It's pretty easy to employ hindsight and a staff of many to write cogently about it.
However, try tying the bell around the cat's neck Mr. Gore.
Come up with a single idea that will threaten to shake the Earth.
I have no doubt that you are an honorable and concerned (if not alarmed) citizen. I, for one, am willing to forgive you for the seemingly honest mistakes that some choose to rant here about. I am certain that you and your team are doing the best you can.
But that is not leadership. A leader must be capable of presenting a vision of the future. And we find ourselves now well past the point of no return. Those who dream wistfully of retuning to the status quo of the past are not only wrong, they are stupid. Our world changes. Systems of government change. Rules for functioning within them change. America as we knew it will not survive this crisis no matter how many of us bail water or how big our buckets are.
This entrenched, bloated, corrupt & top-heavy structure is already crumbling. We should be preparing for its imminent collapse. We can build something 100 times better out of its rubble.
I just wrote my final project for a government class on this same topic. I only wish I was as articulate as Mr. Gore. I tip my hat to the master.
Xthplanet,
There was a fellow named Gramsci who had much to do with the evolution of that phenomenon (though he was quite well-meaning and the law of unintended consequences is invoked here), and the corporate media has adopted that perspective wholeheartedly for a variety of reasons.
Thank you, President Gore! You are on such a roll. When the Right attacks, we will defend you.