freecounterpoint: Brooks on Gore's book

Tuesday, May 29, 2007

Brooks on Gore's book

11 comments:

Pepe le Pew said...: The Vulcan Utopia

By DAVID BROOKS
Published: May 29, 2007
If you’re going to read Al Gore’s book, you’re going to have to steel yourself for a parade of sentences like the following:

“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.”

But, hey, nobody ever died from contact with pomposity, and Al Gore’s “The Assault on Reason” is well worth reading. It reminds us that whatever the effects of our homogenizing mass culture, it is still possible for exceedingly strange individuals to rise to the top.

Gore is, for example, a radical technological determinist. While most politicians react to people, Gore reacts to machines, and in this book he lays out a theory of history entirely driven by them.

He writes that “the idea of self-government became feasible after the printing press.” With this machine, people suddenly had the ability to use the printed word to debate ideas and proceed logically to democratic conclusions. As Gore writes in his best graduate school manner, “The eighteenth century witnessed more and more ordinary citizens able to use knowledge as a source of power to mediate between wealth and privilege.”

This Age of Reason produced the American Revolution. But in the 20th century, television threatened it all. In Gore’s view, TV immobilizes the reasoning centers in the brain and stimulates the primitive, instinctive parts. TV creates a “visceral vividness” that is not “modulated by logic, reason and reflective thought.”

TV allows political demagogues to exaggerate dangers and stoke up fear. Furthermore, “conglomerates can dominate the expressions of opinion that flood the mind of the citizenry” and “the result is a de facto coup d’état overthrowing the rule of reason.”

Fortunately, another technology is here to save us. “The Internet is perhaps the greatest source of hope for re-establishing an open communications environment in which the conversation of democracy can flourish,” he writes. The Internet will restore reason, logic and the pursuit of truth.

The first response to this argument is: Has Al Gore ever actually looked at the Internet? He spends much of this book praising cold, dispassionate logic, but is that really what he finds on most political blogs or in his e-mail folder?

But 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.

The reality, of course, is that there is no neat distinction between the “higher” and “lower” parts of the brain. There are no neat distinctions between the “rational” mind and the “visceral” body. The mind is a much more complex network of feedback loops than accounted for in Gore’s simplistic pseudoscience.

Without emotions like fear, the “logical” mind can’t reach conclusions. On the other hand, many of the most vicious, genocidal acts are committed by people who are emotionally numb, not passionately out of control.

Some great philosopher should write a book about people — and there are many of them — who flee from discussions of substance and try to turn them into discussions of process. Utterly at a loss when asked to talk about virtue and justice, they try to shift attention to technology and methods of communication. They imagine that by altering machines they can alter the fundamentals of behavior, or at least avoid the dark thickets of human nature.

If a philosopher did write such a book, it would help us understand Al Gore, and it would, as he would say, in fact, evoke a meaningful response.; 5/29/2007 1:10 PM
Tecumseh said...: As Gore writes in his best graduate school manner, “The eighteenth century witnessed more and more ordinary citizens able to use knowledge as a source of power to mediate between wealth and privilege.”

Graduate school? Hey, Brooks has pretty low standards for that. Sounds more like 10th grade prose to me. While at it, do you think Gore knows the difference between median and mean? For all his pomposity and pretentiousness, my hunch is that, deep down, he's not brighter than your average pinko-leftie, who mistakes regurgitated pidgin-Marxism for depth and insight.; 5/29/2007 1:38 PM
Mr roT said...: this is pretty damn good. Thanks, Pepe. Brooks even avoids throwing Gore in with the ideologues that capture the attention of the illogical TV-masses.
I do like where he raps him for being a weirdo that got to the top.
Just great.; 5/29/2007 1:39 PM
Mr roT said...: AI, what do you think the social "sciences" are like at the grad school level? I think Brooks is right on. His Gore quote sounds like a pompous amateur with an ideology tuned to lick the endowed-chaired professor's anus.; 5/29/2007 2:35 PM
Arelcao Akleos said...: It seems that Pepe has decided to trust links so very much; 5/29/2007 3:18 PM
Mr roT said...: What do you mean, AA? This article is on TImes Select which is a subscription site. We can't have access. Pepe copy-pastes the piece because there's no other way for us to read it.; 5/29/2007 3:29 PM
Arelcao Akleos said...: I know. I occasionally paste in articles whose link i do not trust.
It seems though, in his last ten posts or so, Pepe has had an awful lot of these; 5/29/2007 7:02 PM
Mr roT said...: Yeah, Dowd, Rich, and now Brooks. All Select though only Brooks deserves the appellation.; 5/29/2007 7:21 PM
Pepe le Pew said...: I don't understand what bone you are trying to pick again this time aa; 5/29/2007 8:52 PM
Mr roT said...: bone. heh.; 5/29/2007 10:57 PM
Arelcao Akleos said...: it was an observation....not augury. Bone picking is all in your hands; 5/31/2007 3:05 AM

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