It’s called “The Assault on Reason”. Here’s the preview blurb from Amazon:
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.
I’ve been thinking that I’m waiting for the Democratic presidential candidates to take on not just the disastrous policies of the Bush administration, but the cultural attitudes that allowed them to happen. Call it the culture of Radical Ignorance.
The first I remember of it was Reagan, for whom “strong conviction” outweighed an actual knowledge of reality: fictional “welfare queens”, “trees cause pollution”, etc. Bush clearly saw Reagan as his role model. Steven Colbert spoofs this mentality (“truthiness”); Harry Frankfurt’s “On Bullshit” also notes the mutually reinforcing relationship between the lied and the lied-to.
In any event, I’m hoping that this particular Zeitgeist has played itself out, in light of the our President’s continuing insistence on things that just aren’t true, and the terrible consequences thereof. Gore’s book will likely be a bit more dry than “An Inconvenient Truth”, but it’s time that we recognized and laid out some rules for discussion — large-scale meta, you might say.
…I’ll wait for the inevitable Laurie David video. And I don’t mean any disrepect by that for either Gore or David.
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For me, the most interesting book on the Bush II malAdministration on the topic is Chris Mooney’s book on the Republicans’ war against science. That book is really quite frightening.
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I do have a couple of additional thoughts on the post down below (trees actually do expectorate–if you want to call it pollution, feel free, but they have been doing so for tens of thousands of years, and the prsumably the enviornment has adapted), but one thing that I would like to mention. It is interesting that you have cited Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit. I read that a while ago, and was quite taken by his essay. I use “silly” here instead of “bullshit” because I fear that the peanut gallery here will send any of my comments making use of that term into purgatory. You, Mr. Proprietor, might want to seriously re-think your “hecklers’ veto” policy regarding sending comments into purgatory.
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I had no idea Gore was following Air America so closely!
I thought he was talking about the global warming movement again.