Fair analysis but some flaws in the content

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	• The Assault on Reason Al Gore Penguin (Non-Classics), 2008 - 320 pages average customer review:based on 325 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Fair analysis but some flaws in the content

Although a bit dry, I think Mr. Gore's main argument that reason has been replaced with flash images on TV is indeed relevant to today's society. He argues that there was a time when reading materials especially during the Enlightenment period was cherished and respected. Now, the value of reason is taken for granted, ignored, loathed, or manipulated through the media networks. I buy this part of his argument. However, there are some flaws in the book. I felt Mr. Gore was not entirely correct with his interpretation of certain historical events, i.e., slavery and the Civil War- it was fought to preserve the union not about slavery. Secondly, there is no confirmation that hurricanes have become stronger due to global warming. Evidence from universities in Florida suggest otherwise. Due to the ambiguity, Mr. Gore should not state it as fact. Thirdly, while I agree that special interests have taken over in Washington, I am perplexed as to why Mr. Gore did not mention the special interests behind the Iraq War other than oil. I give him credit for mentioning this since they are "partly" one of the reasons we are in this failed fiasco. However, other interests contributed to this such as military industrial complex interests, other business interests, and AIPAC. Unfortunately, just mentioning the latter can get one into trouble and labeled as anti-Semitic due to its power and influence across the political spectrum and mainstream media. So in one sense, I can see why Gore would only focus on the oil interests in his book. It is simply not popular to mention AIPAC. Nevertheless, for a person of his caliber, prestige, and intelligence, an excellent book would focus on all the above aspects even if it popular or not- because reason amounts to truth and vice versa. And isn't this his argument anyway? Regardless of the book's shortfalls, he makes an ok argument and his criticism of the Bush administration is compelling and warranted. Recommended. However, supplemental reading is necessary that pertains to oil, AIPAC, CIA, and the influence of other special interests in Washington.

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Excellent and insightful

After reading this book and coming to realize what this country has gone through since the fiasco that resulted in Bush leading this country instead of Gore, I was really saddened. Before this read, I didn't know how insightful and deep Mr. Gore is and truly wish he was on the ballot this go round because someone of his stature is truly what we need at this point in our country's history. The book is fantastic. It is demonstrates how a tyrannical and corrupt administration has been allowed to sink our democracy to the lowest levels in history aided by an unthinking, unreasoning populace. Kudos! A wake up call for all.

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Way Better Than I Expected

Al Gore, the man elected President in 2000, has written a more satisfactory non-campaign book than any of the three current candidates to replace the usurper Bush - more forthright than Clinton's, deeper than Obama's, and a hundred times less self-serving than McCain's. What a president he might have made after all! though I wasn't an enthusiastic supporter of his in 2000! I snatched up this book to read on a long airplane flight, thinking that if I fell asleep it wouldn't be a great loss. I intended to leave it on the plane. But it's a solid piece of work - not a literary triumph, not witty or stylish, a tad repetitive, but powerfully insightful into the mess that American public life has become.

It's a sermon, this book of Gore's, a "Jeremiad", the kind of sermon preached in times of cultural crisis. That America is in crisis seems self-evident, with some huge percentage of polled citizens declaring that "we" are going in the wrong direction. Gore's central observation is that political discourse, in the broadest sense, has degenerated since 1980, and that the degeneration may well become more drastic. Fear-mongering and deception have replaced the reasoned give-and-take of American tradition. "The surprising recent dominance of American politics by right-wing politicians," he writes, "whose core values are usually wildly at odds with the opinions of the majority of Americans is one that resulted from a careful building of a coalition of interest groups that have little in common with one another.... This coalition of supporters includes both right-wing religious extremists and exceptionally greedy economic special interests..." and, as he explains in careful detail, extreme ideologues who reject the whole concept of the commons, of "public interest" in favor of unshackled trickle-down capitalism tinged with imperialism. That, friends, is undeniably so.

The "Assault on Reason" has been made possible, according to Gore, by the slow and steady elimination of the vigorous two-way public forum based on access to information, which characterized American democracy in the past. That forum was based on reading, on the participation of many people in the relatively cheap and open-to-all print medium that was the original stimulus of the rise of democratic institutions and their revolutionary overthrow of aristocratic government. As radio and then TV have replaced reading, Gore says, access to information has been re-consolidated in the hands of an oligarchy of wealth, and the flow of debate has become one-way, nothing but "marketing" of ideas, AKA propaganda. In his first chapter, Gore posits that reading, in itself, helps to shape in the human mind the faculty of "reason", which is the essential ingredient of popular sovereignty. Gore is no scientist, although he is fond of scientific metaphors and of seeking scientific explanations for political phenomena. That fondness has opened him to attacks from his deniers, but I have to say that Gore's science is stronger than I expected. I've recently spent some time with my good friend Dr. Joshua Sanes, the head of the Institute for the Study of the Brain at Harvard University. Josh declares that Gore's simple explications of mental processes and development are essentially sound and up-to-date. Anyone who wishes to quibble might be wise to compare Gore's notions with the essay "Toward Basic Principles for Emotional Processing" by Jean-Marc Fellous and Joseph Ledoux, reprinted in the book Who Needs Emotions.

Gore also casts his net of argument to include apt correlations with the ideas of thinkers of the past, from Aristotle to Adam Smith and beyond. In several ways, Gore is the mirror image of the "screaming heads" who serve as the storm troopers of the right - Coulter, Hannity, O'Reilly inter alia - whose broadsides are never historically contexted. Gore is moderate, dispassionate even when most impassioned, and careful to offer analysis rather than mere slogans, war cries and insults. It's easy to see why the most vocal ideologues of the right choose him as their bete noir. It must be infuriating to see him succeed in making sense to a lot of people.

It's not just the devolution of reading and reasoning habits that is responsible for the current squalor of public discourse, however. There are culprits, the assailants in this assault on reason, and the chief culprit is George W Bush. Gore writes: "I know President Bush is plenty smart, and I have no doubt that his religious belief is both genuine and an important motivation.... I'm convinced, however, that most of the president's frequent departures from fact-based analysis have much more to do with his right-wing political and economic ideology than with the Bible... Bush uses a religious blind faith to hide what is actually an extremist political philosophy with a disdain for social justice..." Much of Gore's book focuses on specific indictments of the Bush administration for deception, secrecy, disregard for law, tyrannous invasion of individual rights and disregard for the Constitution, and outright folly in the struggle against terror, the management of the economy, and the oversight of the environment. Gore never uses the word `impeachment' but it's clear that he regards Bush as guilty of impeachably grave high crimes and misdemeanors. So does this reviewer.

Lincoln said that a "house divided against itself" could not stand. Teddy Roosevelt once railed against the "malefactors of great wealth." Dwight Eisenhower warned us of the "military-industrial complex." Al Gore is not a maker of memorable phrases of their order, but his book is at least as powerful a warning to the American public as theirs. Things have to be fixed, friends, and the fixing begins with repudiating Bush and Bush's version of the Republican party.

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