Webdiary - Founded and Inspired by Margo Kingston

Margo: Malcolm B Duncan has taken up my recent invitation for a book review of Al Gore's The assault on reason. I haven't read it yet, but from the extracts and interviews I've read I have a feeling I'll LOVE it. I hope the book is a stepping stone to Gore becoming the next president of the United States. Malcolm has a different view. Malcolm is a Sydney barrister and Webdiary contributor. He reckons this is just part one of his review. Help! Go for it Malcolm!
[The picture is of Malclom looking slightly older than his Tom Lewis pic!]

 
Al Gore’s (yes he calls himself Al) The Assault on Reason (Bloomsbury Publishing, London 2007) certainly is.   I strongly recommend you do not read it as time is precious to all of us and the less we waste the better.    One could gain more intellectual insight by reading the Daily Telegraph.

For those of you who are interested and to fulfill my rash promise to Margo to review this rubbish, I think it needs to be dealt with, like Gaul, divisus in tres partes (Caesar’s Gallic Wars Book I – oh go and look it up yourselves).   (Margo: See here.)

The first is a consideration of Gore’s comments on reason itself; the second, an assessment of his sour grapes over having been beaten for the Presidency by Bush (which, judging from the quality of thought portrayed in this book, was actually a blessing in very bizarre disguise for the world at large); and finally an assessment of his views on the environment (which, in turn requires reference to his other great furphy, An Inconvenient Truth and an assessment of the recently screened The Great Global Warming Swindle).    I have left that to last because it is bound to drag every climate-change nutter on Webdiary into the open screaming like banshees.

To tors.   I have no argument with Mr Gore about Iraq: the invasion of a non-belligerent (except to its own people) sovereign nation is, as a matter of principle, wrong.    But he goes on and on about it in an extraordinary fashion.   The book is littered with instances of the great principles expounded by the “Founding Fathers” [note the capitals].    As I have pointed out before, I have some difficulty with an advocate of liberty and equality (Jefferson) being a slave-owner.    There is another quality to the arguments that Gore propounds.    He has a basic misunderstanding, possibly even to the point of ignorance, of the intellectual tradition of the Enlightenment.    Now, while John Ralston Saul’s Voltaire’s Bastards: the Dictatorship of Reason in the West (Penguin, 1992) is a well-reasoned and persuasive analysis of the damage the Enlightenment has done to western thought, it is analysis.    Gore’s book is not.   He is a patriot in the missile sense: made in America, by Americans, for use on foreigners, and doesn’t work very well.

To read this book is to gain the impression that Western thought and conceptions of political power, procedure, law and right-thinking sprang into life somewhere around 1776 fostered by a rebellion against a feudal bully.    Apart from that not being true, it is the most astonishing distortion and brings into serious question the capacity of the man to construct coherent argument.   Where are Rousseau, Voltaire, Locke, Hume and the rest?    Where is the analysis?   Well, Locke’s on page 62 actually and this is the short shrift he gets:

More than three hundred years ago, John Locke, one of the architects of the English Enlightenment that was so influential in shaping the philosophy of our Founders [note the capital F] wrote, ‘Every sect, as far as reason will help them, make use of it gladly; and where it fails them they cry out, “It is a matter of faith and above reason.

This is then called in aid of a criticism of Bush’s reasoning.   Well, that’s a neat encapsulation of Two Treatises on Government and An Essay Concerning Human Understanding isn’t it?   This, in a book that is supposed to be about reason itself and how rational thought is being subverted.   One would have thought that required at least some analysis of what reason is and how it might be arrived at but no, for good ol’ Al, he just keeps falling back on the good ol’ Founders.

One of the things I detest most about people like Gore and his fellow rebel colonists is their total UScentricity.    God, in whom we trust, must be an American (with apologies to RF Delderfield).   One gets the impression that good ol’ Al simply wouldn’t understand things like Arthur Herman’s The Scottish Enlightenment: The Scots’ Invention of the Modern World (Fourth Estate, London 2003); Roy Porter’s Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (Penguin, 2001) or even Malcolm Bradbury’s To the Hermitage (sorry, I’ve lent my copy to Keating and he hasn’t given it back yet).

In short, the bloke, rather like American foreign policy generally, is inward-looking, unimaginative and lacks any real understanding of how the world got to be the way it is.   And how could you marry someone called Tipper for Christ’s sake?    (It’s called rhetoric kiddies).

Yet, from the outset, the question good ol’ Al seeks to pose is:

Why do reason, logic, and truth seem to play a sharply diminished role in the way America now makes important decisions? (p 1)…

It was not always this way.   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 – was and remains the central premise of American democracy.   This premise is now under assault.”(p 2)

I cannot but see, on my reading of this book and his environmental arguments, that good ol’ Al is one of the major assailants.    His hero appears to be the well known tergiversator, Abraham Lincoln, constantly described as “our greatest president”.    Call me old fashioned but I have never thought entry into civil war singled anyone out for greatness.   The only one of note that comes readily to mind as dying in his bed is Cromwell who, very wisely, stayed away from theatres.

Another of the book’s fundamental flaws (and I think this reveals a defect in Gore’s psychopathology) is his blind faith in the American system of “democracy”:

Our Founders’ [there’s that capital again] 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. (p 5)

The book is full of this sort of guff and it is simply and demonstrably wrong.   The US has no more a representative democracy than we do.   The “checks and balances” are inherently (and designedly) undemocratic.    Leaving aside the question of the utility of compulsory voting, the Senate in both the US and Australia is deliberately undemocratic because it does not give, nor was it ever designed to give one vote one value.    Notwithstanding the warping of the system that has been wrought by the two-party system, the election of Senators in equal numbers from states that have unequal populations, and the terms that Senators have are inherently undemocratic.   This makes the entire argument of the book, to the extent that it can be graced with such an epithet, inherently unreliable.   In simple terms, the guy’s a dill.    Now, you might think that that is just assertion but try this.   On pages 35-6 the guy confesses to hypnotizing chickens and gives useful advice as to the uses to which your hypnotized chicken can be put.   The caveat is:

What you can’t do is use it as a football.   Something about being thrown through the air seemed to wake that chicken right up.

This guy expects to be taken seriously?

At times the book becomes unintentionally funny:

Our Founders [the F word again] understood this better than any others: they realised that a “well-informed” citizenry could govern itself and secure liberty for individuals by substituting reason for brute force. (p 12)

This assertion is about a group of people whose first foreign policy act was to invade Canada and they’ve been invading places ever since.   They’ve declared war on more countries than any other power in human history and they think they are the font of reason.   They murder their citizenry with gay abandon, they have a penchant for executing mental defectives (hmmm … who was the last guy to try that one – some Austrian I think), they have a largely illiterate population and this guy was part of the Administration that launched a Tomahawk Missile attack on a suspected terrorist base because his boss thought it was a good idea at the time.

That brings us to ideas.   Good ol’ Al spends a lot of time talking about “the marketplace of ideas”.   Well, kiddies, on the basis of the quality of this argument, I ain’t buying.