David Brooks has a typically inane column today responding to Al Gore's new book, The Assault on Reason. A couple of passages warrant discussion. Passage the first:
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.
Ok, in the first place, anybody with Brooks's record of being so totally and consistantly wrong on so many issues, who has a record of massive misrepresentations of fact in order to drive home ideologically convenient points, and who passes himself off as a spokesman for Middle American values (all the time, attempting to conceal his straussian credentials), has no right to accuse anyone else of "imperviousness to reality."
In the second place, I just don't find this to be a credible description of Gore's worldview. While I have yet to read The Assault on Reason, from what I know of Gore from other books and from interviews is that in fact "family, friendship, and neighborhood" are vitally important elements in his world view, as are, by the way, well disciplined passions. Far from Vulcan emotionlessness, what Gore is speaking against is the manipulation of our emotions by an unreasoned form of demogogery, such as that displayed by George Bush, and suborned by people like David Brooks.
Now, the second passage:
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.
My suspicion is that Brooks has mistaken Gore for Stephen Pinker. Gore is not interested in developing a theory of consciousness or the heirarchical relationship between the "rational" and the "emotional" mind. He's offering a political critique of how emotion is manipulated in public life by those who have no interest in what reason can and does tell us, a critique of politics as practiced by George Bush, and suborned by people like David Brooks.
But for somebody educated at the University of Chicago, Brooks seems to know precious little about philosophy. If he thinks that Gore has "come up" with a theory about the realationship of the rational mind to the emotions, then he completely skipped the vast majority of Western philosophy up to the 18th century. The theory that Brooks is denigrating is the theory propounded, through numerous variations, by Plato, Aristotle, Seneca, Cicero, Augustine, Aquinas, Kant, Hegel, Smith, and Mill. All to various degrees recognize the important role that the passions play in the moral life, but they all also recognize that the unfettered passions lead us away from order and into disaster. The moral life of passion unfettered by reason results in a social life such as that which we have been bequeathed by George Bush, suborned by people like David Brooks.
Al Gore has always had this problem, in that his enemies have always seen fit to distort his messages and his public image in whatever way suits their current agenda. This is why such practices have been given the name "goring." He's not alone, but the viciousness and irrelevancy to which he is subject is far above the average dose to which most politicians are subjected. Whatever the merits or demerits of Gore's new book, he deserves better than the continual smear job he gets on the New York Times editorial page.
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