Al Gore wrote another book

[dougo]

Al Gore has a new book, The Assault on Reason. I applaud the avoidance of a long subtitle (as is fashionable these days), but the title is a little misleading (and I don't think it was a good idea to have lots of people saying "the assault on reason by Al Gore"): it turns out mostly to be a broadside against the Bush administration. It is also, though, somewhat of an appeal to reason in general, which I think is great and dovetails nicely with the recent spate of anti-religion books by Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett, Harris, etc. (I should be clear, I haven't read the book, just the excerpt at Time.com.) Here's a paragraph that makes me cheer:

Unfortunately, the legacy of the 20th century's ideologically driven bloodbaths has included a new cynicism about reason itself—because reason was so easily used by propagandists to disguise their impulse to power by cloaking it in clever and seductive intellectual formulations. When people don't have an opportunity to interact on equal terms and test the validity of what they're being "taught" in the light of their own experience and robust, shared dialogue, they naturally begin to resist the assumption that the experts know best.

Where I think he goes wrong is in railing against television as a dumbing-down medium: "the passivity associated with watching television is at the expense of activity in parts of the brain associated with abstract thought, logic, and the reasoning process." As is obvious from this journal, I watch a lot of television, and I think my brain has not suffered from it; on the contrary, things like "Lost" or "The Colbert Report" or "Charlie Rose" or even Gore's own Oscar-winning movie can engage the mind in powerful ways and even enrich the viewer's mental capacities. I'm tempted to say that Tivo is a different medium from the television he's talking about, since you can pause and rewind just like you can re-read a difficult passage in a book, not to mention that you can fast-forward through the repetitive barrage of commercials. But no, I think he really means that anything with moving pictures and sound is somehow inferior to the written word, and I just don't buy that at all.

He also goes on to express support for net neutrality, but it's thinly argued and kind of a non sequitur. So, once again he's pointed in the right direction, but bumbling about it. But I think it's better that he's writing books than running for office—the last thing we need is more bumbling in our leaders, regardless of the ideology.

Also, he's on Letterman tonight, about 30-40 minutes from now, in case you're near a TV.