The Historical Amnesia of Al Gore

By Michael Meo

I saw Al Gore’s Assault on Reason on the politics bookshelf of my local library the other day, and I brought it home. The author starts off well, stating on page one:

 

“What has happened to our country?” . . . . for the first time in American history, the executive branch of our government has not only condoned but actively promoted the treatment of captives in wartime that clearly involves torture, thus overturning a prohibition established by General George Washington during the Revolutionary War.

 

The answer to the question, What Has Happened, involves, in the first chapter, The Politics of Fear. There the reader learns about a great deal of brain research. Fear is bad for clear thinking, and we can prove it (not that we needed so many NMR scans of the circuitry of the amygdala to persuade us!).

 

But then, alas, after such a promising beginning, the author immediately limits his vision to partisan politics: “It is now clear,” he writes on page 41,

 

that the Bush administration has resorted to the language of fear in order to short-circuit debate and drive the public agenda without regard to the evidence, the facts, or the public interest.

 

-- which is true, so far as it goes, but it is singularly inadequate to explain the question posed back on page two:

 

We have a Congress. We have an independent judiciary. We have checks and balances. We are a nation of laws. We have free speech. We have a free press. Have they all failed us?

 

Of course they have: there’s no doubt about it, and the reason they have failed us has very little to do with nuclear magnetic resonance or brain circuitry.

 

Writing for a wide audience and assembling a wide-ranging discussion that owes too much to partisan talking points and not enough to clear logic, Gore to a considerable extent lacks coherence. But the problem is wider than simple woolly thinking. Two crippling themes stand out.

 

The first is, that Money Is Not the Problem. Gore carefully avoids ever employing the kind of arguments deployed by as mild a progressive as Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who spoke of “the malefactors of great wealth.” For “our Founders,” Gore writes on pages 82 and 83,

 

money itself was not considered the problem, because ultimately, money has significance only to the extent that others agree to accept it in exchange for goods or services or behaviors. And in the new American Republic, it was inconceivable that power could be purchased with money (emphasis added – MM). Power was to be allocated in a different sphere altogether – the democratic sphere – where the rule of reason was sovereign.

 

Of course, this is pious fantasy. Money could not purchase power because political power was reserved to the wealthy. To quote a Signer of the Constitution, co-author of The Federalist, and the first Secretary of the Treasury in the federal government, Alexander Hamilton, said in an address to the Constitutional Convention:

 

All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and well born, the other the mass of the people. The voice of the people has been said to be the voice of God; and however generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is not true in fact.

 

The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct, permanent share in the government. They will check the unsteadiness of the second, and as they cannot receive any advantage by a change, they therefore will ever maintain good government.

 

Reserving a “permanent share” of government to “the rich and well born” is somehow allocating political power to a “different sphere altogether” from that of wealth. Where money is concerned, Gore suffers from a severe case of Doublethink.

 

The worst of Gore’s problems, however, and one which he shares with most citizens of the United States these days, is a historical innocence amounting to amnesia of the past. His entire argument falls to the ground because of it, and it recurs on almost every page. We are told that the electronic media of the twentieth century have revolutionized the way we process information, and the use of radio and television have allowed the Politics of Fear to dominate our democratic process.

 

Unfortunately . . .

 

Well, to begin, let us see what Gore starts the chapter about The Assault on the Individual (which, like so many after the first chapter, spends almost all of its ink attacking the Bush administration – a circumstance which, now that all of those very same abrogations of civil liberties have been adopted by the Obama administration, makes the entire chapter particularly pointless). “The new information ecology of the printing press,” Gore writes on page 129,

 

which empowered individuals to wield knowledge as a source of influence, led to a new recognition of, and respect for, the role of individuals. You could say that the idea of individual dignity acquired new meaning with the new accessibility of information that arrived in the wake of the printing press.

 

Well, you could say that, but not if you remembered that the printing press was invented by the Chinese. Their Confucian ethic, placing a high value upon the community as opposed to the individual, seems to have survived the “information ecology” of the printing press quite vigorously.

 

And please note how Al Gore characterizes the history of democratic institutions on page 219. Despite the fact that Gore had previously stated that “The ‘landed gentry’ of colonial America were, after all, the heirs of the noblemen and merchants who had drafted the Magna Carta half a millennium earlier,” he manages to assert

 

Democracy disappeared in Rome when Caesar crossed the Rubicon in violation of the Senate’s long prohibition against a returning general entering the city while still in command of military forces.

 

It would have been difficult for democracy to have disappeared from ancient Rome in the first instance, since the Republic was not a democracy. In the second, the rule of law had already been seriously undermined by the Senate itself, when it assassinated in turn the Gracchi brothers, both tribunes and by law inviolate in their persons, 84 and 72 years prior to Caesar’s invasion of Italy. There had followed a civil war, in which the Senate was an impotent bystander, between the forces of Marius and Sulla; after which the elections to office had been seriously corrupted (Caesar himself had poured a bucket of human waste over the head of his consular partner in public in the Roman Forum); and finally, Caesar’s invasion of Italy came after he had been expressly ordered to surrender the command of his army and submit himself to the Senate, dominated by his political enemies. Those enemies, of course, assassinated Caesar four years later, in the Senate building.

 

When Caesar impolitically combined his military commander role with his chief-of-state role [Gore continues], the Roman Senate, and with it the Roman Republic and the dream of democracy, withered away; and for all intents and purposes, democracy disappeared from the face of the earth for seventeen centuries, until its rebirth in our land (emphasis added).

 

The elections by the barbarian tribes of their war chiefs, the establishment of the Republic of Switzerland, the Magna Carta of 1215 (an action purely by powerful nobles, without merchant participation, by the way), the parliamentary institutions of the States of Holland, of Hungary, of Poland, and of course of England, are whisked away. Oh, dear.

 

Money is not the problem. Technology has given the Politics of Fear unique purchase. We can revivify our democracy by the correct use of the Internet. And do not pay too much attention to history: only the United States has ever had democracy, and it is threatened only by Republicans on television.

 

The truth is somewhat different. The United States was founded by wealthy slave-owners and capitalists. The Supreme Court has always followed, in the words of an early twentieth-century observer, the election returns. And just as the citizens of the Roman Republic were gulled by bread and circuses, so the rich in the United States have for forty years repeated over the airwaves their contrary-to-fact assertions, that the most important news is the latest sex scandal, that the poor people of this country are parasites, that we are obliged forever to be at war with every country in the world our leaders choose to attack.

 

There has been since the 18^th century an Anti-Enlightenment, the existence to which Mr Gore is oblivious. Conservative thinkers were so horrified by the course of the French Revolution and the near-success of Napoleon that they sought to exterminate the possibility of its return. That expression of hostility to the optimistic world view of the Enlightenment is precisely what we need to address. The Assault on Reason has been articulated quite thoroughly, without the slightest necessity for radio or television, by thinkers such as Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821). The British philosopher and historian Isaiah Berlin once quoted De Maistre’s 1819 meditation at length in a 1990 study in the New York Review of Books.

 

Maistre thought that he saw, at the beginning of every true road which leads to knowledge and salvation, the great figure of Plato, pointing the way. He looked to the Society of Jesus to act as the elite of Platonic guardians and save the states of Europe from the fashionable and fatal aberrations of his time. But the central figure in it all, the keystone of the arch on which the whole of society depends, is a far more frightening figure than king or priest or general: it is the executioner. The most celebrated passage of the Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg is devoted to him:

 

Who is this inexplicable being who, when there are so many agreeable, lucrative, honest, and even honorable professions to choose among, in which a man can exercise his skill or his powers, has chosen that of torturing or killing his own kind? This head, this heart, are they made like our own? Is there not something in them that is peculiar, and alien to our nature? Myself, I have no doubt about this. He is made like us externally. He is born like all of us. But he is an extraordinary being, and it needs a special decree to bring him into existence as a member of the human family – a fiat of the crative power. He is created like a law unto himself.

 

Consider what he is in the opinion of mankind, and try to conceive, if you can, how he can manage to ignore or defy this opinion. Hardly has he been assigned to his proper dwelling place, hardly has he taken possession of it, when others remove their homes elsewhere whence they can no longer see him. In the midst of this desolation, in this sort of vacuum formed round him, he lives alone with his mate and his young, who acquaint him with the sound of the human voice: without them he would hear nothing but groans. . . .

 

The gloomy signal is given: an abject servitor of Justice knocks on his door to tell him that he is wanted; he goes; he arrives in a public square covered by a dense, trembling mob. A poisoner, a parricide, a man who has committed sacrilege is tossed to him: he seizes him, stretches him, ties him to a horizontal cross, he raises his arm; there is a horrible silence; there is no sound but that of bones cracking under the bars, and the shrieks of the victim.

 

He unties him. He puts him on the wheel; the shattered limbs are entangled in the spokes; the head hangs down; the hair stands up, and the mouth gaping open like a furnace from time to time emits only a few bloodstained words to beg for death. He has finished. His heart is beating, but it is with joy: he congratulates himself, he says in his heart, “Nobody quarters as well as I.”

 

He steps down. He holds out his bloodstained hand, justice throws him – from a distance – a few pieces of gold, which he catches through a double row of human beings stiff with horror. He sits down to table, and he eats. Then he goes to bed and he sleeps. And on the next day, when he wakes, he thinks of something totally different from what he did the day before.

 

Is he a man? Yes. God receives him in His shrines, and allows him to pray. He is not a criminal. Nevertheless no tongue dares declare that he is virtuous, that he is an honest man, that his is estimable. No moral praise seems appropriate to him, for everyone else is assumed to have relations with human beings: he has none.

 

And yet, all greatness, all power, all subordination rest upon the executioner. Remove this mysterious agent from the world, and in an instant order yields to chaos:: thrones fall, society disappears. God, who has created sovereignty, has also made punishment; he has fixed the earth upon these two poles: “for Jehovah is master of the twin poles and upon them he maketh turn the world. . .” (I Samuel 2:8)

 

[That is the picture Dick Cheney is giving us with his talk of “the Dark Side”; that is what we have before us as we watch the few remaining operative clauses of the Bill of Rights shredded before our eyes. – MM]

 

“This is not a mere sadistic meditation about crime and punishment,” Berlin continues directly,

 

but the expression of a genuine conviction . . . that men can only be saved by being hemmed in by the terror of authority. They must be reminded at every instant of their lives of the frightening mystery that lies at the heart of creation, must be purged by perpetual suffering, must be humbled by being made conscious of their stupidity, malice, and helplessness at every turn.

 

War, torture, suffering are the inescapable human lot; men must bear them as best they can. Their appointed masters must do the duty laid upon them by their maker by the ruthless imposition of the rules – not sparing themselves – and equally ruthless extermination of the enemy.

 

Berlin concludes, after examining the parallels between De Maistre’s vision and that of the fascist dictatorships of the twentieth century,

 

[Maistre] lays great emphasis on the fact that absolute rule succeeds best when even to question its roots is terrifying. He feared and detested science because it poured too much light, and so dissolved the mystery which alone resisted skeptical inquiry. . . . His vision may be detestable to those who truly value human freedom, resting as it does on a dogmatic rejection of a light by which most men still live, or wish to live; yet in the course of constructing his great thesis Maistre boldly, more than once, and often for the first time, revealed (and violently exaggerated) central truths, unpalatable to his contemporaries, indignantly denied by his successors, and recognized only in our own day not, indeed, because of our more perfect insight or greater self-knowledge or honesty, but because an order which Maistre regards as the only remedy against the dissolution of the social fabric came into being, in our own time, in its most hideous form.

 

-- Isaiah Berlin, “Joseph de Maistre and the Origins of Fascism,” NewYork Review of Books, 1990, 37 (14): 57-64 (quote from pp. 62-63); (15): 54-58; and (16): 61-65 (quote from p. 65).

 

 

The wholly inadequate account by Al Gore of the present-day Assault on Reason is ample evidence of a continuing denial of unpalatable truths about the dangers facing rational thought in a passionate conflict of wills. We do ourselves no favors by underestimating the struggle with which we must contend, both within our very selves and with a way of thought which will ever be with us.