LeFevre: Al Gore - ‘To the Ramparts of Reason!’

You have to hand it to Al Gore for chutzpah. He voted for Gulf War I, which paved the way for George W. Bush and Gulf War II, and nearly destroyed the United Nations. Now “the Goracle” lectures the American people for their “lack of outcry” about the second Gulf War, decrying the “Assault on Reason” that he sees as the root of our present morass and malaise.

Al Gore obviously sees himself, as do many of his erstwhile supporters, as a victim of something that has gone “terribly wrong in America.” But in fact he was the historical pivot upon which our long punishment under Bush Junior turned.

Not because of Gore’s ineptly run 2000 campaign, or his naïve post-election strategy that virtually conceded Florida without a fight. It goes back to 1991, when Gore voted for the first Gulf war, taking just enough senators with him to give Bush Senior the Congress (and with it, the implicit support of the American people).

Gulf War I was the straw that broke the American spirit, though at the time our glorious victory in Iraq was celebrated with parades in many cities. The ensuing years of spiritual and emotional deadness has little to do with the “assault on reason,” except that when a people perish, rational thought in the public forum becomes impossible.

A recent picture of a pasty-faced Gore in Time magazine, standing behind his wife Tipper, gives me the heebie-jeebies. He looks like the embodiment of American zombification, which not only made George Bush possible, but also made the Democratic Congress retire to their coffins recently rather than deny funding for “our troops.”

As novelist Ian McEwan has said, “all virtuous positions have been used up in Iraq; there are no great virtues in leaving or staying.” True, and that is precisely the metaphysical trap.

The propagandistic lies of Gulf War II have been exposed. Saddam Hussein was an evil tyrant, but there is no virtue in war. (The use of force to stop genocide or prevent conflict from spreading is not war.) War is evil, except in self-defense, and one evil cannot correct another.

“In order to solve the climate crisis,” Gore intones, “we have to bring reason and logic back into the American process.” Setting aside his American ethnocentrism for the moment, “these perceived causes are actually a symptom of a much deeper crisis,” to use Gore’s own words. Reason is not what fires people; rather, what fires people finds, with true leadership, rational expression.

“Our democracy is in danger of being hollowed out,” Gore says. For someone who prides himself on being ahead of the curve (the Internet and climate change for example), Gore is way behind on this one. Our democracy was gutted before the Bush Administration slithered up through its rotting foundations, and Gore was integral to the cratering, both before and during the Clinton years.

Though “The Assault on Reason” is ostensibly about “the diminishing role of reason…[causing] the systemic decay of the public forum,” it has turgid undertones of romanticism, with a thick coating of American exceptionalism. “The intrepid migrants who ventured across the Atlantic carried the potent seeds of the Enlightenment and planted them in the fertile soil of the New World.”

Gore beats a broken drum with his frequent references to the philosophy of America’s Founders. The old mythologies cannot resonate in a people that have perished, and mean little to de facto members of the global polity, to which all of us now belong.

“Our Founder’s insights are just as relevant today as they were more than 200 years ago,” sayest the Goracle. But that’s simply untrue. The American Founders’ set of “universal values and ideas” does not apply in a global society. Besides, present-day hyper-commercialized America is the logical end of Hamilton’s worldview (Jefferson lost the debate long ago).

More importantly, the Enlightenment’s belief in reason as the cornerstone of humankind’s social and political progress has become a cynical joke in the wake of evil’s game of one-upmanship on the Bush-Blair/Al Qeda battlefield in Iraq--the primary theatre of “the global war on terror.”

The Enlightenment philosophers were wrong, and the Enlightenment is a misnomer. The human spirit and brain have another capacity, far greater and more important than reason—the capacity for insight. With insight, there is passion and reason; but when thought and reason reign, insight and passion wither away, as they have in America.

- Martin LeFevre is a contemplative, and non-academic religious and political philosopher. He has been publishing in North America, Latin America, Africa, and Europe (and now New Zealand) for 20 years. Email: martinlefevre@sbcglobal.net. The author welcomes comments.

© Scoop Media