Unreasonable

Shorter David Brooks (behind the firewall, where it belongs): Al Gore is goofy and, by the way, what's the big deal about the printing press, TV, and the Internet? Family values are all that really matter.

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.

This, in turn, grows out of a bizarre view of human nature. 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.

Without emotions like fear, the “logical” mind can’t reach conclusions. On the other hand, many of the most vicious, genocidal acts are committed by people who are emotionally numb, not passionately out of control.

Some great philosopher should write a book about people — and there are many of them — who flee from discussions of substance and try to turn them into discussions of process. Utterly at a loss when asked to talk about virtue and justice, they try to shift attention to technology and methods of communication. They imagine that by altering machines they can alter the fundamentals of behavior, or at least avoid the dark thickets of human nature.

Although I'm only 175 pages into the book (and pompousness, Mr. Brooks, is in the eye and ear of the beholder), but this seems to me a total misreading of the thesis. Whether it's an intentional misreading or not is not something I'll speculate on. Gore doesn't claim that the brain is structured that way. What he does say is that our lizard brains react to fear more quickly than they do to reason. That's why fear has worked so well for Republicans in 2004. It was fear of brown people, Islamofascist whatevers, that helped Republicans secure control of Congress, allowed them to openly question the patriotism of Vietnam Vets, and led more than 70 percent of the country to believe that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the 9/11 attacks. Reason works more slowly. It would take a couple of years of Katrina, Falluja, etc., for people to come to the reasonable conclusion that those in power have fucked things up on a grand scale.

Moreover, in fact, Gore does concede that history is full of movements that supported eugenics and genocide in the name of "reason," but that it was demagogues who appeal to fears that actually made these ideas come to life.

As for "virtue and justice." Gore does reference those attributes, but sees them more as something hard to attain, which is why the Founders used reason, rather than naive assumptions of people's innate goodness, when devising the Constitution. Gore's main point, really, is that the Bush/Cheney administration has proven to be beyond the Founders' worst assumptions. That their appeals to people's fears (and the Republicans running for president are using the same appeals), led to a disruption of reasonable discourse in this country. The media have played their part in this as well, by not more forcefully questioning the president in their coverage of everything from his tax cuts to the war in Iraq, and instead (the television media) is fixated on the abducted blonde woman of the week. That disruption of discourse led us to a war that was hardly debated before the invasion.

Oddly, Brooks doesn't mention that. But that would undermine his claim that "it is still possible for exceedingly strange individuals to rise to the top."

I guess he means Gore by that, and not George W. Bush or Richard M. Nixon.

But I forgot, David Brooks is our nation's armchair sociologist and clearly knows more about family and neighbors than that ol' podium thumper.