A few brief quotes lifted from Al Gore's The Assault on Reason:
● “In order to conquer our fear and walk boldly forward on the path that lies before us, we have to insist on a higher level of honesty in America’s political discourse. When we make big mistakes in America, it is usually because the people have not been given an honest accounting of the choices before us. It also is usually because too many leaders in both parties who knew better did not have the courage to do better.”
● “As a world community, we must prove that we are wise enough to control what we have been smart enough to create.”
● “The truth is that American democracy is now in danger—not from any one set of ideas, but from unprecedented changes in the environment within which ideas either live and spread, or wither and die. I do not mean the physical environment; I mean what I called the public sphere, or the marketplace of ideas. It is simply no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse. I know I am not alone in believing that something has gone fundamentally wrong.” / “This was the point made by Jon Stewart, the brilliant host of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, when he visited CNN’s Crossfire: There should be a distinction between news and entertainment. It really matters. The subjugation of news by entertainment seriously harms our democracy: It leads to dysfunctional journalism that fails to inform the people. And when the people are not informed, they cannot hold government accountable when it is incompetent, corrupt, or both.”
● “Fear is the most powerful enemy of reason. Both fear and reason are essential to human survival, but the relationship between them is unbalanced. Reason may sometimes dissipate fear, but fear frequently shuts down reason.” / “It is simply an insult to those who came before us and sacrificed so much on our behalf to imply that we have more to be fearful of than they did. In spite of the dangers they confronted, they faithfully protected our freedoms. It is up to us to do the same. […] Yet something is palpably different today. Why in the early years of the twenty-first century are we so much more vulnerable to the politics of fear? There have always been leaders willing to fan public anxieties in order to present themselves as protectors of the fearful. Demagogues have always promised security in return for the surrender of freedom. Why do we seem to be responding differently today? […] The single most surprising new element in America’s national conversation is the prominence and intensity of constant fear. Moreover, there is an uncharacteristic and persistent confusion about the sources of that fear; we seem to be having unusual difficulty in distinguishing between illusory threats and legitimate ones. […] How could our nation have become so uncharacteristically vulnerable to such an effective use of fear to manipulate our politics? A free press is supposed to function as our democracy’s immune system against such gross errors of fact and understanding. As Thomas Jefferson once said, “Error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.” So what happened? Why does our immune system no longer operate as it once did? […] The public sphere is simply no longer as open to the vigorous and free exchange of ideas from individuals as it was when America was founded.”
● “Simplicity is always more appealing than complexity, and faith is always more comforting than doubt. Both religious faith and uncomplicated explanations of the world are even more highly valued at a time of great fear. Moreover, during times of great uncertainty and public anxiety, any leader who combines simplistic policies with claims of divine guidance is more likely to escape difficult questions based on glaring logical flaws in his arguments. […] There are many people in both political parties who worry that there is something deeply troubling about President Bush’s relationship to reason, his disdain for facts, and his lack of curiosity about any new information that might produce a deeper understanding of the problems and policies that he is supposed to wrestle with on behalf of the country. Yet Bush’s incuriosity and seeming immunity to doubt is sometimes interpreted by people who see and hear him on television as evidence of the strength of his conviction, even though it is this very inflexibility—this willful refusal even to entertain alternative opinions or conflicting evidence—that poses the most serious danger to our country. By the same token, the simplicity of many of Bush’s pronouncements is often misinterpreted as evidence that he has penetrated to the core of a complex issue, when in fact exactly the opposite is true: They often mark his refusal even to consider complexity. And that’s particularly troubling in a world where the challenges American faces are often quite complex and require rigorous, sustained, disciplined analysis.”
● “In 1999, Israel’s highest court was asked to balance the right of individual prisoners against dire threats to the security of its people. Here is what the court declared: ‘This is the destiny of democracy, as not all means are acceptable to it and not all practices employed by its enemies are open before it. Although a democracy must often fight with one hand tied behind its back, it nonetheless has the upper hand. Preserving the rule of law and recognition of an individual’s liberty constitutes an important component in its understanding of security. At the end of the day they strengthen its spirit and allow it to overcome its difficulties.”
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