Gore - The Assault on Reason

N ot long before our nation launched the invasion of Iraq, our longest-serving senator, Robert Byrd of West Virginia, stood on the Senate floor and said: This Chamber is, for the most part, silentominously, dreadfully silent. There is no debate, no discussion, no attempt to lay out for the nation the pros and cons of this particular war. There is nothing. We stand passively mute in the United States Senate.

Why was the Senate silent?

In describing the empty chamber the way he did, Byrd invited a specific version of the same general question millions of us have been asking: Why do reason, logic, and truth seem to play a sharply diminished role in the way America now makes important decisions?

The persistent and sustained reliance on falsehoods as the basis of policy, even in the face of massive and well-understood evidence to the contrary, seems to many Americans to have reached levels that were previously unimaginable.

A large and growing number of Americans are asking out loud: What has happened to our country? More and more people are trying to figure out what has gone wrong in our democracy, and how we can fix it.

To take another example, 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.

It is too easyand too partisanto simply place the blame on the policies of President George W. Bush. We are all responsible for the decisions our country makes. 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?

In the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, there was for a very short time a quality of vividness and clarity of focus in our public discourse that reminded some Americansincluding some journaliststhat vividness and clarity used to be more common in the way we talk with one another about the problems and the choices that we face. But then, like a passing summer storm, the moment faded.

It was not always this way. Why has Americas public discourse become less focused and clear, less reasoned ? Faith in the power of reasonthe belief that free citizens can govern themselves wisely and fairly by resorting to logical debate on the basis of the best evidence available, instead of raw powerwas and remains the central premise of American democracy. This premise is now under assault.

We often tend to romanticize the past, of course, and there was never a golden age when reason reigned supreme, banishing falsehood and demagoguery from the deliberations of American self-government. But for all of Americas shortcomings in the past, we did usually strive to honor truth and reason. Our greatest president, Abraham Lincoln, said in 1838, when he and the United States were both very young, Reasoncold, calculating, unimpassioned reasonmust furnish all materials for our future support and defence. Let those materials be moulded into general intelligence, sound morality, and in particular, a reverence for the Constitution and laws.

The truth is that American democracy is now in dangernot 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 is 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 feeling that something has gone fundamentally wrong. In 2001, I had hoped it was an aberration when polls showed that three-quarters of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for attacking us on September 11. More than five years later, however, nearly half of the American public still believes Saddam was connected to the attack.

At first I thought the exhaustive, nonstop coverage of the O. J. Simpson trial was just an unfortunate excessan unwelcome departure from the normal good sense and judgment of our television news media. Now we know that it was merely an early example of a new pattern of serial obsessions that periodically take over the airwaves for weeks at a time.

Late in the summer of 2006, American news coverage was saturated with the bizarre false confession of a man who claimed to have been present at the death of JonBent Ramseythe six-year-old beauty queen whose unsolved murder eleven years before was responsible for another long-running obsession. A few months prior to John Mark Karrs arrest in Bangkok, the disappearance of a high school senior in Aruba and the intensive search for her body and her presumed murderer consumed thousands of hours of television news coverage. Both cases remain unsolved as of this writing, and neither had any appreciable impact on the fate of the Republic.