Assault on Reason

I've spent 36 hours in Cambridge watching the Al Gore roadshow as he debated climate change and explained his "Inconvenient Truth" presentation to an invited group from business, politics, NGOs and the media. I'll post on the Global Warming aspects when I've thought about them a bit more. But I was struck by the former VPs strong views on media. They are not new - he outlined them at the New York WeMedia conference in 2005 and also at the launch of his movie. He has a book coming out shortly - The Assault on Reason - which will expand further. The subtitle -How the Politics of Blind Faith Subvert Wise Decision-making - gives you the drift. Applied to the media it's an argument against politicisation and in favour of rational, evidence-based reporting. A defence of Enlightenment values. To that extent, something I believe in myself...

But Gore goes further and makes it a moral issue, quoting Scott Peck saying Evil is the absence of truth "so reporting something you know not to be true is evil"...and retelling the story of the German philosopher after the end of the second world war who studied how the Third Reich had taken power and concluded the" first significant symptom of their descent into hell was this: ‘All questions of fact became questions of power’..."

He then made a passing reference to Adam Curtis's documentary, The Century of Self charting the rise of PR as the beginning of a move away from rational argument into journalism more concerned with emotional engagement and entertainment values.

All this in parenthesis to his main subject. It was, he said, our "moral duty to live in truth". He was as passionate about this as he was about the climate. I wouldn't want to be a young producer on his network, Current TV, cheating an edit...

(NB He also paraphrased Bobby Kennedy's speech about the value of the GDP when arguing that consumerism wasn't any measure of quality of life. I wonder if anyone else spotted it!)