The Assault on Reason

Watching An Inconvenient Truth for the second time last night, I was struck by the way in which the Nobel Peace Prize-laureate’s film makes blatant emotional appeals at every opportunity. Isn’t this a little odd, considering that the film’s star recently authored a book that bemoans the end of rational political discourse? An Inconvenient Truth is an entertaining movie. It’s entertaining because it’s a morality play, with Al Gore and science on one side and Big Business and other assorted yahoos on the other. And while the truth claims Gore makes in his PowerPoint presentation are subject to debate, in the end those claims aren’t what you take away from the film. Instead you take away images of beautiful or despoiled environments, and the hypnotic soundtrack. The images and music provoke emotional, not intellectual, reactions. Or, as Andrew Ferguson put it in a slightly different context:

HATERS DEAL IN AGITPROP, being impatient with the more deliberate forms of persuasion. The practical problem with agitprop, when it enters the political conversation, is that it isn’t argument. Often it doesn’t even rise to the level of assertion. [Michael] Moore bragged that fact-checkers from the New Yorker magazine had vetted his script, proving, he said, that it was without factual error. He had a point, in a way. The movie contained relatively few straightforward factual assertions. There was very little for the fact-checkers to check, and very little to argue with. Moore’s method was not to present evidence but to assemble insinuations, piling one on top of another. The method may be suitable for propaganda and entertainment; it is disastrous in a nationwide political campaign aimed at unseating a well-known incumbent. It means you will gain the serious attention of only those who already agree with you. Everyone else – which is to say, a large chunk of the electorate – is left out; puzzled at first, and then turned off altogether.

Documentary film is a serious and powerful art form. In politics, however, a documentary becomes a long advertisement for whichever cause the director espouses. And advertisements, because they are visual and aural, appeal to our heart, not to our heads. Assault on reason, indeed.

The Assault on Reason

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