Yesterday I was on a conference call with Al Gore, who was chatting with some blogger types about his new book, The Assault on Reason. It was convivial, if not particularly revelatory. Taylor Marsh wrote all about it, and if you want to listen to an hour-long phone call, you can get it here.
It didn’t occur to me that anybody would be recording, so I asked kind of abstruse questions: a) was there ever a time when reason governed democratic dialogue? and b) isn’t clinging to this Enlightenment division between reason and emotion one reason progressives are such poor persuaders? Answers: a) no, but things have gotten unusually out of whack, and b) there’s no harm using more emotive persuasion, but reason is the progressive’s friend, and a political culture respectful of reason is progressive.
Everybody else was all over him about current political goings-on.
I’ll have more to say about the book once I’ve read it.
