“Fear is the most powerful enemy of reason,” Al Gore declares in his new book, “The Assault on Reason,” an examination of neuroscience, the new information environment, and the depredations of the Bush administration.
But in deriding fear as a tool, the book neglects to mention that Gore himself has harnessed its power. The promotional trailer for “An Inconvenient Truth” calls Gore’s Academy Award-winning film “by far the most terrifying movie you will ever see.”
In fact, the former vice president’s rhetorical instincts in making the movie were right on, sharper than his understanding of neuroscience, keener than his take on the Internet and the way it affects how people process information.
Thank goodness, because Gore’s masterful polemical about the dangers of global warming may be the single greatest contribution to the common good he has made in a distinguished career of public service.
In his book, Gore looked to the right body of research to understand what has been happening to our political life. But he got the lesson of contemporary brain science upside down.
Neuroscience came into its own at about the same time the Internet did. In the past couple decades, new techniques for peering into brain processes have led to extraordinary advances in understanding the mind. These have profoundly refigured the picture that came down to us from philosophers and early generations of psychologists.
One area is particularly fascinating: The new model of the mind offers important but unsettling insights into why people respond to today’s media as they do.
Gore’s central thesis in “The Assault on Reason” is that democracy depends on voters making reasoned decisions based on accurate information, that television undermines their ability to do this by appealing to their emotions (especially fear), and that the future of reasoned public debate can be found on the Internet.
He is in good company in imagining a sharp contrast between reason and emotion and preferring pure reason. Those ideas date back to Plato and the Stoics. They even persisted to some extent in the work of Freud many centuries later.
Contemporary neuroscience sees things differently, however. Reason and emotion are not neatly divided.
In fact, the emotional processes in the brain are better than the rational ones for some purposes. Emotional reactions are much quicker than reason, for example. That is fortunate, because in life-threatening emergencies there often is no time to think everything out.
And the emotional brain learns from experience, just as the reasoning brain does.
Today, as computers grow ever faster and as moving large amounts of information (full-motion video, for example) becomes cheaper, we find ourselves immersed in information, at times nearly drowning in it.
E-mail stacking up, blogs beckoning, cell phones ringing, text messages rushing in, computer screens relaying the second-by-second events of the world, YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, not to mention CNN blaring in airports, television running as you surf the Web, ads playing on movie screens (even in movies) and in elevators, grocery store lines, sports arenas.
In thinking about this, Gore — like many others — makes a neat separation between television on the one hand and print and the Internet on the other. Print and the Internet, he asserts, promote reasoned debate. Television promotes passive reception of emotional stimuli.
Well, yes and no.
Print also is quite capable of unreasonable emotional appeals. Just look at the grocery store tabloids, or Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post, for that matter. Even more revealing, look at American newspapers from the late 18th Century, when the Age of Reason’s Enlightenment thinking was turned into the framework of the American Republic. Those publications were scandalous, shameless and highly inflammatory.
Television, on the other hand, can promote genuine reflection. Think of Ken Burns’ great documentary studies of race in America — “The Civil War,” “Baseball,” “Jazz.” Or of Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth,” which works as well on DVD as on a movie screen.
Sure, these shows appeal to the emotions through vivid visuals and deeply affecting human narratives. But they do make you think. Think ethically, in fact.
That isn’t as odd as it sounds. Important contemporary philosophers argue, as the University of Chicago’s Martha Nussbaum wrote, that emotions are “part and parcel of the system of ethical reasoning.”
So what does the emotional brain have to do with the Internet? From the beginning, this exciting new medium has sent its apostles into flights of utopian rapture. It promises to network the brains of every human on the planet into one superbrain more powerful than any supercomputer. It will permit Athenian democracy to extend the length and breadth of the great nation states of the world. Or, perhaps, it will eliminate nationalism entirely and bring all the peoples of the world together.
And, of course, it will rescue the American political system from television and deliver a government of reasoned discussion.
Revealingly, some of these rhapsodic claims are reminiscent of the early dreams for television, which was going to bring the American people together (to watch “I Love Lucy,” as it turned out).
The trouble with Gore’s view is that it disregards the deepest effect of the new information environment, which is to make us more drawn to emotional presentations of information.
The reason dates back long before the Internet, back to when our earliest ancestors lived on the African savanna. The human brain has not changed much since then. Its capacity for emotional response evolved as a survival mechanism.
Powerful as it is, the human brain has limited information-processing capacity. The emotions’ crucial function is to take command of the brain and focus its attention on situations where survival is at issue — danger, opportunities to reproduce, moments to nurture offspring.
When the brain is challenged to process very difficult information — let’s say, multitasking amid an overload of information — an emotional response is commonly produced. This is natural. In the face of a confusing welter of information, the emotions rise up to focus the brain on something they sense to be vitally important.
Think of hundreds of wild animals moving around chaotically on the savanna. And then a lion. The survivor’s brain pays attention to the lion.
This is one reason, a neuroscientific reason, that emotionally charged presentations of information — on-the-scene crime reports on TV, for example, or passionate blogs, or cable news ranting — have been growing in importance while emotionally cooler presentations — in mainstream newspapers, for example — have been declining.
The Internet already makes vast amounts of knowledge available to large numbers of people. It makes it easy for people to interact with people they otherwise would not even know. But sorry to say, its greatest impact will not be as the forum for rational discussion that Al Gore and others expect.
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Jack Fuller, a former editor and publisher of the Chicago Tribune, is working on a book about neuroscience and the news media.
