The origins and development of eek!-o-freakery (Part 3)

AL GORE'S MEIN KAMPF

In his 1992 book Earth in the Balance, Gore displayed the world view identified sixty years ago by Eric Hoffer as the signature of The True Believer:

The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready he is to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause. 

Gore believes in America’s “natural” world leadership and in his own uniquely personal relationship with God, and his holy cause is environmentalism, all bound together by an apocalyptic vision of a looming showdown between good and evil to make a very nasty package indeed.

His Jimmy Carterite vision of America’s international role is tediously familiar. OK, Gore wrote the book to boost his chances in the 1992 Democratic presidential primaries, but still:

From the beginning, our leadership of the world community has been based on much more than military and economic strength. The American drive to correct injustice – from the abolition of slavery to the granting of women's suffrage – has constantly renewed our moral authority to lead. 

Only Brazil lagged behind America in abolishing slavery, only South Africa took longer to abolish apartheid, and New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Norway, Denmark, Finland - and the Soviet Union - had all enfranchised women before the USA got around to it in 1920.

For the rest, all the shyster tricks are there: argument by indirection, weasel words, false repentance and outright fabrications presented as facts. When dealing with someone who relentlessly employs all the logical fallacies with the air of one entitled to impart eternal verities, Aristotle himself would have recognised the need to get ad hominem. So, let's look at the man. The book, he says, came about because he had:

. . . for several years now been engaged in an intensive search for truths about myself and my life; many other people I know are doing the same. More people than ever before are asking: Who are we? What is our purpose?”

This is the inchoate angst of the adolescent proclaimed by a grown man as a guiding principle. But even that is to be preferred to his equation of society with a dysfunctional family, repeated so often that you have to wonder what went on in the Gore mansion when he was growing up.

Fueled by the fruits of the sun and the soil, water and air, we are constantly growing and creating, destroying and dying, nurturing and organizing. And as we change, the world changes with us.

As we grow older we perceive the world differently, but only a narcissist could believe that a change in his perspective is actually a change in reality. Hoffer again:

The fanatic is perpetually incomplete and insecure. He cannot generate self-assurance out of his individual resources – out of his rejected self – but finds it only by clinging passionately to whatever support he happens to embrace. This passionate attachment is the essence of his blind devotion and religiosity, and he sees in it the source of all virtue and strength. 

Thus Gore’s mid-life crisis, after being beaten like a cheap rug in the 1988 primaries:

. . . caused me to be increasingly impatient with the status quo, with conventional wisdom, with the lazy assumption that we can always muddle through. Such complacency has allowed many kinds of difficult problems to breed and grow, but now, facing a rapidly deteriorating global environment, it threatens absolute disaster. Now no one can afford to assume that the world will somehow solve its problems. We must all become partners in a bold effort to change the very foundation of our civilization.

The books revealed someone so confident that he embodied all that is decent and even holy in man that, if given the chance, he would ruthlessly undermine individual liberties in pursuit of his view of the common good. Conservative theologians and clergy, he says:

. . . are deeply suspicious of any effort to focus their moral authority on a crisis in the material world that might require as part of its remedy a new exercise of something resembling moral authority by the state. 

Surely it is not only conservative clergy who have reservations about this? I believe there is something in the US Constitution about the separation of Church and State. A bagatelle to Gore, who advocates:

Adopting a central guiding principle – one agreed to voluntarily – [which] means embarking on an all-out effort to use every policy and program, every law and institution, every treaty and alliance, every tactic and strategy, every plan and course of action – to use, in short, every means to halt the destruction of the environment and to preserve and nurture our ecological system.

Make the last phrase read, “to destroy capitalism and ensure the triumph of socialism” and this could be the text of a speech by Lenin.

There are no ends in politics, only means, because the means ineluctably become ends in themselves. Gore wants to persuade Americans to give up the unalienable rights enshrined in their Constitution to Big Brother. But “unalienable” means that you cannot have it taken from you or give it up – you are stuck with it.

Something that most Europeans would fail to evaluate correctly is Gore's adoption of the rhetoric of a born-again Christian. They should not. He has:

. . . a deeply personal interpretation of and relationship with Christ, and an awareness of a constant and holy spiritual presence in all people, all life, and all things. 

Gore was a theology student, so when he invested “things” with a “constant and holy spiritual presence” we must wonder if the church-going folk in Tennessee were aware that their favourite son was a pantheist.

But it is Gore's concluding words that really let his cat out of the bag:

Unless we grow in these understandings, we will lose our ability to redeem the promise of freedom. 

So, we must grow not in mere understanding, but in these understandings. He knows what you should think, so grow in his understanding – or else.