Condescension, Al Gore, and Global Warming

In the 2000 election, people complained a lot about Al Gore being condescending. They said he lectured too much and talked down to people. They said he acted like he was smarter than everybody else.

I think people have a very mistaken idea about condescension. Al Gore is not condescending. He assumes his audiences are intelligent and able to think, but he also assumes that they may not have the information and understanding of a particular issue that he has. He offers his listeners that information, not to show off how much more he knows than they do, but as a prerequisite to what he expects his listeners to do, which is think seriously about what he is saying. It is the very essence of respecting your audience to assume both that they think, and that they might require some facts to think about. Only utterly incurious people find it humiliating to be told things they do not know, or believe that it is so shameful not to know something that it is insulting and condescending to suggest to someone that they don't know something by telling it to them.

What is condescending is to offer your listener superficial sound bites, fake facts, sophistry, demagoguery and emotionally manipulative propaganda in place of actual facts and actual arguments. It is condescending to assume your audience does not want to be told a fact it does not already know, and does not want to think about such facts in any case. When we accept that kind of crap from our political leaders, we are not only being condescended to, we are condescending to ourselves. We are humiliating and shaming ourselves.

Yes, Biscuit just saw An Inconvenient Truth. Yes, it was good, and we love Al Gore. But we already loved Al Gore. We loved Al Gore in the year 2000, although I must admit I paid very little attention to him before that. In 2000, Al Gore said one of his favorite recent movies was Being John Malkovich, and George Bush said his was Forrest Gump. And that's a totally liberal elitist thing to love Al Gore about, but we don't care. And we already knew that global warming was a hideous disaster. What we did not know was that a slide presentation could be done so well as to make even Tufte proud. And also, that Al Gore appears to use the same model Powerbook as me. Wow, I feel so close to him now. Anyway, go see the movie, and especially drag your oblivious SUV-driving friends and relatives to go see it. And then support politicians who support a carbon tax, which is probably the only way our country will be able to, you know, not be blamed for leading the way (proudly, defiantly, shamelessly) to the next mass extinction.

Oh, and go carbon-neutral. It's not enough, but it helps. And it's ever so easy. All it takes is money.

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On a related topic, Max and I have noticed that sometimes people make fun of us for using 'big words' with Ari, or for taking the time to explain concepts like "compromise" and "nuclear fusion" to our 3-year-old. (Okay, Max's dad does all the heavy science explanation, but still.) This is because, despite the evidence of their own childhoods, in which people were always treating them as though they were stupider than they actually were, most people persist in believing that children are stupider than they actually are. So I'm very sorry that people find it disturbing that our 3-year-old talks about the need to "stabilize" his block towers so they don't "topple", but mostly I'm sorry for all the kids in the world who don't have anyone to treat them like they have got brains. Of course we recognize that childrens' brains are not as developed as adult brains, and that there are limits to their understanding, but we prefer to observe those limits in our child, rather than predict them. We respect them wherever we find them, but we don't assume we know in advance what they are. Are we smug, irritating intellectuals or what?!