Al Gore in the balance

By Henry I. Miller Copyright 1999 Washington Times April 5, 1999

Al Gore's recent claim that he created the Internet reminded me of a neighbor we had when I was a kid growing up in a working-class section of Philadelphia. According to this guy, he had invented all kinds of things, from the hula hoop to whitewall tires. It didn't take long until my buddies and I realized that he was out to lunch.

Much of the media treated Mr. Gore's boast as a nonevent, and prominent Republicans made light of it. House Majority Leader Dick Armey quipped that he had come up with the idea for the interstate highway system, and Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott claimed credit for the paper-clip.

But those who have read and listened carefully to Mr. Gore will recognize that this is not another example of a politician lying or exaggerating. Rather, there is something profoundly disturbing here in the man who will surely be his party's standard-bearer in the next presidential election: Al Gore is delusional.

We have seen again and again that he has real difficulty in discriminating reality from fantasy. He claimed, for example, that he and Tipper Gore were the model for the novel, "Love Story," an assertion author Erich Segal denied. Mr. Gore also accused his political enemies of possessing "an extra chromosome," a remark that infuriated the families of persons with Down's syndrome, which is caused by an extra chromosome.

Mr. Gore's delusions also run riot on issues of technology and environmentalism, such as Mr. Gore's repeated endorsement of anti-technology tracts and criticism of technological advances, as congressman, senator and vice president. His writings generally place science and technology at odds with "the natural world" and by inference, with the well-being and progress of mankind. Mr. Gore's book, "Earth in the Balance," provides insights into the thinking of this Man Who Would Be President.

Mr. Gore's apocalyptic central thesis is that we need to take "bold and unequivocal action . . . to make the rescue of the environment the central organizing principle for civilization." Throughout the book, he uses the metaphor that those who believe in technological progress are as sinister, and polluters are as evil, as the perpetrators of the World War II Holocaust. He characterizes the environmental insensitivity of markets as "philosophically . . . similar in some ways to the moral blindness implicit in racism and anti-Semitism." These views trivialize what may be the most heinous man-made event in history.

Mr. Gore's gives a peculiar, cliche-laden, New Age spin to serious issues. Mr. Gore argues that our approach to technological development has been shaped by aggressive male domination instead of by the nurturing instinct of women.

"Ultimately, part of the solution for the environmental crisis may well lie in our ability to achieve a better balance between the sexes, leavening the dominant male perspective with a healthier respect for female ways of experiencing the world." Mr. Gore trashes the empirical nature of science, for disconnecting man from nature. "But for the separation of science and religion," he laments, "we might not be pumping so much gaseous chemical waste into the atmosphere and threatening the destruction of the earth's climate balance." He ignores that but for the separation of science and religion, we would still be burdened with the notion that the sun and the planets revolve around the Earth - which would no doubt pose certain problems for space exploration by NASA. Mr. Gore repeatedly characterizes contemporary American society as "dysfunctional."

Why? Because we have aggressively harvested fossil fuels, and embrace fruits of technology like Astroturf, the Walkman, microwave ovens and frozen dinners. Mr. Gore deludes himself that his views are morally superior to those of the populace. He admits only grudgingly that he will initially have to settle for the partial measures that are politically possible -but, we are assured, he and his acolytes will keep bold and dramatic measures at the ready, awaiting the education and enlightenment of the Great Unwashed.

Throughout his political career, Mr. Gore has been particularly loopy about biotechnology. In 1983, then-Rep. Gore endorsed a horrendous anti-biotechnology diatribe authored by technophobe Jeremy Rifkin, calling it "a framework for critical consideration of future technological advances." Harvard University evolutionary biologist Stephen J. Gould said of the same book, "I don't think I have ever read a shoddier work," and characterized it as "anti-intellectual propaganda masquerading as scholarship."

While a senator, Mr. Gore excoriated plant breeders' decision to develop gene-spliced plants that would decrease the overall use of herbicides and enable farmers to substitute less hazardous chemicals, saying that it "lent credibility to those who argued that biotechnology would make things worse before it made things better." This is a view shared by virtually no one in the scientific community; and a measure of biotechnology's success is that last year, more than 80 million acres of gene-spliced plants were cultivated, about three-quarters of that in the United States.

Finally, after years of prodigious efforts to get U.S. regulatory agencies to introduce burdensome and unnecessary biotech regulation, Mr. Gore came up with this ingenious but bizarre twist: "The most lasting impact of biotechnology on the food supply may come not from something going wrong, but from all going right. My biggest fear is not that by accident we will set loose some genetically defective Andromeda strain. Given our past record in dealing with agriculture, we're far more likely to accidentally drown ourselves in a sea of excess grain." Somebody needs to remind him that the planet's population is expected to double within the next decade or two.

The bottom line is that, to use an esoteric medical term, Mr. Gore has a screw loose. I wouldn't want him for a neighbor, let alone as the leader of the Free World.

Henry I. Miller is a senior research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and the author of "Policy Controversy in Biotechnology: An Insider's View."

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