Al Gore Wins a Nobel

Al Gore Wins a Nobel Prize

In October, 2007, former Vice President of the United States, Al Gore, was awarded a shared Nobel Peace Prize for his work on global warming. In a New American article by William P. Hoar, the question of why Gore was awarded such a distinguished prize was examined. It was, posited Hoar, honoring Gore for his life-long commitment to the issue of global warming, which, admittedly, until recently, few people had taken him seriously about. The issue of global warming has come to the forefront of public attention because in fact, irrefutably, the polar glaciers are melting, and areas where glaciers that formed thousands of years ago are in fact seeing newly created land mass as those glaciers have disappeared. This history melting glaciers and Gore's concern about the polar glaciers are discussed by Gore at length in the documentary directed by Davis Guggenheim, and starring Al Gore. Gore has, he says, dedicated his life to talking about global warming.

Still, there has been much controversy over his documentary, an Inconvenient Truth (2006), which brought him the Nobel Peace Prize, along with the UN scientists who signed off on what the opposing science expressed in the Great Global Warming Swindle (2007) have said is bad science. It is what Dan M. Kahan (2007) writing for the Stanford Law Review calls the "cognitively illiberal state.

Dan Kahan goes on to explain how Al Gore, a non-scientist, but a skilled orator and a man who has great public appeal, and an appeal that increases the more the public become weary of the war in Iraq and weary of George W. Bush. It is this, and the liberal tendency to go for all things green these days, which may not be a bad thing until it starts bleeding over into the rational thinking processes of people. This is what Kahan calls the cognitively illiberal state. That is accepting the ideas of an individual because that individual is associated with the liberal ideologies of the political and religious right.

It is this association with all things "liberal," the Constitution, the right to challenge in the Supreme Court, which are, Kahan says, paradigmatically associated with the prevention of harm.

This, Kahan says, explains why people are accepting of Al Gore's global warming theories, even though they are not facts; because he presents his theories as values that people want to embrace. This issue alone, and the way that Al Gore has used his liberalism to manipulate the public with rhetoric and guilt, even presenting false and unproven information that people are willing to accept as fact because it is reflective of the values they believe themselves to possess, and want to force upon others who might not share those values; and, says, Kahan, it is harmful to the public.

For a society that relies upon fact and truth in the way that America does, and, because our very system of justice relies on it; then redefining fact as values is potentially harmful, deceitful and misleading. It is becoming, Kahan says, the "cultural cognition of harm." This is the phenomenon of cultural cognition, Kahan says, and he defines it this way:

Cultural cognition refers to a collection of psychological mechanisms that moor our perceptions of societal danger to our cultural values. In appraising societal risks, for example, we rely critically on value-pervaded emotions such as fear and disgust. To minimize dissonance, we more readily notice and recall instances of calamity that appear to be occasioned by behavior we abhor than by behavior we revere. Where members of society disagree about the harmfulness of a particular form of conduct, we instinctively trust those who share our values -- and whose judgments are likely to be biased in a particular direction by emotion, dissonance avoidance, and related mechanisms."