Why did Al Gore lose the presidential election to George W Bush in 2000? Despite having won the popular vote, he lost the contest in the electoral college, although the outcome of this all hung on Florida. The supreme court handed down a 5-4 majority decision which effectively awarded the Sunshine State to Bush, although it was later established that Gore had in fact won there.
So perhaps it was his selfless decision not to provoke a constitutional crisis that did for Bill Clinton’s Veep? Or should he have sewn it up earlier by winning West Virginia and his home state, Tennessee? Was his stiff bearing during the campaign a consequence of complacency? And did his vanity run away with him in refusing to allow Clinton to take to the road on his behalf?
Historians would do well to take a forensic look at this issue because whatever Gore's failings as a president might have been, the world would have been a very different place had Bush and his coterie not hijacked the White House and the American constitution. If Al Gore had been in a position to bring the same analytical rigour to the American presidency as he has done in his latest book, The Future , then the monumental failure of political leadership that has confronted us whichever way we looked for the past 15 years or so may have been checked.
I know it’s a big if, but given what is at stake these days, this issue of political lightweights promoting idiotically myopic policies could prove to be one of species life or death if they continue to hack away at the natural environment with no regard for the consequences.
Readers with a tendency to self-harm should avoid this book. Even for those with a bright disposition there are moments where social, economic, environmental and moral Armageddon appears so tangible that it takes all one’s self-restraint to resist reaching for the antidepressants.
Which is not to argue that this is a bad book. Indeed, the reason why it leaves you feeling so depressed is that it is very hard to find fault with any of the meticulously researched material.
Boiled down, Gore reasons that the rate of technological change, and with it the very nature of our economy and our environment, has gathered such pace since the proliferation in the 1980s of networked computer systems that our species is no longer able to manage its own destiny with any surety.
The thesis brings to mind the concept of scale as developed with greater elegance by Mark Medish, one of Gore’s former colleagues at the White House and one of the most gifted thinkers to emerge from the Clinton years. Humans, Medish suggests, have always worked within a scale that complements both the natural world and our intellectual capacity. In many respects we now operate beyond that scale, leaving us vulnerable to all manner of unpredictable forces, whether micro or macro.
Gore uses the term Earth Inc to describe a similar phenomenon: “national policies, regional strategies and long accepted economic theories are now irrelevant to the new realities of our new hyper-connected, tightly integrated, highly interactive and technologically revolutionised economy.”
In Earth Inc, investment capital simply follows the most profitable option, sniffing out the lowest wages, the cheapest transport links and the most attractive rates of taxation.
Not only are jobs shifted around the globe with no regard to workers, but in many parts of the world those same positions are being filled by machines, a process which Gore refers to as “robosourcing”.
In the utopian literature of the 20th century, the logic of fewer costs associated with extractive, manufacturing and service industries sometimes led to a Marxist vision of humans being able "to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner". (Although these days a rollicking session of Call of Duty would probably replace the rearing of cattle.)
History is, regrettably, unfolding in a different way. The money saved by outsourcing and robosourcing is not being distributed in a manner that evens out the gross inequalities which plague humanity but in one that accentuates them instead. In explaining the colossal damage that the accelerating concentration of wealth in the hands of the super-rich has wrought, Gore comes as close as any vice-president of the US is ever likely to come to a wholesale denunciation of capitalism.
Even worse than the growing gap between rich and poor, Gore insists, is the way the American branch of the ruling global oligarchy is subverting the democratic process. The core disaster here was the supreme court decision, known subversively as Citizens United, which, in short, allowed gazillionaire corporations to give money to political campaigns. This leads Gore to observe that “The ideological condominium formed in the alliance between capitalism and representative democracy that has been so fruitful in expanding the potential for freedom, peace, and prosperity has been split asunder by the encroachment of concentrated wealth from the market sphere into the democracy sphere.”
This slightly pompous language is illustrative of the book’s style, but neither that nor its despair-inducing logic, noted above, can diminish the impact of Gore’s argument. He backs it up with an astonishing multitude of fascinating insights and apposite facts, so that at times this tome appears to lean on a whole colony of staffers beavering away on the internet and in libraries to feed the beast of his ideological curiosity.
Earth Inc is the totality, and Gore examines its five organs: networked technology; global corporates; the drive for growth; the outlandish products being forged by the synthesis of the digital revolution with its counterpart in the life sciences; and the degradation of the environment.
In each section, he stops awhile and considers the gobbets of remarkable and inspiriting progress that each of these organs produces. But while one is desperate to believe that these will indeed overcome the fearful odds we face, if the species does go under in the next two centuries or so, Al Gore will have explained why. It is just a shame he won’t have the chance to do anything about it from the West Wing.
Misha Glenny's most recent books are Dark Market: How Hackers Became the New Mafia; McMafia: Seriously Organised Crime; and The Balkans 1804-1912
