Daniel O'Connor | Integral Ventures, LLC
Last night, Karen and I saw Al Gore's new movie, An Inconvenient Truth. It is, in my opinion, a very clear, compelling, and heartfelt documentary that profiles one man's authentic effort to educate people around the world about the need to deal with the global warming crisis.
Thanks to the superb direction of Davis Guggenheim, the film offers an unexpectedly pleasant balance and interweaving of technical and factual analysis, moral and ethical challenges, and personal introspection and disclosure, with Al Gore speaking through all three of these voices in a manner that sounds completely authentic and genuinely above the deplorable politics of this controversial issue. In philosophical terms a la the universal pragmatics of Jurgen Habermas, there is in this film a very effective differentiation and integration of validity claims in the three domains of what is true, what is right, and what is sincere--the critical ingredients of the shared understanding and coordinated action that is the apparent goal of this film.
What is True?
For example, the truth claims are presented, one big mind-full at a time, by watching Gore make what has evidently become his trademark multi-media presentation to real audiences around the world. In this role, he is speaking much like a seasoned professor with the apparent expertise that comes from a great deal of background reading and conversation with scientists, as well as the clarity that comes from years of practice in distilling the essentials into a form that lay-people can readily understand. I have been a fairly-well-read student of ecological sustainability since 1993, yet I was very impressed with Gore's ability to explain such complexities as the potential impact of the Arctic ice melt on the Atlantic conveyor and its second-order consequences for the European climate. He's a gifted teacher.
What is Right?
These powerful truth claims are then generously seasoned with Gore's moral imperatives and ethical challenges, either within the context of the formal presentations or in the voice-over narration that accompanies his back-stage preparations and travel. According to Gore, but in my own terminology, what makes these truths so damned inconvenient is that they represent prima facea evidence of the overwhelming need for a change of course in our socio-economic development to one of ecologically sustainable economic growth and social development. Such change is at the root of it a question of values--not espoused values, but subconscious value systems that govern the way we see, think, feel, judge, act, and learn in the midst of the world in which we live. However, it was not clear in this film how well Gore understands the depth and tenacity of these subconscious value systems and their inherent capacity to defend their hosts against all manner of inconvenient truths and moral imperatives that might otherwise compel them to learn in the second-order sense.
What is Sincere?
Nevertheless, as compelling as these inter-related positive/normative arguments are, it is the third facet of Gore's three-fold presentation that might ultimately be the key to the sort of personal, social, and technological transformation required to deal with the ecological crisis. This is the voice of sincerity, of personal reflection and self-assessment, that comes through in the series of more private vignettes that are woven between the public claims of what is true and right. Through these glimpses of what we are to regard as the real Al Gore, we can infer that he has climbed his own learning curve and that all of us might therefore be forgiven for our own participation in the creation of the present crisis--a necessary step, I believe, before we can really get on with the work of resolving it.
Perhaps I am reading too much into this facet of the film, but I do think that Gore probably has climbed a very steep and painful learning curve, not so much in the realm of truth and rightness, but in the realm of personal authenticity. For a man like this to succeed in a political system increasingly characterized by the systematic distortion of truth, justice, and sincerity--where facts are considered irrelevant or unknowable, political opinions have taken the place of sound moral judgment, and personal sincerity is a punch line--he must have felt the constant need to distort his own honest perspective as the unfortunate means to the greater end of making a real difference in the world. When does an inconvenient truth become a moral imperative that need not be unduly coerced? When an individual sincerely owns the light and the shadow of that truth and that judgment and begins to act authentically from that center in a manner that facilitates a similar process of learning in others. Al Gore seems to be doing this now, perhaps better than he ever could have done as President.
What Now?
Such is the pattern that repeats itself several times throughout the film, with each new round of facts, values, and stories building on the previous rounds until the overall substance of the multi-faceted message really sinks in. Naturally, it is the task of each and every viewer to assess the extent to which Gore's validity claims are indeed valid and therefore the basis for the kind of second-order learning that would be necessary for one to take effective action to help avert this obvious/potential crisis.
My bottom line on the movie? It is not without flaw, but it is arguably peerless even among documentaries because of its universal message (and universally pragmatic messaging). It is certainly Oscar-worthy and I hope it does win an Oscar because it deserves to be seen and discussed to the point where a critical mass of people worldwide can situate themselves in the center of the dialogue and speak with authenticity their own three-fold perspective on the situation--not just in conversation, but through each and every decision, exchange, gift, transfer, and vote.
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