In America, reason is under assault. How do I know this? The same way all reasonable people know anything. Al Gore has written it in a book, The Assault on Reason, with no pictures on the cover. He has also unloaded himself of enlightening profundities such as the following: “The remedy for what ails our democracy is not simply better education (as important as that is) or civic education (as important as that can be), but the reestablishment of a genuine democratic discourse in which individuals can participate in a meaningful way – a conversation of democracy in which meritorious ideas and opinions from individuals do, in fact, evoke a meaningful response.”

If you made it to the end of that sentence, congratulations. You’ve just had a meaningful response to a meritorious opinion. Gore is particularly exercised by America’s allegedly new-found passion for studying the private indiscretions of Hollywood stars. He’s very upset that I know who Lindsay Lohan is – and regards it as a threat to American democracy. He blames television for this appalling vulgarity, and regards it as an indefensible distraction from, well, meaningful responses to meritorious ideas: “At first I thought the exhaustive, nonstop coverage of the OJ Simpson trial was just an unfortunate excess – an unwelcome departure from the normal good sense and judgment of our television news media. Now we know that it was merely an early example of a new pattern of serial obsessions that periodically take over the airwaves for weeks at a time: the Michael Jackson trial and the murder trial of the actor Robert Blake; the case of Laci Peter-son – who went missing eight months pregnant with her first child – and the tragic death of intern Chandra Levy; Britney and K-Fed; Paris and Nicole.”

Of course, before OJ Simpson, no mass media in America covered celebrities at all. Before OJ Simpson the American public always debated public policy with an unwavering attention to facts, reason and empirical logic. That’s how they avoided the Vietnam war, for example – because they were closely following the intellectual discourse of Adlai Stevenson. That’s how they conducted themselves during the civil rights movement, the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King, the Johnson implosion, the Nixon impeachment, and the riots and crime waves of the 1970s. It was all reason all the time, wasn’t it. Remember Wood-stock? It was actually a seminar.

To add to the implausibility of the diagnosis, Gore recommends the internet as the balm for all democratic ills. Up to a point, Lord Al. I’d actually never heard of Lindsay Lohan or Paris Hilton until my e-mail in-tray got bombarded with online video. Lohan is among the most searched names on Google. By and large, Britney Spears’s private parts have been viewed far more often online than on cable news shows. Yes, Gore is right that the web is an astonishingly wide and deep resource for democratic debate. But it is only as powerful as its users want it to be.

And the entire idea of the rational ego being independent of the emotional id is fast being consigned to scientific history. Aristotle was mistaken, we are now informed. Reason, according to the fast-expanding school of cognitive neuroscience, is fuelled by and critically dependent on emotion. “When you look at the actual anatomy of the brain you quickly see that everything is connected,” Elizabeth Phelps, a cognitive neuroscientist at New York University, told The Boston Globe this year. “The brain is a category buster.”

Being reasonable, moreover, does not mean an avoidance of error. In fact, reason is propelled as much by error as it is by logic. Take the obvious target of Gore’s argument – the decision by a clear majority of Americans to support the Iraq war in 2003. We were wrong. But were we completely irrational?

The arguments were there, and, yes, they were fuelled and clouded by emotion. But how do you expect a country traumatised by 9/11 to be able to foresee the dangers of action in Iraq as acutely as the dangers of inaction?

This is what human beings are. We are reasonable creatures, created and empowered by unreason. Just watch An Inconvenient Truth. Yes, it’s a model of rational argument. But it also appeals to emotion – the fear of looming catastrophe, the sense of loss that climate change provokes. Gore wasn’t wrong to depend on these emotional levers, as well as the rational ones. True debate requires both.

The best intellectual architects of liberal democracy have always understood this. Gore sadly doesn’t. He is still amazed that not everyone agrees with him and finds it necessary to attribute such disagreement to irrationality. In this, he misunderstands the genius of constitutional democracy.

It isn’t that it creates some kind of emotion-free zone in which citizens defer to or become experts in various empirical questions. It’s a product of competing arguments but also conflicting emotions. It is both logos and thymos, logic and passion, debate and theatre.

Democracy, moreover, does not depend on reason winning every time. It depends on the legitimacy of mass participation and ensures that fallible human judgment can be corrected – in the long run. And when you look at American democracy these past few years, the evidence does not seem to me to indicate some collective, irrational unhinging.

Gore, after all, won the popular vote in 2000 – despite the OJ Simpson case. George W Bush’s reelection in 2004 was by the narrowest margin, despite reason’s alleged collapse. Americans elected a Democratic Congress last November, and are now overwhelmingly opposed to continuing the Iraq war along the lines proposed by the president. Is this evolution in a vast, complex country a function of collective madness? Or collective wisdom?

There are threats to this balance, and Gore is not wrong to worry about them. As always with Gore, his virtues are not completely overshadowed by his blindspots. The power of religious fundamentalism, the appeal of jingoism, the constant distractions of a mass media trying to make a profit: these all impede democratic debate. But again, they are not and haven’t been the only propellers of American thought. In the era of the religious right, for example, the proportion of Americans supporting same-sex marriage has gone from 27% in 1996 to 46% today, according to the latest Gallup poll. Did reason have nothing to do with that?

So if the former vice-president will forgive me, I have the latest issue of Hello! to peruse. After a brief sojourn among the platitudes of Gore’s prose, I could do with a break. Bring it on, Britney. Hit me, baby, one more time.

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