by Jay Hazen, Reading Liberally Denver
I arrived at YearlyKos 2007 uninitiated to the blogosphere, ready to tell a tightly knit, politically literate community about Reading Liberally, a new offshoot of Living Liberally. As I shuffled from O'Hare and through the hotel lobby at two in the morning of Thursday, my iPod narrated Al Gore's The Assault on Reason, one of the first selections of Reading Liberally Denver and a book I am now already re-reading. I saw geographically diverse nodes of the netroots lounging in armchairs, putting faces to very familiar names, and thought about what a friend told me about Yearly Kos: "If, God forbid, a bomb went off in Chicago's McCormick Center it would take movement progressives a decade or more to recover." When I saw this community in person, I felt like I was a part of the antidote to something discussed in chapter 5 of Gore's book: The Assault on the Individual.
You could say that the idea of individual dignity acquired new meaning with the new accessibility of information that arrived in the wake of the printing press.
Further:
The Information Revolution that began in the late fifteenth century progressively substituted the force of thought for force of arms in the political economy of Europe.
The force of thought is an operative phrase that Gore credits with Enlightenment theories of individual liberty and their objective (radical at the time) to quell the pernicious influence of rivalrous nation-states on the lives of everyday people. This expression can be seen in the writings of revolutionaries like Tom Paine, who wrote, "Man is not the enemy of man but through the medium of a false system of government."
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