PZ Meyers hears a debate between techoguru George Gilder and Richard Dawkins and says:
Ashbrook recapped the last half hour by calling Gilder a "prominent American thinker". I am so embarrassed.
But Gilder is a thinker in the way kids with ADD are renaissance men, it's the number of topics that impresses, not the quality of thought that goes into them. Before he became an ID advocate, before he began rhapsodizing over high-bandwidth utopias, before he wrote on three or four other subjects he had no business pontificating over, he was a gender theorist attempting to rationalize traditional gender roles as essential to our natures.
His book began with a long and incoherent parable about a courageous knight saving a helpless princess from a dragon, then living happily ever after. Pages later, he contrasted this with a self-sufficient princess who does the job herself, shakes off the prince's attempts to help, and becomes a lonely shrew. A couple chapters later, he attempted to attack Title IX (or maybe just female encroachment on male sports -- I forget) by arguing that men, though physically able to do gymnastics and ballet, simply looked wrong when they tried. He brandished no poll numbers or aesthetic theories to buttress this; it was just that George Gilder, when eating chips and watching ice skating, preferred to stare at chicks than dudes, and thus an essential component of male and female natures was revealed, and the newly-enlightened Gilder could confidently pronounce gender equity in sports unnatural. The guy's got pundits' fallacy encoded into his DNA, and yet we keep publishing his books and allowing him on our media.
So Ashbrook is right. George Gilder is a prominent American thinker, but only because Americans don't think very hard.
