David Gelernter, a professor of computer science at Yale and a major contributor to development of the software used in parallel processing and, I am sure, many other remarkable achievements, not to mention his scruffy beard and hair, looks like what he hates: a damn hippie.
So Dave isn’t really an idiot. He’s what happens when a brilliant man gets pissed off when he discovers that the rest of the world won’t let him tell it what to do. Dave’s crankiness is well known. Back in 2012, Dave poured out, in a fulminatin’ frenzy, a snappy little treatise bearing the self-revelatory title America-Lite: How Imperial Academia Dismantled Our Culture (and Ushered in the Obamacrats),1 blaming all these horrors on—wait for it—the Jews, the kicker being that Gelernter is a Jew himself. The problem is, not many Jews, not to mention the rest of us damn hippies, love Israel as much as Gelernter thinks we ought.
It is way not surprising that Gelernter was an early embracer of Donald Trump. What is surprising is that at over at the Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf sees fit to sit at Dave’s feet and record his self-important and unimpressive ramblings
about this and that, and even engage in a few of his own, putting forth his musings on “Charles Krauthammer’s meditation on Fermi’s paradox”. Amusingly, Gelernter tells him that Krauthammer got it all wrong.2 See, Conor, there’s only room for one genius in this interview!
Afterwords
It would be fun, in theory, to put Gelernter in the same room with Noam Chomsky and watch them try to outdo each other with Olympian vituperation and Jewish in-jokes—“You have the brainpan of third-rate Trotskyite epigone!” “Your ‘Hebrew’ sounds like Urdu!” But they probably wouldn’t cooperate.
- For those who don’t want to labor through Dave’s labored invective (“The nation is filling inexorably with Airheads, nominally educated yet ignorant; trained and groomed like prize puppies to be good liberals”), Russell Jacoby, writing for the Chronicle of Higher Education, provides a useful exegesis (though you can skip Russ’s 900-word, name-dropping “history” of anti-intellectual intellectualism, which he unwisely attaches to the front of the piece). The more you read of Dave’s prose, the more you realize he should stick to 1’s and 0’s. ↩︎
- Fermi’s paradox argues that the universe should have given birth to multitudes of rational beings with whom we could communicate. So where are they? Carl Sagan, probably not Krauthammer’s favorite windbag/self-promoting astronomer, offered the theory, endorsed by others, and Charles himself (and, presumably, Conor as well), is that advanced civilizations tend to destroy themselves. Dave doesn’t think that’s the case—after all, we haven’t done it, so far—but then he goes off on a rant about why the fuck aren’t we giving arms to Ukraine and why the fuck didn’t Jimmy Carter keep the Shah on the fucking Peacock Throne (except that he doesn’t say “fuck”). My theory: perhaps, we aren’t an advanced civilization? (Also, I think the estimates for the likelihood of the development of advanced civilizations are grossly “optimistic” and I don’t see any reason to believe that interstellar space travel is possible.) ↩︎
