Capitol Ideas: The Prophet of Profits
Bethell, Tom
CAPITOL IDEAS by Tom Bethell The Prophet of Profits W hat's George Gilder up to these days? He used to write about feminism, marriage, and tax cuts. He's still interested in those things but now...
...In 25 years, he has gone from writing about feminism to Wavelength Division Multiplexing, or whatever the latest digital or fiber-optic technology may be, without seeming to have changed the subject in his own mind...
...He was tapping at a laptop, replying to some bulletin-board comments on his website (www.gildertech.com...
...Framed above his bed George had a quotation from William Blake: "To See a World in a Grain of Sand...
...Best here means most efficient, time-saving, broadest bandwidth...
...So good products tend to prevail over bad," he said...
...But I think the weakness of that novel is that it doesn't finally bespeak a very powerful faith...
...Which is not an easy task by any means...
...Gilder himself was squeezed into a rather small office, with physics books shelved on the wall behind him...
...He keeps an eye on Silicon Valley, and then, by a process that no one quite understands, figures out which companies are making the new products that the new technology needs...
...It turned out that microchips were made of silicon, or sand, and a world of information could be inscribed within them...
...It's a belief that goodness does prevail...
...That technological echo of the poetic image captivated him...
...Our prurient interests and our morbid fears and anxieties...
...It shows up in a hundred ways: in the disordered obsession with population control, in the belief that complex machines possess intelligence...
...Good effects multiply, bad effects nullify themselves...
...Which prompts the thought that "a culture that is not devoted to showing the glory of God cannot really triumph...
...Gilder is close to his sixtieth birthday...
...One bad product that is already losing is television...
...Here we encounter his shining optimism, one of his most infectious qualities...
...Feminism (Sexual Suicide) led to family, and to the travails of growing up TOM BETHELL is TAS's Washington correspondent...
...So that goodness becomes, somehow, less powerful...
...Therefore it must be appeased and blandished, they think...
...Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent...
...Gothic cathedrals were designed, of course, to enhance our sense of the presence of God...
...The business had been very successful, Gilder had told me, and several new people had been hired...
...He wasn't sure how many...
...They provide space that Andy Grove could hardly afford in Santa Clara...
...The microchip is the Gothic cathedral of our time...
...He runs five miles a day, preferably uphill...
...I can believe it...
...It's a secular book...
...But broad bandwidth means lots more channels, interactive, with smaller (and therefore more moral...
...Gilder sometimes seems to verge on a materialist heresy (and naturalistic fallacy) of his own...
...That would extend the canon, let's see, from Ti-Grace to...Amazing Grace...
...He also has a book on religion in his future...
...He struggles with the moral codes that are implicit in worship, but he doesn't have the worship or the faith, so you're left with moral codes themselves as the objects of worship—stoic affirmations of principle...
...The materialist superstition will collapse because "it's both false and suicidal," Gilder believes...
...The phone rang and after a few words Gilder went out into the hall...
...He had been on a winning streak for three years, and he didn't know how long it would last...
...and in that most fanatical faith of modern materialists, the belief that with enough time, randomly colliding molecules give rise, step by step, to conscious beings...
...It has been said that he can't finish his books...
...What about Tom Wolfe's idea that detailed reporting is the sine qua non of novel writing...
...I didn't think our literature was especially impressive, or our poetry, art, or films...
...But in the telecosm, what does distance matter...
...That is where the mystery comes in, for physics wasn't exactly Gilder's strong suit at Harvard...
...Discovery has also published a book called Speaking of George Gilder, which collects excerpts from his recent speeches, interviews, andwritings on economics, morals, microcosm, and telecosm...
...His monthly newsletter costs subscribers $300 a year, but that would have been a bargain for those who followed the investment advice it contained...
...Pinned to his wall today is another saying, which captures Gilder's most essential quality: "Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence...
...Small was indeed beautiful, and good, too...
...Soon, scores of transistors would be placed not on the head of a pin but on the point of a pin...
...And sand, aluminum, and oxygen are the three chief components of the microchip and they are also the most common substances on the earth's crust...
...It has to appeal "to masses of people at once," and such conglomerations are "depraved...
...All would depend on his continuing study of the emerging companies and the underlying physics...
...His hair is thinning but he is still as alert-looking as ever, and if anything leaner...
...This led to a study of entrepreneurship (Spirit of Enterprise) and so to the new technology of semiconductors and the digital world (Microcosm), and its likely effects on society (The End of Television) which has turned into an ongoing examination of which high-tech companies are doing what (Gilder Technology Report...
...Gilder is no doubt right that porn's role on the Internet has been exaggerated, and certainly television's mass audience is melting away...
...If nothing has meaning, then the most ruthless and predatory forces will win...
...For what do we have in common...
...The American Spectator • August 1999 19...
...It did achieve that effect for me," Gilder said...
...So he is practicing the great capitalist art that he has all along preached...
...There the ending is the most powerful part...
...Gordon Moore, the author of Moore's Law [which states that computing power doubles every i8 months] and an inventor of this technology, believed that this was providential, and if he thought so, who was Ito gainsay him...
...So the omnibus volume of Gilderian wisdom goes from Betty Friedan to Richard Feynman without logical leaps, and classifying it would puzzle the conscientious librarian...
...He told me the other day that debating misguided European advocates of something called Time Division Multiple Access technology (bad), not to be confused with Code Division Multiple Access (good), both having to do with cellular telephony, "was as emotional as debating Ti-Grace Atkinson and Germaine Greer in the feminist wars...
...participants...
...It's figuring out what the technology wants to do!' W e went to another office, empty, and Gilder talked about "the materialist superstition," the great stumbling block of our age...
...Here, I fear, we will have to await Gilder's book on religion, parts of which he has already begun to write...
...Because if you're depraving your customers they are not going to be able to buy your goods for very long...
...The first issue of his newsletter came out three years ago, and investors who followed his advice would have done very well financially...
...Can the microchip possibly have the same effect...
...This was quite a frightening task, he admitted...
...Liberals, he says, may almost be defined as believing that evil is more powerful than good...
...You figure out what the equations in general are doing and then you proceed to the next step...
...It's regular and poly-colored and has the aspect of a stained-glass window...
...I am just the intellectual slave," Gilder said...
...He has found in his latest work that "the best technologies really do win...
...It's made of sand and glass and air...
...Talent will not, genius will not, education will not...
...Even if you can't understand the darned book, you understand the parts that you can," Gilder said...
...Gilder lives and works in the Berkshires, in Western Massachusetts, far from Silicon Valley...
...His latest book, The Noblest Triumph, was recently published by St...
...But of course it was not designed to have that effect...
...There I met Richard Vigilante, his publisher, recently hired from Regnery Publishing...
...One of the impressive things about George Gilder is the way one interest has led to another in seamless fashion...
...You are completely swept along with this Christian allegory that climaxes at the end...
...18 August 1999 • The American Spectator plishing as the microchip...
...without a father (Naked Nomads), which led to the ill effects of welfare (Visible Man), thence to an interest in economics and supply-side theory (Wealth and Poverty...
...Television appeals to tyrants, planners, and politicians who want to reach the passive masses...
...It's "partly intuitive," he allowed...
...At the Discovery Institute in Seattle, founded by Gilder's old college roommate Bruce Chapman, they are trying to combat the latter superstition, with a program that takes a critical look at Darwinism—the ideology of materialism masquerading as biological science...
...It just seemed to me to be the most important thing that was going on," he said of the new technology...
...The belief "that matter itself can reveal meaning," or that "material sensory measurements suffice to capture God, and kill him," is the great modern heresy...
...When you look at it through the microscope, it's incredibly beautiful and amazing...
...Compare A Man in Full with Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, which is perhaps a similar story...
...Physics itself has been his latest venture, because in order to know which companies are doing things that will prove successful in the long run (a few years, in the fast-moving world of high-tech), he has to know which ones are employing technology that is going with the flow of the underlying physics, and which ones are fighting that flow...
...But what about the possibility that faith wanes in a prosperous society, that people are more inclined to forget about God in a condition of material abundance...
...He's still interested in those things but now he is studying the new economy of what he calls the Telecosm, and putting out the Gilder Technology Report...
...And that is America's problem today...
...Then, eliding smoothly from the good of efficiency to the good of morality, he foresees technologically-driven triumph in the culture wars...
...The idea that the role of the artist is "merely to depict reality is barren and ultimately Satanic," he thought, "because the person who plunges into reality soon enough finds Satan there and he's likely to prove very seductive...
...The mill is about the size of a World War II troop ship, with dusty floorboards and echoing corridors and great bare wooden rooms, seemingly empty for decades...
...Belief in God, he says, "is a belief in powerful good...
...I just have to figure out which companies are going to work...
...Materialism "ends up in the belief that evil prevails," because all it yields are "arrangements of atoms" which will forever be meaningless...
...But they are not climactically powerful...
...Martin's Press...
...that nothing whatever exists except for molecules in motion—that mind is matter...
...That puts less strain on the knees...
...Tom Wolfe is as good a writer as we have got," Gilder allowed, and in A Man in Full "he is struggling to find God, and that is edifying, and worthy of our attention...
...He keeps his subscribers informed of these developments...
...He said he didn't believe in any literature or any art "that doesn't ultimately show the glory of God...
...When Gilder was working on Wealth and Poverty twenty years ago, Peter Sprague told him about the semiconductor industry and the coming microcosm...
...On close inspection, the facts that support it turn out to be few and pitiful...
...The good capitalist learns how to serve others effectively, he has said, and does so by creating something that is worth more than it cost...
...Gilder's next book, summarizing his latest findings, will be called Telecosm...
...They were not as representative of what this era was accomGeorge Gilder extends his seamless web...
...It is the belief that the spiritual can be reduced to the material...
...Gilder Technology Group occupies a rambling suite of offices in a huge old textile mill in a small town called Housatonic...
Vol. 32 • August 1999 • No. 8
