February 26, 2005
PARADIGMIN' IN THE ROUGH:
Why Not Here? (DAVID BROOKS, 2/26/05, NY Times)
This is the most powerful question in the world today: Why not here? People in Eastern Europe looked at people in Western Europe and asked, Why not here? People in Ukraine looked at people in Georgia and asked, Why not here? People around the Arab world look at voters in Iraq and ask, Why not here?Thomas Kuhn famously argued that science advances not gradually but in jolts, through a series of raw and jagged paradigm shifts. Somebody sees a problem differently, and suddenly everybody's vantage point changes.
"Why not here?" is a Kuhnian question, and as you open the newspaper these days, you see it flitting around the world like a thought contagion. Wherever it is asked, people seem to feel that the rules have changed. New possibilities have opened up. [...]
It's amazing in retrospect to think of how much psychological resistance there is to asking this breakthrough question: Why not here? We are all stuck in our traditions and have trouble imagining the world beyond. As Claus Christian Malzahn reminded us in Der Spiegel online this week, German politicians ridiculed Ronald Reagan's "tear down this wall" speech in 1987. They "couldn't imagine that there might be an alternative to a divided Germany."
But if there is one soft-power gift America does possess, it is this tendency to imagine new worlds. As Malzahn goes on to note, "In a country of immigrants like the United States, one actually pushes for change. ... We Europeans always want to have the world from yesterday, whereas the Americans strive for the world of tomorrow."
One need not have drunk the Kool-Aid to recognize that there's just one man responsible for the fact that so many are asking this question right now.
MORE:
The tide of freedom (SALIM MANSUR, 2/26/05, Toronto Sun
Shakespeare's Brutus declares, "There is a tide in the affairs of men," and its meaning, when properly grasped, opens new chapters in human history.The abiding tide in human affairs is that of freedom, sometimes receding and at other times in full flood.
It is in the wake of this tide beginning to swell in the Middle East that U.S. President George Bush arrived in Europe this week.
Bush -- like Ronald Reagan, his political hero -- has shown an uncanny ability to grasp the meaning of freedom's tide in history and boldly "take the current when it serves" to expand liberty's realm.
He's more the wakemaker, no? Posted by Orrin Judd at February 26, 2005 1:13 PM
This is the liberal fallback position. I'm starting to here libs at work say how "lucky" the president is. The see success as almost inevitable and they cannot give credit to the architect. Fortune favors the bold.
Posted by: Pat H at February 26, 2005 2:24 PMNo man can "make the wake" of history, but one man can harness the wake of events. Bush has harnessed the wake of 9/11, whereas all other leaders in the world have been content to let the wake wash over them and deposit another layer of silt over their sinking establishments of "stability".
Posted by: Robert Duquette at February 26, 2005 3:24 PMThat one man. Are you referring to Gorbachov?
Posted by: erp at February 26, 2005 4:20 PMWho dares, wins.
Posted by: jim hamlen at February 26, 2005 4:31 PMHe is correcting the mistakes made under both the Eisenhower and his father's administrations, when we had the chance to dramatically advance freedom with relatively little effort but the 'realists' and the paid stooges of the world's dictators prevented is from doing so. Chirac, every bit as much a paid stooge as any Dulles, can't stand Bush. That is endorsement enough for me.
Posted by: Bart at February 26, 2005 5:23 PMTides don't have wakes. He means "on the swell", not "in the wake."
Posted by: pj at February 26, 2005 7:11 PM"We Europeans always want to have the world from yesterday, whereas the Americans strive for the world of tomorrow."
Dynamism is life. Stasis is death.