Why Not Here?

David Brooks in the New York Times watches people in various parts of the world ask a simple question. Simple but loaded with implications. A very nice little essay that you need to read. Here's a taste...

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.

The question is being asked now in Lebanon. Walid Jumblatt made his much circulated observation to David Ignatius of The Washington Post: "It's strange for me to say it, but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq. I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting three weeks ago, eight million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world."

Let's hope. I remember watching incredulous as the old eastern bloc fell bit by bit. It was unthinkable (or at least "unthought") but then it happened. "Why not here?" someone asked and there turned out to be no answer. "Why not now" is the partner question, equally unanswered. I'm not much of an incrementalist. That's why I shy away from the label, "Moderate" (one reason, at least.) My version of Radical Centrism is impatient, and ready to overturn the out-of-balance world in order to wrench it into alignment. The middle-east is a world of extremes, and extremists. The Iraqi election looks to me like a centrist revolution. A rejection of the extreme and one-sided, in favor of a "radical" shift toward balanced consensus and stability. In a mad world like Iraq, sane people will be revolutionary. Simple, ordinary folks waking up from a nightmare and asking a simple questions like "why not here? why not now?"