random rants and references

I had planned to follow up on my Friday post about living in a transformative age. Now, fortunately, my weekend laziness allows me to do less ranting and more referencing to the many articles that discuss recent Mid-East events as portending a major transformation there.

David Brooks, in his Saturday New York Times Op-Ed, asserts that : Why Not Here? "is the most powerful question in the world today", referring to the growing clamor for freedom and democracy in the Mid-East. He cites recent activities in Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, and Iraq to make his case about accelerating changes. He quotes the head of the Syrian Press Syndicate as saying "There's a new world out there and a new reality. You can no longer have business as usual." Later that same day, the the pace of change picked up, as reported by Yahoo! News - Mubarak Orders Egypt Election Law Changes . An event which followed within hours of Secretary of State Condi Rice's decision to skip her scheduled stop in Egypt after learning that Mubarak had jailed his key political opponent. (I think Egypt is the 2nd largest recipient of US foriegn aid. Could we be hinting that allowances are tied to good behavior, like tough parents? )

Since we are dealing with bigtime paradigm changes, Brooks give some credit for his thesis to Thomas Kuhn who " 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."

Today, Michael Barone has a great summary in USNews.com: Minds are changing (3/7/05) , which covers the above events and more. He also notes that "minds are changing in the United States. On Nightline, the New York Times 's Thomas Friedman and, with caveats, the New Yorker 's Malcolm Gladwell agreed that the Iraqi election was a "tipping point" (the title of one of Gladwell's books) and declined Ted Koppel's invitation to say that things could easily tip back the other way. In the most recent Foreign Affairs , Yale's John Lewis Gaddis credited George W. Bush with "the most sweeping redesign of U.S. grand strategy since the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt,"".

Barone finds particularly striking the words of Lebanese Walid Jumblatt, the Druze leader long a critic of the United States :"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, 8 million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world. The Syrian people, the Egyptian people, all say that something is changing. The Berlin Wall has fallen. We can see it."

If thes events constitute a "Tipping Point" breakout in the Mid-East, it will mark the start of a lasting transformation, even though the path may not be trouble free.