Misreading Kuhn for fun and profit

There's a nice monograph waiting to be written, cataloguing the ways that Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions has been read wrongly--and the political patterns that emerge from that misuse.

Most such failed interpretations of Kuhn, I think, lack the randomness that accompanies mere sloppiness; they're more often tendentious (if not willful) misreadings that operate in a particular and predictable direction.

As a case in point, read the opening paragraphs of this gem by conservative apologist and NYTimes columnist David Brooks:

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.

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."

Sorry, David. Kuhn made his point quite clear: It's not that someone in a field of inquiry asks a new question and "suddenly" everything shifts. More likely, someone asks a new question, and those who liked the Old Questions systematically marginalize them by whatever means is necessary and available (delayed promotion, denied access to infrastructure like grants or journals, car bombs, whatever) until finally the people who were committed to the Old Question retire or die.

Misreading Kuhn on that point makes it possible to argue that a system that is authoritarian or inflexible is in fact progressive and open to change.

And who would want to do that? Other than people who have a nice setup in the status quo, I mean?