Bombastic Trump leads the paradigm shift to ‘ashtray diplomacy’
Tom Plate says from trade to the South China Sea, Donald Trump has taken a page from ashtray-hurling scientist Thomas Kuhn, reacting to challenges with a disruptive leadership style. And, looking at China, Russia and even Malaysia, he’s not alone
So, when the famous professor in the cave of his office at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton once hurled an ashtray at a graduate student under his tutelage, it soon became, for historians and philosophers in the know, a defining moment in high-level eccentricity, questionable mentorship and academic drama.
Even more than a half-century later, it’s difficult to get the unsettling image of the flying ashtray out of our minds; neither can the target of the propelled ashtray, Errol Morris, who grew up to become a celebrated film director (The Fog of War, and many others) – and very fine author.
In his just-published The Ashtray: (Or the Man Who Denied Reality) – usefully philosophical; engagingly unstuffy – Morris admits taking on the late Professor Kuhn, then (as indeed even now) a global superstar for his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a masterpiece that popularised “paradigm shift” to explain scientific progress.
