The Contrarian View

This is one of those posts that I am stumped to find a tag for. I went with philosophy but for no particular good reason. I started reading this article in aeon, Splitting the Universe, and it got me thinking about the role of contrarians generally. Here is how it starts:

One of the most radical and important ideas in the history of physics came from an unknown graduate student who wrote only one paper, got into arguments with physicists across the Atlantic as well as his own advisor, and left academia after graduating without even applying for a job as a professor. Hugh Everett’s story is one of many fascinating tales that add up to the astonishing history of quantum mechanics, the most fundamental physical theory we know of.

What fascinates me about this is how it resonates with a lot of my observations over the years. I came from very humble roots, basically farmers and homesteaders on the Canadian prairie, but I have worked within a number of institutions including government ministries, universities, colleges, conservatories and private business. What I have noticed over the years is that all institutions tend to be founded by people who are most interested in ideas and goals, but over time they are nearly all taken over by people who are most interested in their careers and the growth of the institution itself. Sometimes this is expressed in the form of a law. A related observation is that the behaviour of most organizations can best be explained if they are thought to be controlled by a cabal of their enemies.

What all this, and the aeon article, capture, is the fundamental contradiction between the discovery of ideas and principles and how they tend to be applied in the world. They are typically, perhaps exclusively, discovered by contrarian individuals who don't think in the usual channels. Then, when the ideas are found to be valuable, they are developed through institutions that are, inevitably, taken over by careerists and opportunists. It is just the way of the world. What is most irksome is that the mediocrities running the institutions are smug and arrogant while the people who actually discover things are humble and often forgotten. Hence the story of Hugh Everett.

There are a few contrarians in the field of musicology: one is Joseph Kramer, though you might not think of him as a contrarian. Another is Richard Taruskin who tends to write the occasional polemic, so he is more likely to be thought of as a contrarian. These days, a contrarian in musicology is someone who, ironically, does not view everything in terms of identity politics. In tomorrow's miscellanea I will have an interesting example of Taruskin's contrarian thinking.

Our envoi is a harbinger of that. This is Christopher Hogwood conducting and directing from the keyboard the first movement of the Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 by Bach: