Why I don't believe in proof

When I was a young musician, I took a radical stance vis a vis musical performance and interpretation. In order to defend my stance against an entrenched and complacent musical culture, I took to the books. I read and I read discovering precedent after precedent, proof after proof for my views by which I hoped to convince my colleagues to pull their heads out of the cave and see the light.

This was an exhausting endeavor - not the reading, but the convincing. I hadn't yet learned that convincing people with logic is the least effective way of changing behavior, my faith in civilized debate and persuasion notwithstanding.

Still I got pretty good at it. I could quote Baillot, Quantz, Carl Phillip Emmanuel, Mozart, pere, Gemianini, and all the others. From Gregorian chant treatises to Gustav Mahler I had ample description by the masters of what I divined to be authentic and universal musical technique. I believed myself to be unassailable from a scholarly perspective, and incontestable from a musical one.

And yet budging the classical behemoth, as I expected, was not as easily forthcoming. That would have to come from my performances.

And yet I was certain that I needed this intellectual stubbornness and groundedness in order to make my musical case valid in the eyes of my many critics. Whether I won most of them over or not, I don't know.

But I knew for sure what i was describing was "right," and I had my loyalist adherents who would validate through their own example, and whilt that was not really enough for me at the time, that is where I left things.

Looking back, my experience taught me much. Trying to convince people of something is a fool's errand. Power, zeitgeist, and the motion of the spheres is what changes people's minds far more than intellectual reasoning. Even for those who are willing to be intellectually persuaded by a reasoned argument find themselves in conflict with their bodies unless the reasoner pushes all of the correct biological buttons of superior alpha-leader. That most intellectuals are entirely disconnected from their bodies makes this point in practice less relevant, it is nonetheless difficult to effect change without moving the body and the passions of the heart.

So this is where I find value now. In passion over reason, with reason, of course being given its due, but only in moderation,

For this brings me to my point. That, if you want to, you can prove anything with reason.

In studying music, quotes from historical authorities were a primary source of precedent (the mother's milk, of, you know, making your point and being right, according to Donna). There were so many wonderful quotes from the masters regarding rubato, tempo variation, portamento, vibrato, ornamentation, and such, that making my case was easy.

In my searches, I found, interestingly, others using my very same quotations to make opposite points. These, of course, were bastardizations of the original meaning and context of the quote (I was sure I was right about that), and I was always able to disprove my disprovers. It was fun, a kind of intellectual warfare on the villainous and the dogmatic.

But eventually I stumbled on one quote that has always stuck with me. Doc, my teacher and mentor at the time, referred me to an article in Organ Times from the 70's extolling the virtues of (if memory serves) the tracker organ and legato playing. I don't remember anything about the article, except for the quote from the opening paragraph:

"You can prove anything with quotations."

Well, despite my being right about everything, I would have to admit that this was true. Precedent is handy, but it is really just a tool to fool the foolish and bring more ballast into your argument's camp.

Truth, finally, is not a fixed thing. It is the word written by the winners that is locked into history. That truth will then be shimmied from side to side by scholars (winners of tenure) and their updated views will be disseminated to the public by journalists and educators (winners of Pulitzers and Board of Education elections). What is "true" in the classical sense is anybody's guess and in the end is not so much important as the reality. What happens and what "is", and what is "true" or what is "right" have almost nothing to do with one another. And bio-fascism (as Mac might put it) is entirely indifferent to truth but entirely in the service of the winner.

So let's be clear about this. Proofs by quotation are not only logically unsound, they are also historically subordinate to the wielding of power.

Fine.

But the same goes - and triply so - to proofs by science. You can prove anything with quotations, but you can prove *anything* with scientific experiments. We are trained to believe this is not true, that science has miraculously sucked all of the subjectivity out of life and that truth can be revealed - the real truth this time - by objectively observing the results of a laboratory experiment.

This is the 9th grade version.

The grown-up version asks the following questions of the so-called objective scientist: Who decided to do the experiment in the first place? Why did you do that experiment and not another? And more to the crux: Who is paying for the experiment? Where did you get the equipment and the laboratory itself? How are you able to do scientific experiments and not have to work for a living? And finally: What experiments and what results will get you into peer-reviewed journals and therefore advance your careers?

You see science is a marvelous concept- objectivity, reason, detached observation - but in the world there is no way - no way - to firewall science from money, economics, policy, and politics. None.

Why are there studies about the number of antioxidants in pomegranate juice? Do you think somebody was just curious? No, there was a financial profit to be had by backing up a product advertisement with "scientific facts." Why are there infinite studies on diabetes treatment and yet virtually none on the cures available to all through a plant-based diet? Because there is a fortune to be made in diabetes treatment and virtually none in eating asparagus.

And then there's the truly frightening statistic. We would love to think of egg-head scientists as being fully committed to truth and objectivity. But what about career advancement for them? How do they get their name in the right journal so they can get the authority to do more experiments?

Here it just gets ugly. After all, what the hell is a peer review, anyway? How are we to challenge our assumptions if our work is only reviewed by our peers? Would we tolerate this from congress, from legal representation? Never. And yet we defer to the expertise of scientific boys' clubs to tell us what is right.

But here's the kicker. None of us can disprove the findings of scientists. Why? Because we can't afford to. None of us has access to the lab, to the materials, to the journals, to the equipment. We can not, on our own, collaborate and compare with researchers around the world - the requirement for passing scientific muster.

And so we are utterly powerless in the face of the scientific monopoly on truth. And to speak out against science is at its best, lunacy and at its worth blasphemy- with all of the state-sanctioned punishments once reserved for non-believers in the cloth.

And this is very important. Because the same lack of review was (again) the mother's milk of the modern scientist's medieval antecedent- the priest. In days of old, everyone was illiterate- even many kings and queens. Maybe they could read their vernacular - maybe - but they could certainly not read Hebrew, Latin, Greek, or Aramaic.

This put lay people, with respect to medieval bible-driven truth in exactly, *exactly,* the same position as the modern "laity" with respect to science. If a medieval priest told you that the bible said to give him an extra bushel of wheat each week in order to get into heaven, the farmer would have no way to dispute that. If he said you must pray 5 instead of 10 times a day, then that was truth. Entirely incontestable, since the common person lacked the resources (in this case intellectual) to challenge him.

This is why Luther's revolution was so monumental. It would be the equivalent of giving each world citizen his own laboratory and endless funding for research. Only in this way - through democratic, not peer, review - can some sort of truth be arrived at.

And what we find over history is that this democratic review shows "truth" to be much larger than fact but a kind of organismic, biological truth that transcends fact. Objective, or factual based truth is only possible within a small collective of like-minded thinkers- the peer review group, or the Washington Post editorial board. These people can have a lock on truth because their ideas are self-referential and are not seriously challenged by opposing viewpoints.

The beauty of the mish-mash we call democracy, or the House of Representatives, is that these truth-groups are constantly pitted against each other in order to form something even more precious than truth: reality.

Democratic review should be the overriding procedure for all inquiries of consequence. Science should not be given cloth-like deference to espouse truth. You can prove anything with science, anything at all. And everyone does. It is the coin of the land every bit as much as Leviticus was in days of old. It is a hidden monopoly, a hidden tyranny in our midst, and it rules us right under our very noses.

It is for this reason, by the way, that I am such a fan of the religious nuts in America. They have the audacity (through their own narrow-mindedness) to challenge science at its seams. I love this and urge them to continue on their quest to undermine the dominant paradigm- as their own was undermined generations back by the scientific juggernaut.

As for me, I'll hang back from that particular fray and say what I'll say. Not interested in proving anything, just being what is. Who could ask for anything more?



Addendum -

I was looking for this piece for a while. Listen up and enjoy. Note that the interviewer, despite being brave enough to launch the interview in the first place, is unwilling to challenge her own underlying assumptions about science. The final question about whether his own research would apply to himself is a kind of self-reassurance that what he's saying isn't as monumentally important as it really is.