Orchestral Authority

In a Mars Hill Audio interview, Victor Lee Austin talks about his recent book, Up With Authority: Why We Need Authority to Flourish as Human Beings . He uses the analogy of an orchestra to indicate how fundamental authority is to certain forms of human flourishing.

Orchestral music is one of many kinds of collective human activity that cannot be achieved without authority. The reason, Austin argues, is that there is no single right answer to the question “What shall we play at the concert?” or “what shall we practice today?” Reason can’t provide a firm answer to such questions; each individual player in the orchestra might have perfectly reasonable, and very different answers. If the orchestra is going to play at all, somebody has to decide the question, and that is an exercise of authority.

Once that authority is exercised, the individual musicians are capable of achieving something they could never do individually, nor even as a collection of individual players. They come into their own as musicians by following the authority of the conductor. For the orchestra, authority is not at odds with freedom, but a vehicle for freedom and expression.