Orchestras aren't what make the West worth defending

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"Is there a better crystallization of Western civilization's values than an orchestra?" asked a commenter on social media this week, sharing a video of classical musicians performing a concert suite drawn from "Porgy and Bess" by George Gershwin. "The millions of hours of diligent practice needed? The centuries of iterative tradition? The uncompromised excellence? The decorum? The craftsmanship? Basically everything worth preserving."

The music was elegant but the observation, I thought, was wrong. The claim reflected a confusion of aesthetic achievement with moral and political achievement — a category error that misses what actually makes Western civilization distinctive and worth defending.

No one would deny that orchestral music can be sublime. But to suggest it represents "everything worth preserving" in the Western tradition is to mistake a flower for the root. The orchestra is a magnificent cultural product, but it is hardly the embodiment of Western civilization's essential values. Other civilizations have produced equally sophisticated artistic traditions — Chinese calligraphy, Islamic architecture, Japanese tea ceremony, West African oral epics. What distinguishes the West isn't its aesthetic refinement but specific political and institutional innovations — liberal democracy, free markets, equal justice, self-government — that raised up humanity in ways never previously seen.

So what would better crystallize those values? If you wanted to choose a single image that captures what's truly essential about Western civilization, what would it be?

I'd nominate Norman Rockwell's 1943 painting "Freedom of Speech." It depicts a working man in a denim jacket standing to speak at a New England town meeting, surrounded by neighbors in suits and ties who listen respectfully. It's a perfect distillation of democratic self-government: citizens deliberating together, everyone's voice mattering regardless of station, decisions made through reasoned argument rather than force or inherited authority.

This is what makes Western civilization genuinely distinctive — not the cultivation of excellence through practice, but the radical idea that political legitimacy flows from the consent of the governed. The town meeting embodies principles you won't find crystallized in any orchestra: equality before the law, individual dignity, tolerance of dissent.

Of course, it wouldn't be hard to come up with other strong candidates:

Consider a photograph of voters queuing patiently outside a polling place in any free society: One that comes to mind is the iconic 1994 image of South Africans in Soweto waiting in long, snaking lines for a chance to cast a ballot in their nation's first free election after the fall of apartheid. It shows the peaceful transfer of power, the revolutionary Western idea that citizens have the right to replace their rulers — not through violent revolution but in a peaceful vote. Democratic elections embody the principle that political authority derives from popular consent, not from hereditary succession or military might.

Or picture a scene in a courtroom, an embodiment of the great Western teaching that everyone — powerful or weak, wealthy or impoverished — is entitled to justice and the due process of law. If you want something that reflects "everything worth preserving" about Western values, then watch Atticus Finch's closing argument to the jury in "To Kill a Mockingbird," the role for which Gregory Peck won the Academy Award for Best Actor in 1963: "In our courts, all men are created equal," the lawyer says. "I'm no idealist to believe firmly in the integrity of our courts and of our jury system. That's no ideal to me. That is a living, working reality!" The great innovations that make that possible — trial by jury, the presumption of innocence, the right to confront one's accusers — these matter more to human freedom than even the greatest symphonies.

And what about the messy but extraordinary blessing of market capitalism, the Western embrace of innovation, trade, and property rights that led to an explosion of human prosperity unknown for most of history? I have always loved Voltaire's description of the London Stock Exchange in the 1730s: It was a place, he marveled, "where the representatives of all nations meet for the benefit of mankind. There the Jew, the Mohammedan, and the Christian transact together, as though they all professed the same religion, and give the name of infidel to none but bankrupts." The market civilizes strangers into partners, making mutual benefit possible despite differences that historically meant conflict or prejudice.

Each of these images captures something that no orchestral performance can: institutions and principles that constrain power, protect freedom, and make human flourishing possible.

But we don't actually have to speculate about what best represents Western civilization's values. We can look at what people fighting for freedom choose as their emblems when their backs are against the wall.

In 1989, as Czechoslovakia's communist regime neared collapse, workers across the nation walked off their jobs in a general strike demanding democracy. At a brewery, The New York Times reported, a worker named Zdenek Janicek climbed onto a platform in his grimy overalls and addressed nearly 1,500 of his fellow workers:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident," he said, "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Then Janicek added: "Americans understood these rights more than 200 years ago. We are only now learning to believe that we are entitled to the same rights."

Thirty years later, during the massive Hong Kong protests against China's moves to choke off all remaining democracy and human rights in the city, thousands of marchers waved American flags and sang "The Star-Spangled Banner."

These protesters weren't cloaking themselves in American nationalism — they were reaching for the principles that America long symbolized: self-government, rule of law, individual rights, democratic freedom, equal justice. These are values that emerged from Western civilization's long struggle against arbitrary power, from Magna Carta through one-person-one-vote. America has always been an imperfect embodiment of these ideals — more imperfect these days than many would have thought possible. Yet when liberty is on the line, people around the world know what matters most: not aesthetic beauty but political institutions that can secure dignity, human rights, and liberty of conscience.

The orchestra playing Gershwin's "Porgy and Bess" suite was performing beautiful music, and there's nothing wrong with celebrating that beauty. Cultural achievement matters. But it isn't what sustains freedom or checks tyranny. Aesthetic excellence can flourish under any political system. After all, the Soviet Union had the Bolshoi Ballet and the gulag archipelago; East Germany had the Leipzig Gewandhaus orchestra and the Stasi. What orchestras need is patronage, training, and discipline, not liberty.

Liberal institutions, by contrast, require something much harder to sustain: a commitment to constraining power, protecting dissent, and treating citizens as equals before the law. Rule of law, property rights, free inquiry, self-government — these are fragile achievements that need constant defense. They are what make Western civilization worth preserving, because without them, human freedom withers — no matter how beautifully the orchestra plays.

Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe, from which this is reprinted with permission.

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