{"id":7828,"date":"2020-12-04T08:32:35","date_gmt":"2020-12-04T08:32:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/?p=7828"},"modified":"2020-12-04T08:33:03","modified_gmt":"2020-12-04T08:33:03","slug":"harmony-anyone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/2020\/12\/04\/harmony-anyone\/","title":{"rendered":"Is there harmony about Harmony?"},"content":{"rendered":"

There was a webinar last night:\u00a0Teach the Future<\/em><\/a>\u00a0meets the Harmony Project<\/a><\/em>. \u00a0 The event was supposed to be looking at systems change in education, asking what an ideal education system looks like and how we can get there, but it was a bit of a love-in. \u00a0Everybody's contribution was brilliant, and everyone agreed with everyone else which is the new way, of course, where mild disagreement is seen as hostility and actual dissent is a crime against humanity.<\/p>\n

We didn't hear very much about the Harmony Project save that it seeks to put nature at the heart of education, and that our top priority ought to be to make peace with it (nature, not education). \u00a0I'm very skeptical about harmony as a driving social idea. \u00a0The following edited extract from the book that Paul Vare and I wrote in 2018 explains why.<\/p>\n

What springs to mind when \"harmony\" is mentioned? \u00a0If you're at all musical then you might think of the pleasing sounds that come from a certain combination of notes, or even of the harmonics that are so important to the richness of the sounds we hear.\u00a0 Or, thinking of St Francis of Assisi, it might be the sort of harmony that seeks to displace discord; or the harmony we associate with tranquility and peace when we speak of living in harmony with our neighbours, or of getting along. \u00a0You might have also thought of Harmonia, the Greek goddess of peace and concord. Maybe eHarmony, the dating website, came to mind, or Harmony, the Rapper, who's a hip hop emcee.<\/p>\n

Then again, you might know that in 2009 the United Nations proclaimed April 22nd<\/sup> as International Mother Earth Day<\/em>.\u00a0 In doing so, it acknowledged that the Earth and its ecosystems are \u201cour home\u201d, and expressed its conviction that it is \u201cnecessary to promote harmony with nature in order to achieve a just balance among the economic, social and environmental needs of present and future generations.\u201d\u00a0 Or perhaps you know that, in 2010, the Prince of Wales wrote a book (with\u00a0Tony Juniper\u00a0and Ian Skelly)\u00a0with the title Harmony: a new way of looking at our world,<\/em> with a focus on the world's environment and its problems.\u00a0 It's for these last two reasons that Paul and I were interested in the idea. \u00a0I should note that the Harmony Project draws on the book's ideas.<\/p>\n

The UN said that the world has been slow to respond to the damage that human activities are causing to the planet, and that the purpose of International Mother Earth Day<\/em> was to promote a view of the Earth as the entity that sustains all living things found in nature; it was to honour the Earth as a whole and our place within it. \u00a0Confusingly, the UN had, in the 1970s, already designated March 22nd<\/sup> as Earth Day.\u00a0 The differences between the two are too subtle for me.<\/p>\n

HRH and co-authors say that Harmony <\/em>is a practical guide to what we have lost in the modern world, why we have lost it, and how we might rediscover it. \u00a0It is, they say, a philosophical blueprint for the \u201cmore balanced, sustainable world\u201d that we\u2019ll have to create if we\u2019re all to live well in the world.\u00a0 In this sense, it\u2019s rather like the Earth Charter.\u00a0 Harmony<\/em> looks at how many of the world\u2019s challenges can be traced to how we have abandoned a \u201csense of balance and proportion\u201d, and it illustrates how many of the practices of modern life have put us at odds with the rest of nature.\u00a0 It sets out to show how this imbalance influences our lives for the worse.\u00a0 It tells the story of what the authors see as our disconnection from Nature and what this has contributed to the greatest crisis in human history.\u00a0 It argues that, if we seek balance in our actions, this will return us to a more considered, secure, comfortable and less polluted world.\u00a0 The key idea here, and in many of the other meanings, is mutually-beneficial co-existence.<\/p>\n

As we have seen, the word balance<\/em> features a lot in the Prince\u2019s book, but balance and harmony are not the same thing. \u00a0Balance is one of those words that everyone says they understand, when perhaps their grasp is shakey. \u00a0What image comes to mind when balance is mentioned? \u00a0Is it a see saw? \u00a0Or a pair of old-fashioned weighing scales where you put the weights on one side and an object to be weighed on the other? \u00a0\u00a0We need an intuitive understanding of Newton's gravitational theory to make sense of them.<\/p>\n

But the idea of a balanced diet is quite different, and is closer to the sort of balance that the Prince of Wales is writing about. \u00a0Understanding the idea of a balanced diet requires a theory of nutrition which allows you to know what to include in a diet, and in what proportion. \u00a0So what sort of theory do you need if you are to promote \u201charmony with nature\u201d in order to achieve the UN\u2019s \u201cjust balance among the economic, social and environmental needs of present and future generations\u201d.\u00a0 \u00a0The UN doesn\u2019t say.<\/p>\n

But are we interested in harmony with nature, or within it?\u00a0 The first sees humans separate from nature; the second part of it.\u00a0This second idea, harmony within nature, might be useful as a political philosophy that seeks to protect the biosphere from the hubris of humans, but it does not describe nature itself where you see inequality, competition, violence and death playing out all the time.\u00a0 There may be lots of examples within nature of mutually-beneficial co-existence, and we might want to draw on this to inform our own philosophy and politics, but you can never fully escape the other metaphor of nature\u2019s being red in tooth and claw.<\/p>\n

In a Guardian review<\/a> of Harmony<\/em>, Terry Eagleton argued that the book\u2019s unifying thread is \u201cthe need to abandon a soulless modernity for a traditional spirituality.\u201d\u00a0 In other words, this isn\u2019t a question of acting or behaving differently, but about thinking differently; that the biggest problem we have is how we look at, and see, the world.\u00a0 Harmony <\/em>argues that we should look at it like we used to, when we had a worldview that saw humanity as a part of nature.\u00a0 Now, modernism and the enlightenment have separated both us (and God) from nature.\u00a0 Whilst Harmony<\/em> argues that solutions to our various crises (climate change, poverty, species extinctions, etc) lie in regaining that balance with the world around us, what it doesn\u2019t do, is tell us how.\u00a0 That is because it cannot.<\/p>\n

All this takes us back to our default position of seeing harmony lying in our seeking to establish mutually-beneficial co-existence, not only with other humans, but with the rest of nature. \u00a0We might possible do this through nature-friendly policies, less exploitation of natural resources and wild places, living with a much smaller ecological footprint, and doing what we can to lessen our impact on other species, habitats and ecosystems.<\/p>\n

We might try to have a kind of binding contract with nature to bring all this about, and might envisage a United Species Organisation to police it.\u00a0 But this would be a one-sided negotiation \u2013 making a peace treaty with only one side at the negotiating table. \u00a0We might want to sign up, but nature surely wouldn't, even were it possible. \u00a0Nature is supremely indifferent to us, to human hopes and dreams, vanities and foibles, and hubris. \u00a0It may, one day, be our nemesis because fundamentally nature is not on our side. \u00a0We might remember that whenever we hear anyone speaking of harmony within nature as though it had any meaning.<\/p>\n

Dominic Lawson wrote in the Sunday Times recently that \"the ascent of humankind is nothing other than our triumph over the purposeless hostility of nature. \u00a0And the wonder of modern medicine \u2014 of which vaccines are the most glorious example \u2014 is the greatest tribute to our astonishing resourcefulness as a species. \u00a0To deny it is to be anti-human.\" \u00a0Is there, I wonder, just enough truth in these ideas for the Harmony Project to give them a place in any debate about putting nature at the heart of education?<\/p>\n

...............................................<\/p>\n

HRH Prince of Wales, Juniper T & Skelly I (2010). Harmony: A New Way of Looking at Our World<\/i>. London: HarperCollins\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Scott W & Vare P (2018) The World We'll Leave Behind<\/a>: grasping the sustainability challenge. London Routledge<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There was a webinar last night:\u00a0Teach the Future\u00a0meets the Harmony Project. \u00a0 The event was supposed to be looking at systems change in education, asking what an ideal education system looks like and how we can get there, but it...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":237,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7828","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment","category-news-and-updates"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7828","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/237"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7828"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7828\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7828"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7828"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7828"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}