Bass & Electric Guitars. Credit: Daniel Christensen

By Jon Moore:

Having discovered Nothing is What it Seems and A Cycle is not a Circle, we now move forward with the idea: Do What You Will But Do No Harm. In this part we will look at areas of society and culture where this has occurred. In Part IV we will see just what really happened.

Democracy. A fine word full of noble aspirations, we are told. The more of it the better. By extension anything that is democratising in nature must be good, or more probably, great. The industrialisation of guitar production is one such idea as following this event, music became democratised. Almost anyone, irrespective of talent, could now afford an instrument. Guitars were and are cheaper than cornets, oboes, french horns and bazoukis. As a result, a great upwelling of the proletarian talent was unleashed upon the western democracies in the twentieth century. Some good music was produced, I’ll not deny that, however once the instrument was electrified, we were and still are, subjected to not only poor quality music but also loud poor quality music. So doing what we will – expressing our musical aspirations – can be said to have, if not done no harm, at least done some good.

To take this a step further, modern child rearing ideas (you recall how fondly I feel about these from Part I) and the collapse in educational curricula, suggests we must encourage our children to follow their dreams no matter their innate ability nor talent. We have parents relentlessly selling their dreams to their children who, bless their innocence, know no better and waste their childhoods and adolescence in following the unrequited dreams of their parents.

The logic goes something like this: I wanted to be a rock star and was held back by the system, the man, my parents, siblings, poverty or any other convenient excuse. I’m sure this must be my child’s dream, after all, musical talent flows in the genes. I am doing them a favour by pushing them on the road to celebrity and riches. This logic is specious on so many levels and most individuals grow out of this parenting but some do not. At a recent soirée I was subjected to 40 somethings playing, only adequately, songs from the sixties. Now there must be a special place in hell for the self deluded who inflict this torture on others. Being the only sober person at the soirée probably heightened my displeasure but it was certainly not “doing no harm”. There were young and impressionable minds at this soirée who were taken in by the delicate, if off time tambourine playing.

To reinforce the democratising of music, in all probability, by chance, the development of the Walkman leading eventually to iThings now means it possible to bathe oneself in a continuous background of noise. Huxley had individuals pumped up on soma to disconnect them from the world, we have done it with music. At face value this seems a remarkable technological improvement over the gramophone or even the live concert. I wonder though, does this make for better people or even happier people? More likely it creates contented people. Unfortunately ‘contented’ is always linked to cows due to some excellent milk marketing by Nestles. Given the connection it might actually be quite accurate. A train carriage full of individuals, all in their own worlds travelling to wage slavery and back is not dissimilar to a herd of dairy cows lined up for milking at 4 in the morning, even if the farmer has slept in.

IVF and democratisation

We are also able to force mutually infertile pairs of individuals into reproductive “success” through IVF. On the surface this looks like a definite “Do what you will but do no harm” situation. Nature, though, has a reason for this mutual infertility, even if it doesn’t seem fair, right or proper to the individuals concerned. Yet even those who successfully reproduce seem to suffer harm over the cycles of the process. For those where this treatment is not successful, there is very definite harm suffered. Unfortunately the idea of do what you will appears to have evolved into do what I want and there can be no chance of failure or disappointment.

This idea of “I will do and have what I want when I want it” has some serious consequences, more of which shall be explored in Part IV. Yet, on balance, doing what I want provided I give some thought to the negative consequences seems a good thing. We are again trapped in the Pleistocene mindset that allowed us to successfully out-compete the other Homo species extant at the time. I know I was amazed to read at the age of fifteen about the Chinese idea of short term being 50 years. It is possible as a colonial culture we see the short term as twelve months because that was when the next supply ship would arrive. It is also possible given the unlikely survival of these colonies from their shaky starts we are still trapped in this thinking style.

Even the Chinese time frame may be insufficient for the Holocene. The short and the unusually warm nature of this period placed on top of our Pleistocene ways may be setting us up for trouble. Unfortunately some humans have gone to the other extreme and focused on the do no harm end of the scale. The so called precautionary principle is evidence of this. Taken to its logical conclusion a person would never get out of bed. The thinking seems to be: 1. As humans we are incapable of thinking about any other species but our own. 2. This is unfair to all other species and life on the planet. 3. The sooner we can remove humans from Nature the better.

This belies the fact every other species is incapable of thinking about any other. Life as expressed by Nature is not interested in things being “fair” and we are part of Nature. The answer would appear to your humble correspondent, to be somewhere in the middle. It takes a tremendous amount of energy and effort to think things through thoroughly. It places an individual outside the cultural norms of most societies. Remember what happed to Socrates. So what are we to do? In Part IV we will hopefully come up with some useful techniques as we explore the next step along the path to enlightenment: There are always unintended consequences!

Earth philosopher, organic farmer, family man, archaeologist and author, Jon is well-known in his hometown as a dispenser of independent, wide-ranging wisdom to anyone who will listen, an excellent raconteur and a regular imbiber of fine coffee. Already working on a number of related publication projects, Jon’s first book, Zen Druid will be available in August next year. Follow Jon’s latest venture at Living the Dream.

Tags: child rearing, democracy, humanity, Jon Moore, philosophy