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What Is Mo Tzu Against Music

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In Mo Tzu’s Against Music, the audience learns that music is ultimately harmful to society. He first starts out by saying that the responsibility of a benevolent man, or women, is to find ways to eliminate what is harmful to society. In addition to this, a benevolent man’s duty is not to just take his only interest and add it, but also make decisions based on the common good. For instance, many rulers and ministers may like music very much; however, it does not provide any benefit for the common man, thus people must stop making it. Moreover, Mo Tzu concluded that the common man should not pay taxes for something that only benefits a small proportion of the population. With this in mind, people might also note that Mo Tzu was expressing this …show more content…

After realizing this one can begin to understand the writing. Early on in Mo Tzu’s writing Against Music, he states that men cannot extract music naturally from the earth, such as iron ore, salt, sea water, etc., thus, in order to acquire music, it requires the government to collect taxes. Knowing this, he provokes him to argue that government should only collect taxes to produce goods or services that will benefit most members, if not all members, of society. For example, he mentions that if the government asks to for money from the people for boats or carts is it acceptable, Due to the fact that boats can be used on water, perhaps for fishing or trading merchandise, and carts can be used for helping the common man with his everyday work. In the same way, he states that if music did have benefit the common man, it would be perfectly suitable to go about producing—through the use of tax money, However, he expresses that music has not benefit for the common person. In fact, it does nothing to help end the three main struggles of humanity: shelter, clothing, food. Due to this, it is perfectly understandable why music, the government should not use public resources to produce music. One of the government’s main obligations, in any society, is to …show more content…

Later on in his writing, he states “music interferes with [the various duties of the world].” Then proceeds to claim that music will interfere with the affairs of the government because music will prevent people from appearing to court early, hearing suits, attending to government affairs, etc. If this is true, then music should be prohibited because nothing should be in the way of the running of the government because it may end in “the state [becoming] disordered.” Likewise, if Mo Tzi is right and music does affect different industries negatively then it should not be made. However, some people may try to refute this by stating that music makes people more productive: “Music is effective in raising efficiency” (Fox). However, all of these studies were done way after the time Mo Tzu’s time so we cannot apply them—society has changed, people have changed. Furthermore, based on the reading Against Music, it appears that the definition of music now is different from the one back then; Music back then involved dancing, eating, and drinking lots of alcohol. In order words, it was a more like an event, not an singular

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