Harmony through Unity?

I saw this written on a shirt the other day and I about lost it. Call me pedantic...

That's pretty much the end of that thought. I still hate the saying regardless of whether it's pedantry though. "Harmony through unity" is the kind of Instagram-ready nonsense that people take up as a watch-cry they can mindlessly shout whenever someone disagrees with them, but that's not actually the reason I hate this so much. No, that's mainly down to it not making sense.

See, some idiot somewhere went to design a bloody t-shirt and thought to themselves "let's see, something generic about unity... as in people in harmony? Sure, why not." They pondered on the concept for all of three seconds, made the assumption that harmony and unity are synonyms based on I'm guessing a third-grade equivalent education, and printed the shirt, called it a day. But as you may have guessed already, they were WRONG! Harmony and unity are NOT synonyms!

Harmonized vocals and unified outfits. These guys get the difference.

Can they mean similar things in some contexts? Sure. But there's a very clear difference in their meanings. Harmony is taking disparate things and making them work well together, such as melding different accounts of the same events, or as was the original intent, melding different musical statements in a pleasing manner. Unity is similarly focused on multiple things blending together, but the blending happens because they're all the same. Such as pulling together a group of people who agree exactly on a topic, or back to music, synchronizing several musical statements so they're all playing the same thing.

So what's the issue here? Frankly, if you have unity it's impossible to have harmony. If you unify your points of view, they can't blend harmoniously. If you have all of your instruments playing in unison, that results in a complete and utter loss of harmony. Simply put it's impossible to achieve harmony through unity, because if you're really unified harmony is, well... no longer possible.

Now you could flip this to "unity through harmony" and make an argument for it. A group of people who blend their worldviews harmoniously could be said to be unified, because the definition of "unified" is somewhat more broad. But you don't get harmony from everyone being the same.

You get harmony when people aren't unified but decide they want to make it work anyway. Which is work, I'll grant you, but also way more inspiring when you really think about it.