Attraction or Compulsion

One of the more memorable metaphors Arnold Toynbee used in his A Study of History—to describe the differences between the early and late stages of a civilization—was the image of the Pied Piper on the one hand and the drill sergeant on the other. The Piper causes change by attraction, the sergeant by compulsion. A still-growing civilization is characterized by drawing to itself both an internal following, its own population, and an external one; the external populations wish to adopt its ways because they find them attractive.

Everything, of course, about the military nexus, signals compulsion. It is designed to move against the natural stream of things—thus to compel individuals to overcome their natural impulses in order to exert a directed force against an opponent, even at the cost of what is supposed to be our greatest good, life itself. Force is at the center of it, not least in those who must apply it. They must force themselves to act against internal resistance. The negative here rules.

By contrast the Piper and his seductive melodies simply attract, spontaneously, and all the action that follows is voluntary and pleasurable.

We find the Piper, stripped of all his pretty garb, sweet music in Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover, derived by logic from the sheer existence of motion and the old Greek’s view that nothing moves unless it’s moved—and hence, rejecting the possibility of an infinite regress, he projected, at the heart of movement, of whatever kind, the Unmoved Mover who moves everything, ultimately—by attraction.

That attraction can become compulsion is an assertion only true if we permit the meaning of the word, attraction, to change its meaning in the process. It never becomes compulsion because compulsion implies resistance.

Attraction is also at the root of true religion—whereas the hell and brimstone kind is its fake equivalent to compel social behavior. No true religion ever took root by force—and all those that would maintain themselves by force are mere compulsion; they are dressed in the Piper’s striped garments but are tone-deaf to the core.

Well to remember Toynbee’s contrast in assessing what keeps flooding all the lands.
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Image from Wikipedia Commons (link).