Impetus for action can come from compulsion or persuasion. Compulsions come from outside forces steering us to do some things or avoid others. The real or implied threats if we do not conform is legal action involving punishments at various levels up to death, or responses from peers of shunning or physical harm.
Persuasion focuses on interior motivations and tries to guide a person to behave in a certain way. We are bombarded by motivational messages of all kinds that direct our thoughts and actions. Politicians spend billions of dollars during election cycles to get us to vote for them and their party. Influencers fill the media with recommendations regarding the choices we make. Religious leaders exert considerable influence over their followers with both threats of hell and promises of heaven.
We are caught between forces of external compulsion and interior persuasion. That occasionally feels like being caught in a vice between the moral and immoral, legal requirements and conscience, patriotism and faith, our wants and needs, or ourselves and others. Reinhold Niebuhr wrote a book about the tension of moral man in immoral society. An individual tends to lean more to being moral than groups.
Religious teachings can be in the form of compulsion or persuasion and assume authority for followers. Teachings can be either positive and contribute to wellbeing of individual and society (which some religious people refer to as salvation) or detrimental to those goals.
I agree with one passage in the Koran that states, ‘There can be no compulsion in religion’ (Surah 2, 256). You might be surprised to learn that the statement is in the Koran or that I agree with it. An understanding of the statement requires the interpretation of the context and its foundation in predestination. My understanding and agreement are based on the necessity of freedom of individual in matters of what is true to believe and what is good to do. Freedom requires persuasion and internal motivations.
The founders of the American experiment of democracy realized that written laws and compulsion are necessary but not sufficient to govern a free society. If a majority decide to break a law (for example, speed limits or drug use) lawlessness will prevail. External compulsion might slow but will not defeat lawbreakers. Our founding documents enshrined the double emphasis on non-establishment of religion, but freedom of religion and other civic voices to teach morality. They did not establish civic religion, but they did encourage civic morality. Freedom and internal motivations that transcend external compulsions are essential in a free society.
A key to freedom is good education. Establishment of schools and colleges was an early movement in our country. Liberal arts colleges were at the top of the educational undertaking because they believed liberal arts impart the skills of freedom. Those skills enabledindividuals to rule themselves and govern society.
Freedom is both the fertile soil and the product of a good education. Both are difficult to preserve in our current social and political context. The constant pressures on teachers are to indoctrinate students to hold or profess the dogmas of a presumed majority. The only reason to preserve academic freedom for teachers and professors is to assure freedom for their students to think for themselves in the best of intellectual company.
Think of the difference of playing music and making music. Inadequate teaching leads to only reproducing the notes dictated by the sheet music. Making music as old timey musicians called it, as experienced in some jazz improvisations, or as in inspired performances is an analogy of making music.
We would be wise to discern the appropriate relation of compulsion and persuasion in determining our actions so we can be free citizens and moral individuals.
Raymond Brady Williams, Crawfordsville, LaFollette Distinguished Professor in the Humanities emeritus, contributed this guest column.
