It's been years since Kosshi was established as a form of training for myself. It was a way to craft my thoughts on Budo and set them out into the world.
Now, I feel like it's done its part. And it's been a great ride - helpful and insightful for me and hopefully a few others. But it's now time to concentrate on other things. If you'd like to keep up with me, you can check out my first published book, The Protector Ethic: Morality, Virtue, and Ethics in the Martial Way. And you can also follow me on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. You can also follow my dojo on Instagram @sgtidojo.
I'll leave Kosshi right here just in case anyone wants a read.
In the meantime, let's all "keep going!"
Best,
James
January 22, 2019
January 3, 2018
Under the Blade 2018
Shinnen Omedeto Gozaimasu!
2017 was a year of hard work and introspection for me personally. At the same time, the dojo and I trained diligently, gained some new students and friends, enjoyed our 18th annual Gasshuku, and had a rousing “forget the year” Bonenkai!
2018 is shaping up to be one of my most significant years ever. And there are two big reasons why. The first is the anniversary of my dojo—in 1998, I returned from Japan and founded the Bujinkan Shingitai-Ichi Dojo. What an auspicious time in that we just celebrated Hatsumi sensei’s 50th year anniversary of the founding of the Bujinkan Dojo Japan in 2017! It feels good to be in good company.
When I came home after training in Japan for nearly three years, I had no students and no prospects of acquiring any. But I had a name; a phrase that Hatsumi sensei himself had talked about earlier that year.
Shingitai-Ichi (心技体一致) is an embodiment of the moral-physical philosophy that is the martial way. More so, it’s a road map for training it. SHIN or “heart” refers to the moral essence of what makes martial arts relevant in this day and age—any day and age for that matter. GI, “technique,” refers to the refinement of strategic martial principles in constant flux. TAI, “body,” refers to reconciling our ethical bearing with martial tactics to keep one’s training and ability viable, or capable of preserving life. And I CHI, “harmonize,” refers to sustaining the anti-intuitive, almost paradoxical nature of martial arts with the equanimity one needs for life and times.
It has been a fantastic twenty years! I've met such incredible people (some of whom have been with me nearly the whole time!). I even met my wife because of training! So, I can say in earnest, I'm really looking forward to the next twenty! The second act is always the most intriguing!
The other reason I’m looking forward to 2018 is my first published work! The Protector Ethic: Morality, Virtue, and Ethics in the Martial Way releases on May 1, through YMAA Publication Center, and is available now for pre-order at Amazon.com!
The Protector Ethic
The Protector Ethic covers the moral-physical foundations of recognizing and embracing the “protector ethic”—the reason martial arts exist at all.
As a student and teacher of martial arts going on forty years, with a master’s degree in ethics from Loyola University Chicago, and holding a master instructor license for this ancient Japanese martial tradition, it is my contention that our personal ethics are more strongly rooted and thereby actionable when we habit our virtues through the physicality of martial training. This is perennially important because the fear of human conflict can lead to ethical nihilism.
People will tolerate dehumanizing cruelty, and as a general rule will give in and give up rather than defend themselves or others from attack, because the fear of conflict is a phobia.
Human nature will often contort itself just to avoid contact with its darker half—even ignore suffering and then lie about it afterward. This reality leads to ethical befuddlement as the seductive forces of moral relativism and ambivalence toward time-honored cultural values transforms that fear into phony virtues, like political correctness and voluntary victimhood.
But this kind of confused self-importance can cause us to shrink from the malevolence of this world, and in doing so we can actually appease evil by no longer prioritizing and protecting our universal values. Instead, we become willing to demean them through ignorance and dishonesty, which only coaches us toward the nihilistic ideals to hold contempt for the good and distrust for truth itself.
To combat this, I submit we must unlock the universal moral values intrinsic to our humanity, like the “protector ethic,” to stand up and defend ourselves and others who might not or cannot defend themselves.
It is developed by intuiting the principles of martial endeavor: honor, integrity, vigilance, and rectitude—nothing less than the immutable cardinal virtues backstopped by physical skills. Understanding the reciprocity of natural justice, temperance in our reasoning, and prudence in our judgment, provides, above all, the courage to act. This process begins when we ask ourselves a simple question: Why train?
Why Train?
Excerpts from The Protector Ethic:
Why train? is the single most important question that we can ask ourselves whether we are new and naïve to training or an old, grizzled veteran because it speaks to the connected tissue of the martial way itself and all of the myriad good reasons that intertwine our lives that we can identify and even some we cannot.
My hope is that I shed some light upon the trail of martial training that can sometimes become as unclear as the martial way itself. If you’d like some waypoints in figuring out your own sense of obligation, your own “ought,” pre-order a copy of The Protector Ethic.
Theme for 2018
The training theme of the Shingitai-Ichi Dojo will not only follow the themes laid out for us by Hatsumi sensei in 2018, but will also dive deeply into the “confront & subdue” context of taking the fight to those that would provide threat.
I’m calling this theme, “Undo the enemy” since it deals with taking a fight to an enemy preemptively, and placing ourselves in harm’s way to “undo” threats and overcome them accordingly.
Learning to do so is going to involve hard training, self-risk, and with that risk, the building of courage. And here is where I’ll end with another excerpt from The Protector Ethic that seems to say exactly what I mean here:
Have an inspired 2018!
~James
2017 was a year of hard work and introspection for me personally. At the same time, the dojo and I trained diligently, gained some new students and friends, enjoyed our 18th annual Gasshuku, and had a rousing “forget the year” Bonenkai!
2018 is shaping up to be one of my most significant years ever. And there are two big reasons why. The first is the anniversary of my dojo—in 1998, I returned from Japan and founded the Bujinkan Shingitai-Ichi Dojo. What an auspicious time in that we just celebrated Hatsumi sensei’s 50th year anniversary of the founding of the Bujinkan Dojo Japan in 2017! It feels good to be in good company.
When I came home after training in Japan for nearly three years, I had no students and no prospects of acquiring any. But I had a name; a phrase that Hatsumi sensei himself had talked about earlier that year.
Shingitai-Ichi (心技体一致) is an embodiment of the moral-physical philosophy that is the martial way. More so, it’s a road map for training it. SHIN or “heart” refers to the moral essence of what makes martial arts relevant in this day and age—any day and age for that matter. GI, “technique,” refers to the refinement of strategic martial principles in constant flux. TAI, “body,” refers to reconciling our ethical bearing with martial tactics to keep one’s training and ability viable, or capable of preserving life. And I CHI, “harmonize,” refers to sustaining the anti-intuitive, almost paradoxical nature of martial arts with the equanimity one needs for life and times.
It has been a fantastic twenty years! I've met such incredible people (some of whom have been with me nearly the whole time!). I even met my wife because of training! So, I can say in earnest, I'm really looking forward to the next twenty! The second act is always the most intriguing!
The other reason I’m looking forward to 2018 is my first published work! The Protector Ethic: Morality, Virtue, and Ethics in the Martial Way releases on May 1, through YMAA Publication Center, and is available now for pre-order at Amazon.com!
The Protector Ethic
 |
| Pre-Order on Amazon.com |
As a student and teacher of martial arts going on forty years, with a master’s degree in ethics from Loyola University Chicago, and holding a master instructor license for this ancient Japanese martial tradition, it is my contention that our personal ethics are more strongly rooted and thereby actionable when we habit our virtues through the physicality of martial training. This is perennially important because the fear of human conflict can lead to ethical nihilism.
People will tolerate dehumanizing cruelty, and as a general rule will give in and give up rather than defend themselves or others from attack, because the fear of conflict is a phobia.
Human nature will often contort itself just to avoid contact with its darker half—even ignore suffering and then lie about it afterward. This reality leads to ethical befuddlement as the seductive forces of moral relativism and ambivalence toward time-honored cultural values transforms that fear into phony virtues, like political correctness and voluntary victimhood.
But this kind of confused self-importance can cause us to shrink from the malevolence of this world, and in doing so we can actually appease evil by no longer prioritizing and protecting our universal values. Instead, we become willing to demean them through ignorance and dishonesty, which only coaches us toward the nihilistic ideals to hold contempt for the good and distrust for truth itself.
To combat this, I submit we must unlock the universal moral values intrinsic to our humanity, like the “protector ethic,” to stand up and defend ourselves and others who might not or cannot defend themselves.
It is developed by intuiting the principles of martial endeavor: honor, integrity, vigilance, and rectitude—nothing less than the immutable cardinal virtues backstopped by physical skills. Understanding the reciprocity of natural justice, temperance in our reasoning, and prudence in our judgment, provides, above all, the courage to act. This process begins when we ask ourselves a simple question: Why train?
Why Train?
Excerpts from The Protector Ethic:
“People come to the martial way for all kinds of reasons, some of them good, most of them not good enough. Others have watched too many action movies. A select few seek the supernatural, working hard to sound just like the gongfu master’s master whenever they open their mouths, which is often, far too often. Deceit is at its worst when we believe our own lies, so avoid those who talk like Yoda and move like Jabba.
It took years for my own temperament to change, but that’s not just my story; it’s the life cycle of any serious martial artist. To break the mold of the form and enter the fray of the formless, where the real training takes place, you have to give up looking for answers. Only then can you do what must be done: ask better questions. You have to. Skills like exceptional punching and kicking only improves further once you understand and articulate an ethos for it. So you start with the question most avoid asking because they have a less-than-inspiring answer or, worse, none at all: Why?
Why am I doing this?
Why should I learn any of this stuff?
Why train?
Logic and reasoning can lead that inquiry. Other times a simple story convinces in a way argument cannot. Isn’t clarity the point? In fact, clear thinking on big questions begets bigger ones, like resolving right from wrong, deciding action from obligation, and facing up to the musts, oughts, and shoulds. If we’re going to use our bodies as weapons, and weapons as weapons, we’d better train our minds to discern wisdom from knowledge so we can act in the right way at the right time. Do this and avoid the worst possible fate, the one where we’re too late to make any difference.”
Why train? is the single most important question that we can ask ourselves whether we are new and naïve to training or an old, grizzled veteran because it speaks to the connected tissue of the martial way itself and all of the myriad good reasons that intertwine our lives that we can identify and even some we cannot.
“Imagine training the chest-compression and breathing techniques of CPR but divorced from their purpose of saving lives. Without their purpose, why learn them? What’s the point of the skill if we’re training ourselves to be incapable of recognizing when it ought to be applied? In fact, without that “ought,” that sense of obligation, what makes it at all necessary?
Some years ago I traveled to the West Coast for training at a weekend event. During one of the segments, I was called to the front to physically defend a fellow who was to be attacked. Now, I was a highly adept martial artist who’d been training since I was a kid, and I’d even lived in Japan for several years, getting my butt kicked by the very best teachers of my art. I was little concerned about defending anybody from anybody because I knew something the attacker did not: I was about to attack the hell out of him.
The moment my protectee was threatened, I leaped into action with more than twenty years of expertise to thwart the assault. I remember feeling pretty satisfied as I loomed over the aggressor, now facedown in the dirt and dust, and twisted him into an airtight submission. I was proud of myself—I’d been called out before a crowd of my peers, so my aim was to impress, and I was pretty sure I had. I remember that moment as well as I remember the next: turning to confirm the safety of my protectee, only I couldn’t find him. He’d been silently nabbed by an unknown second attacker. Cue the laugh track for this fool.
A teacher, mentor, and friend, Jack Hoban, arranged the fiasco. He had nothing against me; he was simply taking advantage of the chance to teach a larger lesson. And I have never forgotten that lesson. It laid bare the one thing no professional ever wants to admit he possesses: a weakness he wasn’t even aware he had. My confidence to serve up skill lacked the one thing truly necessary for right action: clarity of what I ought to do. My job, my role, in that moment was not about attacking an attacker. It was about defending someone, about safeguarding his life. It was about being a protector.
After all my years of training and experience, you might think I should have already known this, that it would be second nature, a given. It was not. And it is not for many other professionals. In that crucial moment, I was convinced I was doing the right thing, but I was wrong. I was confused. And I failed. Instead of being a protector, I behaved like a thug.
No one trains martial arts to get worse at martial arts. No one trains to gain less understanding and ability. Everyone trains to get better, gain comprehension, and enlighten themselves. Even weirdos dressed as Power Rangers who flood the net with claims of secret training from Master Cucamonga believe this through the fog of their own self-importance. In fact, it is this unanimous motivation to gain proficiency that’s translated into the variety of reasons folks train in martial arts. But real proficiency is contingent on a central truth: it must protect and defend a clear sense of obligation. It must know its ought.”
My hope is that I shed some light upon the trail of martial training that can sometimes become as unclear as the martial way itself. If you’d like some waypoints in figuring out your own sense of obligation, your own “ought,” pre-order a copy of The Protector Ethic.
Theme for 2018
The training theme of the Shingitai-Ichi Dojo will not only follow the themes laid out for us by Hatsumi sensei in 2018, but will also dive deeply into the “confront & subdue” context of taking the fight to those that would provide threat.
I’m calling this theme, “Undo the enemy” since it deals with taking a fight to an enemy preemptively, and placing ourselves in harm’s way to “undo” threats and overcome them accordingly.
Learning to do so is going to involve hard training, self-risk, and with that risk, the building of courage. And here is where I’ll end with another excerpt from The Protector Ethic that seems to say exactly what I mean here:
“I have a saying: good people who want to be better people get trained. One of the best ways to become someone who can do more for oneself and others is to train to be more martially able, because there is no better metric for one’s improvement than the ability to mitigate both inward and outward conflict.
This is why every individual ought to endure martial training for some period, if only to reveal the profound ability its skills and philosophy have to empower our sense of self-worth. The protector ethic, to stand up and defend ourselves and others who might not or cannot defend themselves, is a habit-formed behavior. Carrying out this ethic is the heart of any martial art.
Knowing we should do this, and knowing how to accomplish it, is the difference between accruing mere skill for reenactment and cultivating life-protecting habits. Should we learn the movements of CPR but devoid of their purpose? A sharper understanding of what is valuable affords acute mindfulness of what is moral—what we know we ought to protect. It provides recognition of and clarity regarding our obligations, and training becomes the direct action of our ethic.
But when we, as this time’s undaunted defenders, neoteric teachers, and persevering guardians of this path, supplant this truth, we get confused: rather than training techniques to protect and defend life, we train a life to protect and defend techniques.
If we are to do right by those in conflict, including ourselves, we must know that which unlocks the universal. We must apprentice in honor, integrity, vigilance, and rectitude as the keys to steadfast warriorship. This is nothing less than recognizing the reciprocity of natural justice, instilling temperance in our reasoning, and exhibiting prudence in our judgment, so we can, above all, have the courage to act. These cardinal virtues, at least as old as the Greek Stoics, make for the best map to the protector ethic because if we define ethics as moral values in action, then martial ethics are moral protector values in action.
To pass on real knowledge and deliver it as wisdom, to teach the tactical and perceive the ethical, to be exposed to our naturally binding obligations and by them hold fidelity to their truth so that the next generation might protect and defend themselves and their families—I’d argue that’s nothing short of God’s work.
If we are to fulfill this role, we must hold firm to this certainty: the martial way only lives once we treat it as something that can die.”
Have an inspired 2018!
~James
February 13, 2017
Under the Blade 2017
Shinnen Omedeto Gozaimasu!
Happy New Year!
Is it too late to say this? Perhaps. I’ve
been hard at work on the new book, so I haven’t had much time. But the draft is
in to the editor now, so I can take a break from writing that to write
this.
2016 was a great year for the dojo! We got
new students, new digs, had great events, including our 17th annual Gasshuku
with a record turnout! And we went back to Japan with a crew in tow! Hell
of a time. The best part of the trip was our four new Godans! Great
stuff.
2017 is shaping up nicely. The biggest
news is the impending book. It looks like by the end of this year, you’ll be
able to walk into your local bookstore and pick up a copy. I don’t have all the
details yet—I can’t even release the title—as there’s still a lot of work to be
done. Wish me luck.
Theme for 2017
Last year’s training theme had to do with
basics from the outside inward. This included all the principles of
positioning, leverage, and initiative and how we could look at them through the
lens of fundamental movements. This year, the theme remains, only we’ll be
seeking the basics from the inside out. This will still include study of the
principles, but from the standpoint of alignment, posture, and kamae.
In our theme for internal basics, I’d also
like to make room for some internal ethics. I’d like to offer a starting place
for our ethical concerns that run tandem with our physical training – you can’t
have one without the other and think yourself successful at either.
My thoughts here for a basic ethic in 2017
is be honorable.
Subjective Subjects
It is an immeasurably polarized time. I
wish I could say it’s all due to a nasty Star Wars vs Star Trek debate America had
with itself after it got drunk and stayed up too late, but folks paying
attention know that isn’t true. It’s far more consequential than that.
Growing up, I can’t remember when our
politics and values were so divided. The reason for the division is simple: subjectivity is
overwhelming universal values. That’s it. If you don’t know what “subjectivity”
is, don’t fret, actually you do, I’m just being fancy.
It’s basically this: folks are placing
their politics above their ethics.
Politics are completely subjective, like a
lunch you order on a Thursday. Who you voted for, if you voted at all, is your
business and not up for debate. Do citizens have a duty to vote? Nope. None at
all. And that’s a good thing in a country that ranks your liberty alongside
your pursuit of happiness. That’s the beauty of subjectivity – caring only as
much as you want to care.
But ethics are not subjective, they’re
objective - no one gets by without them. Literally everything you say and do,
how you say and do it, and who it all affects is manifest in everyone’s life.
How you treat yourself and others is a direct result of you as MVP of your
ethical game. And if you’re alive, you’re playing that game with the rest of
us, whether you like it or not.
America’s Congressional votes over the
last 50 years is a telling reminder that this subjective vs objective game is
nothing new, it’s been played for years. The Washington Post published visual
diagrams of the votes from 1949 through today and they’re stunning. Flipping through them
quickly gives the appearance of mitosis cell division, when one whole becomes
two distinct halves of red and blue.
But those beliefs are now too often challenged when so many make their mark by directly undermining that cultural narrative, whether that’s through extreme examples of collectivism or individualism. And unfortunately, this subjectivity is rearing itself all over the damn place like a friend who needed a place to crash for a few days and now its four months later.
Our media, social and otherwise, is now delivered to us as crafted outrage, like any potter shapes clay. Our righteousness is stoked from being told that justice is upside down in the world. But the world is now so interconnected we’re actually over-connected, as everyone is in everyone else’s business, which seems to beg our opinion about what everyone else is doing.
Unfashionable actions taken by regular folks are now caught on video to explode around the world and ruin lives. A lesson learned can no longer be a personal experience – it’s the end of you. Now that online clicks have been monetized, the world becomes a stage for documenting and inciting indignation and folks can literally strike it rich off the golden veins of others’ misery.
Contrarian protest is now a goddamn sacrament, even when its aims are aimless or contradictory, like those squelching free speech to protect free speech. To listen to some of these folks explain themselves comes off like kids explaining stuff in their patented un-punctuated, rambling incoherence. I can barely gather from them that if you’re not protesting then you don’t #care, and if you don’t #care then you #don’tmatter. Or something.
There is a palpable sense that our private lives are under siege, especially when what we intimately believe is smugly proclaimed to be unpopular and old-fashioned by nihilists, who have proudly proclaimed to have given up unpopular and old-fashioned beliefs like good and bad, and right and wrong.
Perhaps the only thing to be done is abandon social media entirely, leaving loudmouths loudmouthing to empty seats. Surely this will become more popular as outrage tires us physically, drains us psychically, and leaves us spiritually hollow.
Ethics Before Politics
On Jon Stewart’s Daily Show, just days after two armed, militant, and murderous Islamists were killed by Sheriffs when they stormed a “Draw the Prophet Mohammed” contest in Texas, the comedian said one of the few things that I have ever agreed with him on:
It is not okay to shoot other people because you are offended by what they draw. Even if they drew it to offend you. No shooting of them. Never okay … You cannot shoot people because you don’t share their opinions. You cannot shoot people even if they offend you … Not even if those people specifically set out to provoke you. Responding to cartoons, or words, or ideas with violence is wrong … The violence just perpetuates the fear.
I especially liked his opener, “I can’t
believe we have to reiterate this.” Indeed. I can’t believe it either. But here
we are.
To this end, if you’re someone who’s
easily offended by what others have to say politically, to the point where you
take physical action to stop them from saying it, like protesting to destroy people
or property, you are placing politics above ethics – you’re placing your
feelings above the lives of others.
It’s a shitty thing to do and indicates
that you are a lousy person, who clearly doesn’t get it. My advice is to cut it
out before someone, bigger and stronger than you, places their ethic above your
politic.
Stop placing politics above ethics. Here’s how: 1. Be honest.
2. Seek truth.
3. Clarify and Resolve
4. Hold yourself accountable.
5. Stop dehumanizing.
Be Honest: Stop ignoring what is obviously the case, and worse, stop lying to others about it. Willful ignorance and worse, intellectual dishonesty, turn you into a fool or a fraud. Don’t be either.
Seek Truth: Once you decide to be honest, it becomes easier to seek truth, which is usually somewhere in the middle. Do you trust your side to be honest with you? You shouldn’t. Their talking points are scripted to keep you glued to them, which generally means keeping you outraged. In our dojo we have a saying, “When in doubt, make it harder.” If you’re a true believer in your agenda, because you think it better, righter, and truer, then you should challenge your agenda to make sure it really is. Listen to the best arguments from the other side. Do not trust your side to give the best of the other, be a big boy and go over there and hear and read it from them. It’s called making up your own damn mind and it’s a great habit. You may just learn something about yourself.
Clarify and Resolve: give your opinion only when and if it helps to clarify and resolve conflict. For some perspective on this, leave social media for a time – a day, a week, a month. You’ll be glad you did and be surprised upon return with the vitriol after cutting it from your diet. Then, if piping up in conversation, online or in real life, helps clarify a perspective or point, great. Pipe away. But if you’re someone who just spits gas on a garbage fire because you like the taste of gas and the smell of burning garbage, because you’re a garbage troll who lives under a bridge in a dump full of garbage with plenty of gas, you should quit training because you’re a shitty person and shitty people don’t deserve to train.
Hold Yourself Accountable: if you’ve been consistently lied to by some media outlet, you should stop listening to them. If you’ve made things worse by your words, or your actions, you should apologize and then think twice, thrice, or frice, if you plan on doing it again. If you take part in a peaceful protest and it gets un-peaceful and blocks traffic to illegally detain people, or devolves into a riot, you should leave. You should not support financially or morally threats of violence, which is exactly what illegally detaining people implies, or any violence whatever against property or people, even if you think you’re really, really right. You aren’t. Cops have enough to deal with in a peaceful protest, let alone an un-peaceful one. And with you sticking around Instrgramming, you are endangering their lives because they have no idea if you mean them harm or not, so you become just one more element in a host of others elements they have to account for to protect themselves and others. Stop putting your politics above your ethics because this is exactly what you believe others are doing to you. Want to make the world a better place today? Start with yourself.
Stop Dehumanizing: this is easily first, but I thought I’d end on it. Stop demonizing the other side. Stop calling them evil. Stop calling them sub-human. Stop calling them Nazis, racists, or fascists if they are clearly not those things and here’s a hint: most of the time they are not. They are folks, just like you, who are impassioned about what they believe, even if you think that what they believe is fundamentally flawed (it may be). Our emotions can get the best of us, though the best of us do not let their emotions do that – and you shouldn’t either.
The Ties That Bind Us
Recently, I was counseling a friend,
troubled because he felt some of his students were not clear thinking, holding
beliefs and propagating values that he felt were antithetical to training
itself. I reminded him to not be so sincere. No teacher should endeavor to make
certain that every student sees the world like they do. Or that everyone is as
comprehensive in their views as we might believe we are. Good people regularly
live with contradictions in their beliefs. But this isn’t something we should
be overly concerned about and there’s a good reason why: as martial artists we
share far more together than we may think we do.
To some extent he was on to something
because martial training takes certain things for granted. For instance: life
has value and meaning. And that value and meaning is unequivocal - it is the
normative source of all the concerns we might have in navigating the world,
including decisions regarding morals and ethics. And when that compass needle
deviates, even one degree, from that magnetic North, everything gets fucked up
and confusing. All people who train and endeavor to train must understand at
least on some basic level that life is worth protecting. If they did not think
this, why train physically to protect it?
The concern here is that there is no
shortage of subjectivity because when these relative concerns supersede
universal ones we’re left with contradictions that stoke conflict.
Take freedom and equality - two mutually
exclusive concepts that protect each other, as our founders discovered. Equality
means our lives are of equal value and demand and deserve respect. This universal
value means no one has the right to take advantage, harm, or kill us for their
own subjective beliefs, like someone who tramples you to get their lunch order
in first. Freedom is the liberty to pursue whichever subjective beliefs, like
lunch orders or politics, we find valuable, provided they do not violate our equality.
These concepts complement each other and make America, America, and not North
Korea. They share a nice balance because their purpose is contingent upon such
balance.
But re-define equality from life, to
"outcome," a subjective economic concern in which everyone must
receive the same results, no matter what they want, who they want it from, or
what values they conflict with, we wind up out of balance and lose our
freedom. Re-define equality from an objective to a subjective value and it is
no longer compatible with freedom. It causes conflict because economically
defined equality infringes on liberty - folks cannot side with their values
when they conflict with other people’s values.
If you think a devout Christian should be
coerced by force of law to disregard their beliefs to take part in events
antithetical to their value system, I hope you’re consistent enough to agree
that a devout atheist, or a devout humanist, or a devout Muslim should be
coerced by that same law to take part in events that are antithetical to their
beliefs. Equality of outcome means uniform results, which means tossing that First
Amendment right to free association (or dis-association) because our freedom to
value and believe as we see fit is now outlawed.
Without equality defined objectively, we
cannot enjoy our subjective freedom. And when a state sponsored entity compels us
through force to do something antithetical to our values—values that are not in
violation of our equality—then we are being taken advantage of. And if we are
being taken advantage of, we are not being treated as equal human beings. This
is where justice is flipped on its head to serve the “just-us” subjectivists.
Honor the Honorable
Actual justice, applied virtuously and impartially, begets the righteousness that aspires toward a moral resolution because it preserves the universal values for all involved, not just the few under conflict. When Republican president Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, legally freeing slaves held in the Confederate states at the height of America’s Civil War, it was a long overdue act of righteous justice precisely because it reaffirmed dignity for their lives—and dignity for life itself—overruling any slave’s institutionalized dehumanizing station, one that had for generations been societally established as moral and just.
Recognition of worth for the
innocents/innocence among us, resolves any question of worth for all of us. In
this way authentic justice stands in direct opposition to subjectivity and its
claims to morality, which only drains justice of its force.
The voracious nature of human need for
morality, equity, and righteousness, exposed by our miserable misfires at them,
doubles down on the importance for martial artists, warriors, and protectors,
and anyone who deals with conflict, to know natural justice as a virtue, so as
to best understand the essence of the moral-physical philosophies that both
guide and bind us.
All the questions we might have about
whether people are equal to each other, whether we should treat each other
fairly, how we should understand each other, come down to the warrant of our
argument – does it respect life? If so, then we can articulate the right
reasons, enact the right policies, invoke the right rights, value the right
morals, and act on the right ethics, all because we’re dialed in to true
justice. Everything hinges on it.
The martial way is simply a physical
extension of our Natural Law, that sense that life ought to be protected. No
matter where you stand politically, or what your beliefs are, if you embrace this
“protector ethic,” then you embrace the idea that your life is worth protecting,
and if it’s worth protecting, it’s worth defending physically, if
necessary.
So no matter how far you believe a person
with the opposite set of beliefs or politics stands from you, if you both agree
on the protector ethic, then you are not as far away from them, or they from
you, as you might think.
Celebrate this. Revel in it - universals always
dispel the small-minded. We can squabble over the details, but the big stuff
that binds us should always come first. Strengthen your ties to others by treating
them by what you know is the truth.
When we recognize this, we are better able
to feel where honor comes from. Constancy in acting upon this makes one
honorable.
Here’s to a prosperous 2017!
~James
July 17, 2016
A Tomato in Fruit Salad?
https://www.facebook.com/james.morganelli.7/posts/10154349514554771
This is reenactment. I do not believe there are many, if not all bujinkan practioners, who wouldn't walk away from an actual warrior training session in the SCA, bruised and shaking their heads. European martial arts are alive and well, through the SCA, the difference is, these warriors put their martial skills to the test on a regular basis. There is also something wrong with them, they like to get hit with 1 1/4" rattan, once you get hit by it a couple of times, you become desensitized to confrontation. Its funny you posted this. I was just thinking, I need to take the martial skills I've learned in the bujinkan and put them to the test in the SCA. I can think of no better way to test the legitimacy of what I've learned in the bujinkan, but I'm scared to be truthful. Thes guys are savages, when it comes to trying to one up them with martial skills learned somewhere else! I have no doubt, I would leave bruised and bleeding, for some time. And, I'm gettin' old, I bruise and bleed to easy. Hope you are well James. Thanks for the article, if anything else, it provoked a lingering thought in me!
Hi Sean,
Thanks for your thoughts.
Take this post, for instance. I didn’t mean for it to be public. I normally have discussions only with people that I know and train with regularly. In doing so, it changes the manner and gravity of one’s thinking and responses for the better, because I never post anything I would not be willing to say face-to-face or stand up for after the fact. Since I don’t know you, train with you regularly, or have any understanding of your relative ability and experience, I’m simply going to post my thoughts and leave it at that.
Nowadays (my editor hates when I use this word, but I’ll use it anyway because it really is true), in our world, and our nation at the moment, but especially in martial arts, it is becoming more and more difficult to identify wisdom from knowledge. In other words, people confuse the one for the other – they confuse the knowing of something for the wisdom it may impart, as if mere existence is the only evidence necessary for its efficacy. This is to suggest that all knowledge is wise, but is actually a devaluation of wisdom. Why this is happening is certainly attributable to the connectivity and speed with with we can know stuff, all kinds of stuff, which can lead to a superficial understanding of it.
However, as anyone who knows the difference between the fact that a tomato is technically a fruit and its actual usage as a food, they avoid placing it into a fruit salad. In the devaluing of wisdom, today’s thinking would have us throw Heirloom tomatoes into a bowel with the various berries, pineapple, oranges, and slices of kiwi because of “knowing” it is a fruit. History and experience (and taste) notwithstanding.
We arrive at wisdom in the martial way when we can apply knowledge, whatever it may be, ethically. That’s how we know the difference. If you are really serious in training the martial way, and for the reasons I suspect you train it, you have to be honest about the answer to this question: are you training techniques to protect and defend life or are training a life to protect and defend techniques? In other words, are you training as a means to an end - the survival/sustainment of life - or as an end in itself - to be “good” at “martial arts”? Context matters. One is not the other. One is wise. The other is knowledgeable. And much like we might marvel at the size of the rising moon and its seeming proximity, the difference between these points is so vast it is often overlooked.
I watched this clip and thought it was interesting and funny. You seem to think it is a manner to best test martial skills. Which skills exactly, I can’t imagine. It’s a game. A roughhousing one played on a field that uses rattan with a crazy amount of flex, padded swords, and plastic armor. Under those conditions, none of that stuff moves or is used in any manner even remotely close to what it is intended to model. But it has to be that way because it’s a game – if any of those tools were even tenuously accurate, people would die.
If you buy into the notion that rough training here equals best training practices, then carry it to its logical conclusion. But crash-up derby does not provide the best training to test one’s defensive driving skills for everyday life any more than slicing open an artery best tests the dexterity of one’s medical and tourniquet skills under stress. There’s a martial arts group that dedicates a good portion of their training time to kicking each other in the nuts, to, you know, toughen them up, or something. Seems backward to me. Perhaps that time would be better spent habit-forming the avoidance of such an attack. And why? Because when you sack your sack, lump your junk, and Bronson your Johnson, it has nothing to do with best practices intended to acclimate and habituate one to viable and sustainable outcomes in life and death conflict. It’s just weird.
There are folks who think that BJJ is the best way to test groundfighting, Judo the best way to test throwing, and Kendo the best way to test swordfighting. But to what end? For viability in the martial way to protect and defend life (an imminently ethical concern), I disagree on all counts. Again, knowledge itself is not wisdom.
BJJ is best for tournament groundfighting, Judo best for tournament throwing, and Kendo best for tournament Kendo because the manner of their training habituates them to perceive and utilize their techniques under those ideal, tournament, conditions. That’s because Judoka don’t have to worry about getting stabbed by a used needle from a methhead in regular training, BJJitsuka don’t have to worry about multiple attackers beating their skull in with a bat in regular training, and Kendoka don’t have to worry about their sword bending or breaking when they clash in regular training. If they did, if every iteration of their training concerned these aspects, if the very notion of their training was embedded and infused with such possibilities, their training as we know it today could not be their training because the idealism with which it is carried out cannot exist in a world with methheads and their needles, multiple opponents and their bats, and swords that bend and break on impact.
None of their training would exist, because none if it could exist under the context of surviving and sustaining, protecting and defending life. It only ever exists under idyllic conditions - variable threats of the world be damned. Imagine a baseball player training to hit a fast pitch, and then trying to do the same while concerning himself with the potentiality that the umpire, or the catcher, or both will set upon him with stabbing weapons until he dies. If that possibility were an actual part of baseball proper, you wouldn’t see baseball anymore, as it would morph into a life-protecting endeavor completely different from the original.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not talking down any of these arts. I have great respect for them and the level of skill and athleticism they require. All these arts and even the gamesmanship above can be fun and exciting and provide worthwhile time spent with likeminded others for a plethora of good reasons. But one of those reasons is not reliance upon them for the betterment of warrior arts - the context is different. And when we assume the context is the same, because some of the techniques are, we wind up confused. We wind up with a bunch of shit. There’s a reason Michael Jordan didn’t cut it as a baseball player after he retired from basketball. As wise as he was in the one case, he was not equally wise in the other. Why not? Because the ball playing was from a completely different context.
If the touchstone of the folks in the clip was truly survival/sustainment, then the manner of usage would not be what it is. As it is, human crash-up derby is not more sound, or thorough, or rigorous for viable martial concerns, it is less so, because of the context: it’s an idealistic game, and the game dictates the manner of its usage, just like the arts above. It’s not about defending your life or the lives of others, it’s about playing the game. As such, it is not “more real,” or “realistic” because it is rougher. In fact, I would argue there is and can be no such training that is “realistic” at all. None. It does not exist, and for a simple reason: it’s contradictory.
For something to actually be of training use, it must be amenable to the human mind – it has to “make sense” or else no one can try or accomplish it. But the reality of the world and the capricious and variable means by which the violent bring violence has usually little to do with how understandable it is to us, with how much it “makes sense” to us. In fact, psychologically, interpersonal violence often confounds us, which is why most people want no part of it. If it did make sense, training would be a hell of a lot easier than it is. But in the world as it actually is, not the one we want or wish for, the only thing realistic is reality. Only real is real. Period. All our training, everyone’s training, is a well-crafted fiction, and must be for us to gain any understanding of extemporaneous viable change under variable conditions. That’s a lot to take in because training to be competent and ethically so, is really, really hard.
If you want to be better at what you do, try stripping your training down to its component parts: put a wooden knife in the hand of a partner and have them come after you. If you can resist and escape, or at higher levels confront and subdue them, you’re onto something. Techniques must then “fit” into the intervals necessary for any of these opportune moments to be viable. Better yet, have that partner go after someone else with the knife and intervene and defend them from the attack. There is no better means to understand and “test” martial ethics and its tactics than to provide for the safety and security of another.
Context matters. It calibrates, directs, and helps us navigate untenable waters and thus permeates martial endeavor. And it matters so much, it is such an enormous part of what we do and how we are able to do it, that we often overlook it without thinking twice. Like any necessary aspect of our daily existence, like stability before an earthquake, or breathable air, we only appreciate it after it’s become short in supply.
Best to you, and best to you in your training.
James
June 13, 2016
In the Wake of Tragedy, Train
This post was originally written and posted 12/17/12 after the Sandy Hook massacre, but it is apropos after what happened in Orlando this past weekend.
How do I deal with gut-wrenching tragedies? Like the horrors of a Sandy Hook? I train.
I drag my questions, my doubts, and fears - specific and non - into the dojo and compound them, let them gang up on me, and even sometimes, let them win. Because in dissecting their victory, I can best plot a trajectory for their defeat.
Last Friday night, the echo of the massacre still loud, we addressed it, talked about it, trained about it. We broke out the Red Guns and worked through various scenarios using the Sanshin, the Kihon, and henka in our armed and unarmed answers. Most importantly, we group-trained to protect and defend others.
Placing partners in seemingly no-win situations, we crafted viable options for their escape and defense. Bear in mind, when attempting to save someone else, do not count on them to assist - chances are they'll be too traumatized to do much. They may even unwittingly give you away in the process, so in the approach to disarm, one may need to conceal themselves not just from aggressor, but also the victim.
Could we reconcile the crime? Of course not. Some evil cannot be resolved as any tailored answer presupposes the initial question is somehow reasonably answerable. But this highlights the paradox of training itself: memorizing specific answers to questions, like techniques, is not useful when the nature of the question is to continually change. We must instead learn to shape the questions themselves to apply the answers our ability is most able to provide.
So, don't just contemplate horror; that brutal stripping of life often leaves us confounded and inert.
Do something.
Give your thoughts to the physical: train and teach others to train to protect and defend life.
~James
The post below is non-political and contains no direct solutions, but grants the gift of perspective on such an awful topic:
February 15, 2016
Defending Knife Defense
Last year, in the city of Caloocan, Philippines, north of Manila, a security guard battled a knife wielding former employee in a ninety-second murdermatch. There’s video of it online. Watch it if you want nightmares. To see the guard flail for his life, dying in the very office he was protecting, is like suffocating in fresh air.
A large predator stalking us in the wild is bad enough, but a coworker taking advantage of surprise and fear with a melee weapon until we are dead throws even the battle-hardened into despair. We can only wish swift justice for his killer, who as of this writing is still on the loose. The horror show is grim reminder of the finality to decisions and actions under the stupefying stresses of violence.
This kind of savagery contributes to the ongoing debate of the defense against knives. The camps in argument, combatists and artists. Think of their difference in terms of driving. Artists provide well known, traditional techniques to acclimate drivers to good habits. Combatists concentrate on dangerous potentials, like accidents and emergency maneuvers. They focus on inoculating participants to these possibilities and designing ways to aggressively overcome them in kind.
At least some combatists make a popular claim: there is no dependable way to deal effectively with a knife-wielding opponent and to even try is foolhardy. It’s better to escape than fight. In evidence they point to training scenarios dubbed “traditional” and “real.” They accuse artists of outlandish techniques in the safety of the dojo, when they are clearly overwhelmed by a “real” blitz-type attack. To make their point they screen CCTV of knife attacks, such as Caloocan. Combatists warn that artists are fooling themselves, living in a dream world, and by training unrealistically they’ll only wind up wounded or dead.
There’s several challenges to the combatists’ claim. If knife defense is irresolvable, then why is it part of the DNA of martial training? And for as long as there has been training? How do combatists reconcile a thousand years of martial refinement in which knives and techniques for their defense have held prominent roles is various schools? Why did warriors of old make it a staple in their defensive study? Are we to believe this is a hollow tradition? And why such focus upon the knife? Firearms are far more dangerous. They kill at distance and disproportionately deliver lethal results even when wielded by the untrained. And yet, combatists are not making the same arguments against gun disarming and defense.
Three obvious issues also complicate an escape-only policy in martial concerns: context, tactical options, and viability. Escaping is always a great idea, until it isn’t, like when we can’t escape, like when we must protect someone else. This issue of context is game changing. We may also lose the tactical option to escape if constrained by area or environment, again forcing us to fight. And viability is challenged when escaping actually provides a tactical advantage to an opponent to use the timing of our decisions and actions against us. There are going to be certain cases where we will have to fight no matter what, knife or no knife. Every combatist and artist shares responsibility to recognize this.
But combatists are onto something. Too many artists are afflicted by a common malady known variously as the inflammation of dojo-itus, the code of bullshido, or non-jutsu the ancient and secret art of the nincompoop. They’re all the same thing: the denial and stripping of honesty to idealize training for the purposes of performance.
These standards are not operative in the real world, they exist only in the dojo, where artists can shield themselves behind cultural and traditional affectation. Under these conditions, cooperative training between willing participants can metastasize into reckless enabling to foster confidence in counterfeit skills. In reality, the odds are pretty good these same folks will never use their ability for real-world defense, remaining ever ignorant their skills are lacking. That is, unless they discover, most likely under threat, they are a reenactor rather than a leader. It will be a terrifying moment of clarity.
Truth be told, there’s no controversy regarding knife defense, but there is confusion. Both camps have it wrong and for the same reason: techniques are treated as answers to an opponent’s questions. But questions of conflict should always be answered with even better questions no opponent can answer in time.
Perception is Reality
Every martial endeavor exists to some extent in a dream world. In fact, we must use a dream world of sorts in order to incorporate truths as we understand them into the fictions we design and utilize as training scenarios. Everyone does this, from the hardest hard-charging military special operator to your local taekwondo kids class. Drills, sparring, tactical exercises, even kata, are all accomplished through the use of fiction, as fiction is amenable to the human mind and can make sense to us.
But whereas fiction is a matter of “might be,” truth does not have to be believable, it simply “is.” Facing and enduring the “moment of truth” has more to do with adapting to its pace of change rather than apprehending the exceptionally bizarre or banal examples the human mind can concoct to wage conflict. These examples can literally dumbfound, rendering the moment unintelligible, and protract, even immobilize, any response. Confronted by a knife or gun-wielding opponent is a dumbfounding moment - most folks will simply not believe it’s happening to them. In 2014, Mutahir Rauf, an exchange student from Pakistan attending Loyola University, reached for what he thought was a toy gun when he was mugged here in Chicago mere blocks from campus. He was murdered for it.
This is one of the inherent issues with so-called “realistic” training - it’s paradoxical: scenarios have to make sense or else no one might actually accomplish them. But in making scenarios sensible they defy the validity of the actual, the authenticity of dumbfounding truth, by the very fact they make sense. Thus “realistic” training is as fictional as any made for TV movie because only real is real.
Better to construct training to push students to adapt practiced skills and tactics to the stresses of constant change so as to learn how to make new and better decisions. And it’s only with use of the dream world that we can gain this further comprehension and enrich ourselves deeper to the complexities of our given endeavors. Questions we formulate and ask in training not only enlighten to new answers, they do something even more valuable: provide us the analogical insight to forge better questions. This is parallelism at work and is the underlying strength of the parable, the analogy, of training by context.
January 30, 2016
The Way of the Gun
Jeff Cooper, the father of modern pistolcraft said, “If only one method of shooting is to be learned, it should be the Weaver stance.” I’ll take Pop at his word. My stance on gun control isn’t facetious. It’s the only answer that makes sense.
The Right Tool for the Right Right
You won’t find stats or studies here. I won’t focus on bad guys killed or good guys saved. We’ve reached a “post-political” moment, a time when stats and studies have lost their impact, where truth is bendy, and well-funded orgs can conjure up stacks of data from stacks of experts.
The clickbait, tragi-comedy outrage of social media is the most popular means to stomp for political and social concern. Feelings are now outside the reach of logic and facts. And the zeitgeist informs that because we partake, opinions have gravitas though woefully misinformed. In this void, only philosophy and its inquiry finds purchase. And to reveal the truth about guns we need only state the philosophically obvious.
First among the obvious: gun “control” is a metaphor for gun prohibition, the complete disarmament of the populace. This is the true aim of control concerns, where these arguments are rooted, and their logical conclusion. Prohibitors, though perhaps well intentioned, truly believe fewer guns make us safer. They don’t.
A people cannot vanquish their life-protecting tools to the ether and fully embrace their right to life. They cannot do this for a simple reason: any right we cannot defend is not a right.
Close the courts, retire the judges, fire the lawyers, and strip the laws and see how much freedom is left in the freedom of speech. Schools, universities, businesses, corporations, and governments would scribble rule after rule on speech conduct and unfurl lists of punishments for thought considered unruly. It’s already happening.
California and New York are prosecuting heresy against companies they believe have lied about the theory of climate change. University speech codes shush students, students shush each other in “safe spaces,” the IRS bullies conservatives, and civil and federal intimidation against the “intolerant” and religious is rampant. Or do you support a $135,000 fine levied by an Oregon “civil rights commission” because Christian bakers refused to partake in an event antithetical to their values? If you do, you’re swinging sledges against the halls of justice. Let's hope those halls are made of tougher stuff.
There can be no freedom in the freedom of speech if there are no defenses written into law, or courts, or judges, or decisions, or their enforcement—each one of these an exceptional tool—to do the actual defending. And then there is the personal free exercise of speech that must occur to challenge draconian offensives to shut us up. We’re seeing this in action against political correctness as folks denounce the fictions the PC Police are enforcing as truth.
Under gun controls the right to life is restricted once subject to the policy whims of elites, well protected by an army of guns. These folks actively support the denial of options for personal security to others, such as the less fortunate, that they can often afford for themselves by position, location, and means. In doing so, they restrict the rights of those folks. Chicago has mandated a maddening set of requirements for a concealed carry license that people on the city’s south and west sides—where the violence is worst—cannot reasonably fulfill. Talk about institutional racism.
If there is no personal right by individual means to defend life or the lives of loved ones with the only capable and dependable technology available today, then there is no right to life itself.
From Disgruntled Max to Mad Max
Philosophically, restricting the right to life is to demean the value of life as not worthy of defense. But the value of life is a natural law, actually the Natural Law: the universal sense of obligation to protect and defend one’s life that each and every person experiences naturally, that is, without formal training. To argue against this first inclination as Aquinas put it, or demote its priority, is to argue against the intrinsic dignity humans have for life and its value. Not to be dramatic, but this is to argue against the absolute. It’s to say gravity doesn’t exist or humans don’t breathe air.
Folks who reject this self-evidence assume wrongly no one will attack them. It’s delusional, like this:
We should teach men not to rape, instead of teaching women to defend themselves.Placing the responsibility for personal safety on everyone else, including authorities, is reasoning as adorable as any "Precious Moments" statuette, but it isn’t serious. Much like the storms of an unpredictable Mother Nature, we must withstand the inevitable storms of human nature, like rape, robbery, and murder. No one living in Flood Grove or Blizzardtown thinks it unthinkable to prepare for such natural disasters. But that’s precisely what many folks have duped themselves into believing about conflict. The inequities of need and the corruptions of desire plague this world. But with enough social justice fingers wagging we can suppress the depravities of the human condition? After that, maybe we’ll change the weather by shaking our fists at the sky.
Politeness is good manners and etiquette. A practical veneer, we act polite as we want the same courtesy. But polite society is only polite until it isn’t. And in this twenty-first century with all our shiny technology and open-minded thought—so open on certain issues our brains have fallen out—we are just as reliant upon the gun as any crude tool since the dawn of our beginnings, since the wheel, the lever, the heavy rock, the pointy stick.
Guns are everywhere, even in countries that deny them to their own citizens. Businesses and corporations employ guns. Governments pack heat. Hollywood hires armed bodyguards to protect fragile snowflakes. And yes, even criminals carry to be more efficient in their crimes. And it’s against the law. The nerve.
I agree: there ought to be certain provisions regarding responsible ownership of guns. But this is academic. Blind folks do not get issued driver's licenses. However, to arbitrarily deny, confiscate, outlaw—to nick and stab at the very instruments that best protect a human right—is to diminish and remove access to the right itself. Justice delayed is justice denied. It places life in greater jeopardy under the guise of protecting it.
The kicker is that prohibitionists are not truly against the ownership of guns. They simply cede sole ownership to the government, where complete control of anything is always the best and brightest way to elevate the status of humanity. This was no more apparent than in our last century—the bloodiest on record—where gardens like the Soviet Union, Mao’s China, Nazi controlled Europe, tribal Africa, and communist Korea and Southeast Asia all displayed the maturity and wisdom of the ancients in collectively removing continents of people from their status among the living. And the first act in the morality play of all these locales was to disarm the populace.
So, let’s disarm.
Say a well-meaning lad snaps into a Slim Jim and wishes Greg the genie to do away with every gun on the planet (and our collected projectile weapon knowhow too, for good measure). Would a gun free world be better off or not? Safer or not?
Right now, chaos is sweeping the Middle East by a JV team called ISIS. I’m guessing the loss of gun technology might slow them down, but only long enough to sharpen knives, or machetes, or a jagged, rusty hubcap they could pick up and swing.
As guns and their memory vaporize, pandemonium would erupt across the planet. We are thrust back into the ancient world where the most aggressive and power mad among us—a small number to be sure—plows communities asunder with nothing to oppose them except the Mad Max gizmos of any defender. Whole peoples would join the aggressor’s reign rather than stand opposed and their ranks would grow exponentially. Here in Chicago, fear programs a “code of silence” in gang-infested neighborhoods where “snitches get stitches” and nine-year-olds are executed.
Within a month of said wish, good folks across America hide in their basements, hammering spikes through bats as the bravest among us scavenge local 7-11s for any sign of a Slim Jim to recall the genie and wish the nightmare away.
This hypothetical is a macrocosm of interpersonal violence between those who harm and who are harmed. The truth is that the ruthless, dehumanizing madness of the ancient world has not been stopped, committed, and locked away, it’s loose, running rampant, displayed any time innocent life is threatened, harmed, or murdered for the capricious and disturbing wants of ferocious and sadistic people.
Every rape, robbery, and murder is in affect and effect the Visigoth sack of Rome, the Mongol siege of Baghdad, the fall of Constantinople, a return to the medieval pall of the Dark Ages. Philosophy, religion, and education, the tempering of values toward human rights and the rule of law, eventually pulled us from that abyss. Science and technology have held the line against our going back. Only now, gun controllers want to toss the prescriptive rights and specified tech that so much blood was spilled over generations to acquire, that have safeguarded prosperity so it could prosper.
A group hug didn’t end World War II. Bombs did. And for better or worse, at least they put an end to the appalling loss of life from a war instigated for appalling reasons. Perhaps anti-gunners know a way, heretofore unknown, of controlling human viciousness. But even in prison, where needs for food, shelter, healthcare, recreation, and safety are all carried out in a 100-percent gun-free environment, the violent still control the violence.
There isn’t a decent person alive who does not wish to live in a disease-free world. But we can’t aspire to that by denying reality, like refusing to be vaccinated, or propagandizing vaccines as proliferating disease, instead of recognizing them as the only viable personal defense in an unpredictable and brutal world.
Want to minimize risk? Live inside a bubble. But don’t think you’ve removed the threat. You and yours still live in the world. And in this world, the world as it is, not the world we imagine or wish it to be, it’s not an option to protect ourselves without the way of the gun.
Kill It! Kill It with Fire!
Part of the confusion regarding guns is the glut of information we now live with that makes it spectacularly easy to discover and embrace knowledge, even fraudulent or debunked, as original and wise. This contributes to the march of this little thing called nihilism as a popular way to perceive the world, because when anything can be a priority, nothing—no one thing—is expected to be. Not even the stuff that’s actually important.
Gun control is just the kind of knowledge so many embrace as wise. But wisdom comes when we can properly recognize, reason, and judge how to act upon knowledge ethically. Nihilism morally equivocates in entirety, it devalues values, stating there are no good or better concerns to be concerned about. Prices are slashed on every belief to their cheapest: mere opinion. This faith in anythingness would have us believe there’s no difference between the living and the dead; that this fundamental dichotomy is just a matter of perspective, at least, amongst the living.
This is ethical ambivalence. In our selfie-satisfied culture it’s mistaken for the virtue of grace or some sort of noble thoughtfulness, rather than what it rightfully is, utter confusion. And in that confusion we cede rights and liberty, ultimately ceding even the value of life as evidence to the contrary.
So like a sparkly vampire that keeps rising from the dead, moral relativism, political correctness, or post modernism is all disorientation from truth. Stake it through its black heart, festoon it with garlic, coffinate, and rebury it in consecrated earth. Because eventually the wooden stakes will rot and the garlic will weaken. And these seductive forces will reconstitute under some new banner of “progress” for the “greater good.”
And note: gun controllers are fully aware they’ve lost this debate and are repackaging arguments under the banner of “gun safety” as in, “Let’s save and protect more lives.” Ever an appeal to the Natural Law. You remember the Natural Law as that which indicates we require protection and defense in the first place.
So when you next articulate your stance on gun control, remember … the shooting side leg shifts to the rear when drawing in the Weaver, but not so far back as to lose your balance.
January 6, 2016
Under the Blade 2016
Shinnen Akemashite Omedeto Gozaimasu!
Much gratitude to all those who made 2015 a fantastic year!
We had terrific training, a great Gasshuku, and memorable Bonenkai. And our dojo is growing! We have new students, new digs, and new locations. We now have affiliates in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood and as far away as Santa Fe, New Mexico, run by Shidoshi-ho Jason Cather and Edan Dalsheim-Kahane, respectively.
The Bujinkan Shingitai-Ichi Dojo is now located across northern Illinois: in Chicago at several different locations, Downers Grove, Palatine, and Rockford. We are also additionally out of state in Caledonia, Wisconsin, Los Angeles, California, and even across the pond in London, England!
Let’s keep going, everybody—we’ll make it!
KOSSHI
Some of you may have noticed my blog KOSSHI has been oddly quiet. There’s been no recent posts or musings, no smarmy anecdotes concerning life on the martial trail or otherwise.
A-Ha! James has run his trap so much he’s out of things to say!
Right.
Those that know me, know. Don’t get me started on the government, or our nonsensical social trends, or even the new Star Wars, for the matter of that (a decent outing, but a little too safe for this fanboy).
The silence is by design. I’ve been developing a book with the folks at YMAA for publication. You know YMAA as the publisher of such works as “Meditations on Violence,” by Rory Miller, whose same editor I have been assigned, and “Fight Like a Physicist,” by Dr. Jason Thalken, number one on Amazon.com recently in the subject of martial arts.
I can’t say much more than this—even the title’s a secret—but I am very excited about this next chapter.
Theme for 2015
This past year our dojo’s training focused on the Shugoshin, a concept embodying the “Protector Ethic” to shape ourselves toward the virtues of the protector and train across a hierarchy of outcomes, from escaping to confronting and subduing opponents.
This perspective shifted the importance of training from a technique orientation to one of context, a far clearer way to activate and understand our own ability. We also concentrated on bojutsu and its inherent structure to extrapolate higher teachings regarding Taijutsu in general.
It was a heady year, but I think the work did us good. I have a far better take on these ideas than when I first introduced them a year ago. In fact, what I learned is set to be our focus for the coming year.
Theme for 2016
The “basics” will be our training theme for 2016. Great! Everybody studies the basics, right? Sure, but what or which basics are we exactly talking about? There’s a larger concept here: is there a way, a manner to discern true basics?
Most folks speak of the basics as given sets of techniques and tactics. But this is a debatable, vast, and varied lot depending on how one might quantify and categorize it. Even the use of the term “basics” seems out of place as it’s more likely to describe requisite elemental techniques of the art that uniquely define it as what it is.
However I’m reaching for the spirit of the word derived from “base,” and has come to mean “foundation.” I’m talking actual basics here, not simply the vehicle’s nuts and bolts, but its principles of combustion. This is the stuff that we absolutely cannot do without, where anything less than a firm grip precludes us from understanding anything more. Is there a particular set of basics that we must, ought, and should know first and foremost before we know anything else? I think there is.
The material basics I have in mind are what I consider to be formally necessary as a set of first steps to knowing and exploring Taijutsu, or the martial way in general, and its Protector Ethic. I have several ideas that I will detail throughout the year, four specifically, regarding health and physicality.
And as last year, we’ll be using Bojutsu as a catalyst for deeper study, so sand and oil up those rokushakubo, jo, and hanbo for some graduate level training. If you need a little refresher on the concepts, check out “Taijutsu is Bojutsu is Taijutsu.”
Lastly …
Technology and social media has changed the way we see ourselves. And due to the human condition’s failing for ravenous curiosity that too often flaunts the temperate and prudential cautions that are meant to keep it from harming itself, tech has become the MacGuffin so many seek to control.
In doing so, tech has spiraled exactly out of our control, so rapid has been its advance, leaving many ignorant to its impact and Pollyanna in cyber actions. We roam, speak, and do online that which we would never visit, say, or act in real life. It’s making us all weird.
Worse, this immaturity is getting the best of us, estranging and hardening hearts in forums and conversation threads in tech’s use as a caustic sword and a shield that lures toward anonymous activity. And make no mistake, anonymity is a perversion of the self, for when we believe we've a shield from the consequences of behavior, we are numbed to any responsibility for the sword.
As this occurs we can expect greater introversion and social awkwardness, less tolerance and compassion between even like peoples, and less patience to deal with a given day’s obstacles be they manmade or natural, since the real world moves at the pace of the real world, not an iMac.
In due time, the sickest among us will have even their sense of personal autonomy diminished as their living reality inverts for their online one. And then we’ll encounter yet another “marginalized” group seeking victimhood status and special treatment for their own willful behavior when they can no longer function outside the confines of a virtual experience.
In short, we can expect more conflict.
Conflict is inevitable between groups of people, even friends. When values clash, conflict ensues. This can occur when folks hold different values or when differing experiences lead to understanding similar values in differing ways.
To mitigate conflict and resolve values in dispute requires sober effect. It requires people to take responsibility for themselves and others. At the highest levels of that ability, it requires us to have sympathy, kindness, and even forgiveness for the carelessness of others.
Typing words on the net is to fling them into an abyss, much like shooting a gun. Trying to retract those words after the fact is like trying to rescind the bullet shot. There’s no safety in a keyboard, it’s but a blunt instrument that refines or debases, a pallet of creative force that appeals or repulses with every creation. Each of us must choose which.
Yelling from the shadows of the virtual divide only causes confusion. Perhaps that awesome retort to your peer’s misinformed and misguided post or comment is better left unsaid or said better when in their company. I never “Share,” “Like,” or write anything online I am unwilling to stand behind and articulate as I grip and shake the hand of the person I believe needs to listen to it. Meeting and speaking directly with others calms us and elevates our prose as we understand and are understood—you know, communicate—in real time. Tech is fast making this person-to-person-ness as rare as any superpower, much like martial ability itself.
We have trained, sweat, and bled together and have always shook hands before and afterward. We have shared our stories and our experiences over drinks to talk shop. In training and under stress, we lay hands on others and deal with hands laid on us—a diminishing skill among a withdrawn and alienated populace. Thus, we should not be as susceptible to such online seductions. Petty squabbles turn us small. And the smallness of character is often the root of that which is petty.
Reclaim words like “gentleman” and “honorable” as we deal with one another off the mat. If you have issues with someone, don’t raise them online, take it up with them. Meet with them. Say it face-to-face. Grip their shoulder, shake their hand, and remember the kind of person they are in training (or at least the kind of person you are). Then say your piece if you truly believe it needs to be said. Careful and meaningful choice of words civilizes conversation for clarity, which creates the opportunity to change one’s mind. If clarity is not what you’re seeking, re-examine your motives.
If you cannot refrain from or cannot forgive invective because feelings, perhaps you shouldn’t be training. Perhaps the level-heading, fair-mindedness training imparts is lost upon you because you have misunderstood its greatest lesson: Being human is to have values, but valuing human being is to know what is essential to feeling, thinking, and acting upon them ethically.
This is the message of martial training. Let us all make certain we're receiving it.
Prodesse Quam Conspici
We are part of an extraordinarily small group of like-minded individuals—there are certainly not enough of us. We train physically to change the way we feel, think, and act. We train because good people who want to be better people, get trained. Training oneself in the ways of human conflict, arguably the most phobic aspect of human existence, is the best way to improve as a person.
In Old English, to “improve” something was to “emprofit” it. Old French meant it obliquely as “proud,” “brave,” and “valiant.” This came from the Latin, prodesse, “to be useful” in one’s essence beforehand. Esse is more Latin, where “essential,” ingredients of character, comes from. Prodesse Quam Conspici: Be known by one's achievement, not by one's claim.
To improve is to strengthen one’s character through feeling, thinking, and acting by what training informs us is inescapably, universally, and unquestioningly valuable to the human experience.
Share it, mentor it, and teach it as a protector of self and others.
Make 2016 your best year yet!
~James
Much gratitude to all those who made 2015 a fantastic year!
 |
| 2015 Gasshuku |
The Bujinkan Shingitai-Ichi Dojo is now located across northern Illinois: in Chicago at several different locations, Downers Grove, Palatine, and Rockford. We are also additionally out of state in Caledonia, Wisconsin, Los Angeles, California, and even across the pond in London, England!
Let’s keep going, everybody—we’ll make it!
KOSSHI
Some of you may have noticed my blog KOSSHI has been oddly quiet. There’s been no recent posts or musings, no smarmy anecdotes concerning life on the martial trail or otherwise.
A-Ha! James has run his trap so much he’s out of things to say!
Right.
Those that know me, know. Don’t get me started on the government, or our nonsensical social trends, or even the new Star Wars, for the matter of that (a decent outing, but a little too safe for this fanboy).
The silence is by design. I’ve been developing a book with the folks at YMAA for publication. You know YMAA as the publisher of such works as “Meditations on Violence,” by Rory Miller, whose same editor I have been assigned, and “Fight Like a Physicist,” by Dr. Jason Thalken, number one on Amazon.com recently in the subject of martial arts.
I can’t say much more than this—even the title’s a secret—but I am very excited about this next chapter.
Theme for 2015
This past year our dojo’s training focused on the Shugoshin, a concept embodying the “Protector Ethic” to shape ourselves toward the virtues of the protector and train across a hierarchy of outcomes, from escaping to confronting and subduing opponents.
This perspective shifted the importance of training from a technique orientation to one of context, a far clearer way to activate and understand our own ability. We also concentrated on bojutsu and its inherent structure to extrapolate higher teachings regarding Taijutsu in general.
It was a heady year, but I think the work did us good. I have a far better take on these ideas than when I first introduced them a year ago. In fact, what I learned is set to be our focus for the coming year.
Theme for 2016
The “basics” will be our training theme for 2016. Great! Everybody studies the basics, right? Sure, but what or which basics are we exactly talking about? There’s a larger concept here: is there a way, a manner to discern true basics?
Most folks speak of the basics as given sets of techniques and tactics. But this is a debatable, vast, and varied lot depending on how one might quantify and categorize it. Even the use of the term “basics” seems out of place as it’s more likely to describe requisite elemental techniques of the art that uniquely define it as what it is.
However I’m reaching for the spirit of the word derived from “base,” and has come to mean “foundation.” I’m talking actual basics here, not simply the vehicle’s nuts and bolts, but its principles of combustion. This is the stuff that we absolutely cannot do without, where anything less than a firm grip precludes us from understanding anything more. Is there a particular set of basics that we must, ought, and should know first and foremost before we know anything else? I think there is.
The material basics I have in mind are what I consider to be formally necessary as a set of first steps to knowing and exploring Taijutsu, or the martial way in general, and its Protector Ethic. I have several ideas that I will detail throughout the year, four specifically, regarding health and physicality.
And as last year, we’ll be using Bojutsu as a catalyst for deeper study, so sand and oil up those rokushakubo, jo, and hanbo for some graduate level training. If you need a little refresher on the concepts, check out “Taijutsu is Bojutsu is Taijutsu.”
Lastly …
Technology and social media has changed the way we see ourselves. And due to the human condition’s failing for ravenous curiosity that too often flaunts the temperate and prudential cautions that are meant to keep it from harming itself, tech has become the MacGuffin so many seek to control.
In doing so, tech has spiraled exactly out of our control, so rapid has been its advance, leaving many ignorant to its impact and Pollyanna in cyber actions. We roam, speak, and do online that which we would never visit, say, or act in real life. It’s making us all weird.
Worse, this immaturity is getting the best of us, estranging and hardening hearts in forums and conversation threads in tech’s use as a caustic sword and a shield that lures toward anonymous activity. And make no mistake, anonymity is a perversion of the self, for when we believe we've a shield from the consequences of behavior, we are numbed to any responsibility for the sword.
As this occurs we can expect greater introversion and social awkwardness, less tolerance and compassion between even like peoples, and less patience to deal with a given day’s obstacles be they manmade or natural, since the real world moves at the pace of the real world, not an iMac.
In due time, the sickest among us will have even their sense of personal autonomy diminished as their living reality inverts for their online one. And then we’ll encounter yet another “marginalized” group seeking victimhood status and special treatment for their own willful behavior when they can no longer function outside the confines of a virtual experience.
In short, we can expect more conflict.
Conflict is inevitable between groups of people, even friends. When values clash, conflict ensues. This can occur when folks hold different values or when differing experiences lead to understanding similar values in differing ways.
To mitigate conflict and resolve values in dispute requires sober effect. It requires people to take responsibility for themselves and others. At the highest levels of that ability, it requires us to have sympathy, kindness, and even forgiveness for the carelessness of others.
Typing words on the net is to fling them into an abyss, much like shooting a gun. Trying to retract those words after the fact is like trying to rescind the bullet shot. There’s no safety in a keyboard, it’s but a blunt instrument that refines or debases, a pallet of creative force that appeals or repulses with every creation. Each of us must choose which.
Yelling from the shadows of the virtual divide only causes confusion. Perhaps that awesome retort to your peer’s misinformed and misguided post or comment is better left unsaid or said better when in their company. I never “Share,” “Like,” or write anything online I am unwilling to stand behind and articulate as I grip and shake the hand of the person I believe needs to listen to it. Meeting and speaking directly with others calms us and elevates our prose as we understand and are understood—you know, communicate—in real time. Tech is fast making this person-to-person-ness as rare as any superpower, much like martial ability itself.
We have trained, sweat, and bled together and have always shook hands before and afterward. We have shared our stories and our experiences over drinks to talk shop. In training and under stress, we lay hands on others and deal with hands laid on us—a diminishing skill among a withdrawn and alienated populace. Thus, we should not be as susceptible to such online seductions. Petty squabbles turn us small. And the smallness of character is often the root of that which is petty.
Reclaim words like “gentleman” and “honorable” as we deal with one another off the mat. If you have issues with someone, don’t raise them online, take it up with them. Meet with them. Say it face-to-face. Grip their shoulder, shake their hand, and remember the kind of person they are in training (or at least the kind of person you are). Then say your piece if you truly believe it needs to be said. Careful and meaningful choice of words civilizes conversation for clarity, which creates the opportunity to change one’s mind. If clarity is not what you’re seeking, re-examine your motives.
If you cannot refrain from or cannot forgive invective because feelings, perhaps you shouldn’t be training. Perhaps the level-heading, fair-mindedness training imparts is lost upon you because you have misunderstood its greatest lesson: Being human is to have values, but valuing human being is to know what is essential to feeling, thinking, and acting upon them ethically.
This is the message of martial training. Let us all make certain we're receiving it.
Prodesse Quam Conspici
We are part of an extraordinarily small group of like-minded individuals—there are certainly not enough of us. We train physically to change the way we feel, think, and act. We train because good people who want to be better people, get trained. Training oneself in the ways of human conflict, arguably the most phobic aspect of human existence, is the best way to improve as a person.
In Old English, to “improve” something was to “emprofit” it. Old French meant it obliquely as “proud,” “brave,” and “valiant.” This came from the Latin, prodesse, “to be useful” in one’s essence beforehand. Esse is more Latin, where “essential,” ingredients of character, comes from. Prodesse Quam Conspici: Be known by one's achievement, not by one's claim.
To improve is to strengthen one’s character through feeling, thinking, and acting by what training informs us is inescapably, universally, and unquestioningly valuable to the human experience.
Share it, mentor it, and teach it as a protector of self and others.
Make 2016 your best year yet!
~James
August 29, 2015
SHUGOSHIN
UPDATED 9/27/2015
SHUGOSHIN (Japanese for “protector ethic”) is a high-intensity course in martial arts fundamentals geared to training the essential mindset and physical habits for conflict defense of self and others.
Shugoshin training identifies itself as “PROTECTIVES” and empowers practitioners through heightened awareness and intense physical training twice a week, for an hour each time, during its four-week run.
Popular and commercialized martial arts often attempt to mold student reactions to fit a stylized set of predetermined movements, an approach that has little to do with realistic application across variable threats. Protectives are trained in the opposite manner, using threat contexts for “escape, resist, extract, and intercede” to naturalize counters for defensive movements.
As a fundamentals course it will concentrate on vital mental, physical, and spiritual aspects of the martial way:
Protectives replaces static, imitation of techniques – a hallmark of commercial martial arts - with a direct connection to the ebb and flow of martial principles in constant flux. This acuity fosters tactical awareness and creative adaptability, the necessary skills to claim ownership of one's ability to “be” skilled today, instead of always training to “become” skilled.
If you're interested or know someone who might be, please check it out at the Japanese Culture Center, and on Facebook: SHUGOSHIN Protectives Course
Shugoshin training identifies itself as “PROTECTIVES” and empowers practitioners through heightened awareness and intense physical training twice a week, for an hour each time, during its four-week run.
Popular and commercialized martial arts often attempt to mold student reactions to fit a stylized set of predetermined movements, an approach that has little to do with realistic application across variable threats. Protectives are trained in the opposite manner, using threat contexts for “escape, resist, extract, and intercede” to naturalize counters for defensive movements.
As a fundamentals course it will concentrate on vital mental, physical, and spiritual aspects of the martial way:
- PHYSICAL
- Body flexibility and
resiliency
i. Warm
ups and stretching
ii. Tumbling
and breaking falls
iii. Striking
and kicking
- Maneuvering drills and principle-based
responses
i. Punching
ii. Kicking
iii. Grabbing
iv. Throwing
- Counter-maneuvering
i. Escape
ii. Resistance
and escape
iii. Extraction
of others
iv. Interceding
for others
- Scenario-based training
i. Defense
of self
ii. Defense
of others
- MENTAL
- Recognizing and
clarifying universal values
- Empowering oneself as a
“protector”
- Critical thinking for
ethical problem solving
- SPIRITUAL
- Ethical value stories
- Ethical use of martial
ability
Protectives cultivates one’s resolve to persevere, where instinct supersedes technique and is sharpened with a set of principles outside the realm of pure physical might. By cultivating natural responses during initial training, larger, stronger, even multiple opponents can be defeated without reliance on brute force, speed, or strength. Instead, the student’s instincts of positioning, leverage, and initiative are sharpened as tools capable of outwitting even the largest adversary at a time of their greatest disadvantage.
Protectives replaces static, imitation of techniques – a hallmark of commercial martial arts - with a direct connection to the ebb and flow of martial principles in constant flux. This acuity fosters tactical awareness and creative adaptability, the necessary skills to claim ownership of one's ability to “be” skilled today, instead of always training to “become” skilled.
If you're interested or know someone who might be, please check it out at the Japanese Culture Center, and on Facebook: SHUGOSHIN Protectives Course
Introductory course: Fundamentals I
Time: Two 60-minute long classes twice a week
Length: Four weeks
Cost: $190.00
($20.00 per session/8 sessions & $30.00 sign-up fee
includes a detailed training handbook/journal.)
Dates:
Tuesday November
3, from 6:00-7:00pm
Friday November
6, from 7:00-8:00pm
Tuesday November
10, from 6:00-7:00pm
Friday November
13, from 7:00-8:00pm
Tuesday November
17, from 6:00-7:00pm
Friday November
20, from 7:00-8:00pm
Tuesday November
24, from 6:00-7:00pm
Friday November
27, from 7:00-8:00pm
Japanese Culture Center
1016 W Belmont
Chicago, Illinois 60657
If you would like to participate, please contact the instructor
directly:
James V. Morganelli: james@sgtidojo.org
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