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
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