KIT
08-19-2005, 00:08
The Warrior Way
An odd title for this piece, perhaps, but its as good a way as any to start what I have written here, because I think it a bridge of sorts to a mindset that people here might relate to, at least nominally.
It springs from recent discussions regarding the London shooting and police response to terrorism.
We often see talk about "modern day warriors." Despite the fact that many people want to place folks like Gandhi, or Mother Teresa, or cancer survivors in the ranks of "warriors," this is a misplaced view because it lacks a fundamental understanding of what that term means. After all, we don't see sections on martial arts bulletin boards devoted to the warriorhood of yogis, or nuns, or cancer survivors for a reason. (Note= this is not to belittle in any way the contributions or the struggles of such people. It is just in terms of how we define them).
Today, the military and police professions are generally those placed in the ranks of "modern warriors." There is room for debate as to whether or not any or all of them fit the bill, but at its fundamental level, they are so called because like our martial forebears they wear armor, carry weapons, and train to use them because they place themselves in harm's way while doing their jobs.
The key difference is that they are placed in a position to decide to use force. They get blood on their hands. They make life and death decisions that involve intentionally taking the lives of others. They carry weapons and use them in taking these lives and in protecting the lives of others. These professions are part of martial arts bulletin boards because their struggles are not against the weather, or disease, or some god-like force of nature or accident, but against other human beings who mean them deadly harm. This is the core difference in the definition of warrior.
And it is a crucial one. It is the very reason that many people take up the practice of martial arts for self-defense in the first place, and why the works of Musashi and Sun Zi and other warriors of the past and the writings of John Boyd and Lt.Col. Grossman are so popular; the uncertainty, the trepidation that most of us have when contemplating an intentional physical threat to our person (or the person of others) on the part of other human beings. It is the sentient nature of the threat that is more frightening, or at least more frightening at a deeper-in-the-gut level, than any accident or illness or force of nature.
I think this is at the center of why we don't understand what a warrior “is” anymore. The vast majority of people only experience real, kill-or-be-killed violence as entertainment, or as news from somewhere else. It could be argued that even the news is "infotainment" these days. In the practice of martial arts we sanitize it, place it in a controllable, none too threatening package that anyone can participate in and walk away thinking they have some link to men who very much lived and died by many of the same
strategies and techniques we practice. I once heard Dave Lowry speak on the meaning of kata, and if I am quoting him correctly he called it a “protection against the arbitrary.” That is an excellent description of modern martial arts practice as a whole. We don’t like arbitrary. We like pat answers.
You see it in the posts on any forum you go to. People want definitive answers on what to do and how to deal with real violence. “How do you defeat multiple attackers?” “What can I do to someone who attacks me without going to jail?” “ How do I defend against a knife wielding assailant?” Hell, today you can got to a number of websites that purport to teach you in detail how to kill a man in seconds with everything from pressure points and ki to absolutely brutal disemboweling or head-taking moves that are no different from what we saw Al Qaeda doing to those unfortunate souls they had captured.
But that is the face of the warrior. They are as much warriors as any bushi was, and as any soldier is who is battling them in Afghanistan or Iraq, and as any cop is who moves toward a lethal threat and makes a split second decision to use deadly force. Today, perhaps more than at any time before, people who are not warriors have front row access to what it is warriors actually do, because we see it played out on the car camera and helicopter videos of police actions and the news cameras and bullet-by-bullet commentary of embedded reporters in “the sandbox” and beyond.
And they don’t like it. This is way beyond the abstract conception of warrior that places a cancer survivor in the very same ranks. It is even further beyond a lyrical concept of the warrior that we get practicing martial arts at a controlled remove from the violence, pain, fear and loss of life that the arts literally represent - that they represented to those whose names we conjure in hushed admiration when talking about the history of our beloved practice. Today we “devote our lives” to cultural practices, fascinating customs, and minutiae of warrior culture without more than a surface understanding of what the warrior tradition actually represents – or about what it is like to have blood on your hands. Even, at times, innocent blood.
Because when you accept the mantle of bearing arms, you accept the potential for having to use them. Not all soldiers or police seem to be cognizant of this fact when they take their oaths – doing everything they can to avoid ever getting into a confrontation which may require them to have to use deadly force. Others run to those confrontations and believe it is the highest calling these jobs offer.
But with that responsibility comes the possibility that you may make a mistake. That part of the warrior way is rarely addressed in our martial art recollections of “what it was like” in the “Golden Age” of warriorhood, where seemingly everything was like Lake Woebegon where “all the use of force decisions were sound, cut and dried, and mutually agreed upon by everyone who heard about them, and only the bad guys died.”
With it comes the possibility that you may think you are just doing your job, acting to save your own life or the life of others, and make a bad call and someone dies. With luck, you won’t be a Marine with a reporter in your unit who films the entire event yet still the media and the public second guess what you did and rush to judge you a murderer until the full story, the entire context comes out.
Or you won’t be a British cop who mistakenly thinks he has a suicide bomber on his hands…
Those familiar with Donn Draeger’s writings and the International Hoplology society are perhaps familiar with the anthropological terms emic and etic. (Link for a definition: http://faculty.ircc.cc.fl.us/faculty/jlett/Article%20on%20Emics%20and%20Etics.htm)
In short, etic represents the point of view of the outsider looking in, the observer. He has certain points of view and an overall understanding that is limited by not participating in the activity at issue. The emic perspective is that of the insider, the one who is involved in the activity or group. In hoplological terms, you fulfill an emic requirement by becoming a member of a martial arts tradition or group and learning about their practices, way of life, and mindset from the inside. This is viewed as the superior perspective when evaluating a warrior tradition or martial arts style. The ones who truly speak with authority on a subject are those with emic experience.
I have always defined emic a little differently when it comes to the warrior way. Participation, and developing an understanding means far more than simply practicing a martial art. It means experiencing the way of the warrior first hand – carrying arms into harm’s way and making life and death decisions – even if they are not always the right ones. That burden is one that no one can fully understand unless they walk in those shoes.
I do not in any way mean to say here that no one with an etic perspective has the right to criticize what these folks do. I do want to get the point across that they are doing so from a limited, and skewed perspective. It is easy to second guess a decision made in the blink of an eye, under great stress, and with very little margin for error. Media reports are typically about half right most of the time, three quarters if they are getting good information (assuming they understand it: reporters are notoriously bad at anything having to do with police or military training, tactics, firearms, etc.) Even then the political bias of the reporter and/or the news service must be considered.
If you have never been in a position where you had a fraction of a second to make a life or death decision involving the lives of other people, you will not understand why a warrior does what he does – or what it feels like to live with the aftermath, good or bad. Take this into account before you allow yourself to get incensed over the actions of someone who placed his life on the line for people just like you did what he did, until the full story is out and you know he acted incompetently or criminally (even then, much of how that plays out is often based on political whim.)
An odd title for this piece, perhaps, but its as good a way as any to start what I have written here, because I think it a bridge of sorts to a mindset that people here might relate to, at least nominally.
It springs from recent discussions regarding the London shooting and police response to terrorism.
We often see talk about "modern day warriors." Despite the fact that many people want to place folks like Gandhi, or Mother Teresa, or cancer survivors in the ranks of "warriors," this is a misplaced view because it lacks a fundamental understanding of what that term means. After all, we don't see sections on martial arts bulletin boards devoted to the warriorhood of yogis, or nuns, or cancer survivors for a reason. (Note= this is not to belittle in any way the contributions or the struggles of such people. It is just in terms of how we define them).
Today, the military and police professions are generally those placed in the ranks of "modern warriors." There is room for debate as to whether or not any or all of them fit the bill, but at its fundamental level, they are so called because like our martial forebears they wear armor, carry weapons, and train to use them because they place themselves in harm's way while doing their jobs.
The key difference is that they are placed in a position to decide to use force. They get blood on their hands. They make life and death decisions that involve intentionally taking the lives of others. They carry weapons and use them in taking these lives and in protecting the lives of others. These professions are part of martial arts bulletin boards because their struggles are not against the weather, or disease, or some god-like force of nature or accident, but against other human beings who mean them deadly harm. This is the core difference in the definition of warrior.
And it is a crucial one. It is the very reason that many people take up the practice of martial arts for self-defense in the first place, and why the works of Musashi and Sun Zi and other warriors of the past and the writings of John Boyd and Lt.Col. Grossman are so popular; the uncertainty, the trepidation that most of us have when contemplating an intentional physical threat to our person (or the person of others) on the part of other human beings. It is the sentient nature of the threat that is more frightening, or at least more frightening at a deeper-in-the-gut level, than any accident or illness or force of nature.
I think this is at the center of why we don't understand what a warrior “is” anymore. The vast majority of people only experience real, kill-or-be-killed violence as entertainment, or as news from somewhere else. It could be argued that even the news is "infotainment" these days. In the practice of martial arts we sanitize it, place it in a controllable, none too threatening package that anyone can participate in and walk away thinking they have some link to men who very much lived and died by many of the same
strategies and techniques we practice. I once heard Dave Lowry speak on the meaning of kata, and if I am quoting him correctly he called it a “protection against the arbitrary.” That is an excellent description of modern martial arts practice as a whole. We don’t like arbitrary. We like pat answers.
You see it in the posts on any forum you go to. People want definitive answers on what to do and how to deal with real violence. “How do you defeat multiple attackers?” “What can I do to someone who attacks me without going to jail?” “ How do I defend against a knife wielding assailant?” Hell, today you can got to a number of websites that purport to teach you in detail how to kill a man in seconds with everything from pressure points and ki to absolutely brutal disemboweling or head-taking moves that are no different from what we saw Al Qaeda doing to those unfortunate souls they had captured.
But that is the face of the warrior. They are as much warriors as any bushi was, and as any soldier is who is battling them in Afghanistan or Iraq, and as any cop is who moves toward a lethal threat and makes a split second decision to use deadly force. Today, perhaps more than at any time before, people who are not warriors have front row access to what it is warriors actually do, because we see it played out on the car camera and helicopter videos of police actions and the news cameras and bullet-by-bullet commentary of embedded reporters in “the sandbox” and beyond.
And they don’t like it. This is way beyond the abstract conception of warrior that places a cancer survivor in the very same ranks. It is even further beyond a lyrical concept of the warrior that we get practicing martial arts at a controlled remove from the violence, pain, fear and loss of life that the arts literally represent - that they represented to those whose names we conjure in hushed admiration when talking about the history of our beloved practice. Today we “devote our lives” to cultural practices, fascinating customs, and minutiae of warrior culture without more than a surface understanding of what the warrior tradition actually represents – or about what it is like to have blood on your hands. Even, at times, innocent blood.
Because when you accept the mantle of bearing arms, you accept the potential for having to use them. Not all soldiers or police seem to be cognizant of this fact when they take their oaths – doing everything they can to avoid ever getting into a confrontation which may require them to have to use deadly force. Others run to those confrontations and believe it is the highest calling these jobs offer.
But with that responsibility comes the possibility that you may make a mistake. That part of the warrior way is rarely addressed in our martial art recollections of “what it was like” in the “Golden Age” of warriorhood, where seemingly everything was like Lake Woebegon where “all the use of force decisions were sound, cut and dried, and mutually agreed upon by everyone who heard about them, and only the bad guys died.”
With it comes the possibility that you may think you are just doing your job, acting to save your own life or the life of others, and make a bad call and someone dies. With luck, you won’t be a Marine with a reporter in your unit who films the entire event yet still the media and the public second guess what you did and rush to judge you a murderer until the full story, the entire context comes out.
Or you won’t be a British cop who mistakenly thinks he has a suicide bomber on his hands…
Those familiar with Donn Draeger’s writings and the International Hoplology society are perhaps familiar with the anthropological terms emic and etic. (Link for a definition: http://faculty.ircc.cc.fl.us/faculty/jlett/Article%20on%20Emics%20and%20Etics.htm)
In short, etic represents the point of view of the outsider looking in, the observer. He has certain points of view and an overall understanding that is limited by not participating in the activity at issue. The emic perspective is that of the insider, the one who is involved in the activity or group. In hoplological terms, you fulfill an emic requirement by becoming a member of a martial arts tradition or group and learning about their practices, way of life, and mindset from the inside. This is viewed as the superior perspective when evaluating a warrior tradition or martial arts style. The ones who truly speak with authority on a subject are those with emic experience.
I have always defined emic a little differently when it comes to the warrior way. Participation, and developing an understanding means far more than simply practicing a martial art. It means experiencing the way of the warrior first hand – carrying arms into harm’s way and making life and death decisions – even if they are not always the right ones. That burden is one that no one can fully understand unless they walk in those shoes.
I do not in any way mean to say here that no one with an etic perspective has the right to criticize what these folks do. I do want to get the point across that they are doing so from a limited, and skewed perspective. It is easy to second guess a decision made in the blink of an eye, under great stress, and with very little margin for error. Media reports are typically about half right most of the time, three quarters if they are getting good information (assuming they understand it: reporters are notoriously bad at anything having to do with police or military training, tactics, firearms, etc.) Even then the political bias of the reporter and/or the news service must be considered.
If you have never been in a position where you had a fraction of a second to make a life or death decision involving the lives of other people, you will not understand why a warrior does what he does – or what it feels like to live with the aftermath, good or bad. Take this into account before you allow yourself to get incensed over the actions of someone who placed his life on the line for people just like you did what he did, until the full story is out and you know he acted incompetently or criminally (even then, much of how that plays out is often based on political whim.)