ego. Perhaps you’ve heard martial arts destroys the ego, but this is silly. People need a healthy ego to thrive. Training functions as a temper, and it does so by balancing our needs and wants with humility stemming from our duties to self and others.
When training gets selfish, it can grow dark and twisted, a place where everyone is a potential enemy, including people we care about. Instead of becoming that happier, healthier, brighter light to the world that others look to for strength and guidance, we dim, obscured by shadows of our own making. And it’s only in this darkness that the bloodline of the martial way is misidentified as mere “killing arts.” This has the effect of diminishing it, severing the link between tactical strategies and their original, life-protecting principles. The account departs from any sense of responsibility and appeals, perhaps unwittingly, to a base appetite for “might makes right,” a self-satisfaction that degrades training as amoral, neither ethical nor unethical. If it’s neither right nor wrong, it’s just a cold, hard tool that makes it easy to kill.
Now, do not misunderstand me. The knowledge and material ability to kill an enemy hold an immeasurably important place—sacred, even—in martial means and ways. In many respects, maturity in the martial way is paradoxical, as in “learning to die in order to live” or “killing to protect life.” These notions are intrinsic to advanced studies, but because they are not simple to comprehend, let alone physically embody, they are easily misunderstood. And the easiest to misinterpret is the martial as merely mortal.
The fate of the feudal and ancient world was indiscriminate death. People died young, sick, and infirm, as they were plagued by plagues, starved, hunted, and massacred between tribes and clans. History’s brutality is legendary. It was the martial way that tipped the balance to protect and sustain life. Is there any question as to why the warrior class would ascend to the preeminent cultural position throughout antiquity? It wasn’t because the warrior was renowned for his death dealing, but his life protecting. Death was commonplace. Life was special.
If the guiding value of the martial way is only the killing of the enemy, then how do we explain the fact that these ancient arts retain the tactical calculations in order to live through battling an enemy, even though killing may be necessary? It is always far easier to kill and train to kill when one’s life is sacrificial to that goal. Terrorism’s use of the suicide bomb is first and foremost for killing because its aim places it above even the life of the bomber. But the martial way actually coheres to human nature’s life-preserving instincts—even a survival martial art is qualified by the value-of-life notion, survival.
When we depict and participate willingly in a so-called killing art, we revoke training’s ethical standard. And even if we acknowledge the standard, if we don’t train, articulate, and rely on it, we leave it to the misinformed and uninitiated to use its absence against us in a court of public opinion. And, worse, perhaps one dark day in an actual court, where the fearful among us will state the argument for its abolition. It wouldn’t be the first time.
The way of the martial is moral. Whenever we use it, train in it, or teach it to others, we deal with the ethical, the moral in action. And the protector ethic is the outstanding bond, the summit of its endeavor, why it all matters in the first place. Believe it or don’t—the martial way is ruled from within the realm of ethics.
Every physical technique and tactic, every philosophical and strategic conjugation of use, is contingent on this singular point. It is the self-evident, undeniable way of the martial way.
Ethics is as complicated as martial arts, which is to say, as complex as we wish to make it. There are plenty of rabbit holes down which practitioners can fall, but at its most basic, ethics deals with primarily three sets of issues:
Good and bad, which concerns the values we value
Right and wrong, which involves how we reason and judge to uphold our values
Decisions and actions we take to protect and preserve those aspects
Martial ethics deals with how we answer threats and violence when values contradict. Understanding how and why values come into opposition is central to defusing that conflict. Human values are only ever objective—shared by everyone, such as necessities for sustenance—or subjective—relative, shared only by some, such as those dictated by culture or creed. Nutrition is an objective value because if we don’t get it, we die. But your favorite football team is your subjective, arbitrary choice. Objectivity trumps subjectivity, always and every time. If it’s up to us to arbitrate between them, not only must we know good from bad, right from wrong, and how to act on these concerns, we have to first identify the subjectivity causing trouble and activate objectivity to alleviate it.
Applying an objective ethic means seeking the universal because it is just as it sounds: good for all involved. If protectors don’t deal in universals, then their thoughts, words, and deeds remain untrustworthy to those who are forced to live by their decisions and actions.
The ethical measure of decisions often comes down to how well they apply to everyone equally. Equality begins with trying to protect everyone in conflict—victims and perpetrators—basing decisions and actions on changing circumstances or context. If protectors do not treat everyone equally, decisions will become suspect, as will the protectors themselves, and it will foment more conflict.
Perhaps more important, without universals, protectors risk having their own thoughts, words, and deeds mutate and work against them. Doing the right thing means knowing how to discover what that right thing is. But if that’s done through disrespect, then protecting actually becomes bullying. This can cause confusion, frustration, and even physical sickness to those involved. Protectors need clarity to trust their decision making, since they’re the ones who must ultimately live with the decisions they may be forced to make.
In seeking the universal, we have to ask questions like, What is good? and, before this, What is valuable? And we must clarify what it means to value at all. These are the starter questions of ethics, and it’s good training to provide answers here, even if they’re difficult or confusing at first.
Can we know if any of our answers will approach truth? Moral truth? Unfortunately, much of the world will inform us this is irrelevant. It will say humans operate by “moral relativism,” meaning we cannot know with certainty the actuality of rightness, goodness, or moral values, as these are mere projections of culture and experiences distinct to us. As such, they are mere opinions, as particular as any partisan’s. Perhaps you stand with those folks and think that terms like objective, universal, and absolute cannot possibly pertain to moral thinking, and even less attain truth, in a world with infinite shades of gray.
Let’s sidestep the fact that condemning the possibility of objective, absolute statements of moral truth is in itself an objective, absolute statement of moral truth. Moral relativism is a colloquialism of a popular theory, as we’ll learn later, that people pick up and swing around as easily as a child’s plastic bat. When conceived as an “ethical” method, it provides tacit cover to legitimize not doing the right thing when the right thing needs to be done. Worse, it insists there can be no knowing the right thing.
Wrong.
At one of the many speeches G. K. Chesterton, the English writer and Catholic apologist, gave during his time, a reporter asked which book, if he could have any single book, he would want if stranded on a desert island. Such a learned and literary fellow must have some deep insight. Would he choose the King James Bible or a volume of Shakespeare?
