Karate and Life: Know Yourself

Gichin Funakoshi's fourth Precept is this:

First know yourself before attempting to know others.

Unlike the first three, this one doesn't have an obvious connection to the martial arts. What does "knowing yourself" have to do with karate?

People who have studied the martial arts - or any other demanding discipline - seriously for a time know, however, that any discipline in a journey of self-knowledge. In the case of karate, the more I study and practice the more I learn about myself physically, mentally, and emotionally. I learn what I can and can't do, what I am and am not prepared to do, what my strengths and limitations are, and how far I can push the boundaries of all of these things.

The injunction to know yourself before trying to know others starts with the physical. If I don't understand my own body and its movements, someone else's will likely baffle me. That's why people with expertise in any area, from sports to martial arts to music, can watch someone else perform and "see" things that the rest of us can't see.

But this pretty quickly goes beyond the physical. If I haven't made the effort to understand myself, to get "inside" something and try to make it work for me, how can I pass judgment on someone else? And if I haven't really wrestled with myself in a given area, to test my ideas and thoughts and values, how then can I try to do so with someone else?

At its heart, this is a call for humility. It is entirely consistent with the parable about specks and logs (Matthew 7), and any number of other teachings about the need to understand ourselves rather than pass judgment on others.

In this day and age, humility is not much commended as a virtue anymore. We are quick to pass judgment on others, to rain down our wrath and indignation on things we don't understand. Trying to understand, rather than to judge, is seen as weak. For a recent example, check out this story about reactions to a staff member at Ohio State who suggested (via Twitter) that a search for compassion and understanding were appropriate towards the perpetrator of violence.

In today's world, humility takes courage, because it means standing up to the mobs baying for blood. But as CS Lewis reminded us, courage is really the form of every virtue at the point where it is tested. Today we humility is facing terrible and difficult tests. Will you try to know yourself first?

Karate and Life: Justice

A lot of people - even people who don't study karate or the martial arts - have heard of Funakoshi's first two precepts regarding Respect and No First Strike. The other 18 Precepts are not nearly as well known - but there's a lot here that worth unpacking, and a lot that applies to our whole lives.

Funakoshi's third precept is this:

"Karate is an aid to justice."

I think he meant this as a reminder to his students. To study karate, or any martial art, is to develop power - specifically, to increase your power to physically harm other people. That power should only be put to use in the service of justice - that is, in the service and protection of others. Funakoshi, like all great teachers and masters, feared his teachings being used only to create bullies.

This is certainly true for karate - but it is true much more broadly of any kind of power we wield. All of us have the ability to impact others - to bring good or to cause harm, to build up or to tear down. Some have more than others, but this is only a matter of degree, not of kind. To possess power is an inherent part of being human.

Each of us can speak, and many of us can write, and our words will be heard and digested by others.

Each of us interacts with other people every day - some a few, some many. We can choose to make those interactions positive or negative, affirming or denying.

Each of us makes choices every day with our resources - our time, our money, our attention. Those choices impact us, but they also impact the people around us, for good or ill.

The lesson for us here is that, like Funakoshi's students, we should be mindful of the purposes we use our power for. We may not think of ourselves as "powerful", but each of us has an impact on the world.

Knowing that my choices, my actions, and my words have an impact, will I put those to work for justice or for my own selfish gain? Will I try to build a better world for everyone, or will I look to tear others down for my own gain or my own sense of worth? If I'm not pursuing justice intentionally, I may produce some accidentally - but I wouldn't count on it.

Comic book fans know this as the "Peter Parker Principle" - "With great power comes great responsibility." But part of the pull of comic books, especially those stories like Spider-Man which focus on an Everyman who suddenly acquires powers, is that we see ourselves in the characters. What's compelling about Marvel's new TV series, including Daredevil and Luke Cage, is not the main characters' amazing abilities - it is the struggles they face to use whatever abilities they have to make the world a better place. To pursue justice.

In one episode of Luke Cage, the main character is asked by a bystander who witnesses his power, "You're one of them, aren't you?" His answer? "If you mean one of those people who gives a damn, then yes." He's not interested in the nature of his power, only in how he uses it.

This is a warning that almost all martial arts students receive at one point or another: be careful how you use your power, because you can really hurt someone if you try. That's true of all of us - every day we hold the ability to really hurt others if we try. We can also help others with the power at our disposal. We can, if we choose, seek justice.

So remember today that you are powerful. And remember that your power is meant as an aid to justice.

Karate and Life: No First Strike

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post about the first of Gichin Funakoshi's 20 Precepts: The Way Begins and Ends With Respect. I believe that Funakoshi's ideas go beyond karate-do, that there is wisdom worth sharing in his list of Precepts. This is the second post in that series; eventually, I hope to write about all 20.

Funakoshi's second Precept is perhaps his most famous:

Karate ni sente nashi.
There is no first strike in karate.

This is often understood in the martial arts world as tactical advice, and has given rise to endless debates about the nature and application of various blocks and strikes. For an excellent review of this debate, see my friend Dan Djurdjevic's blog.

But what about the rest of us? I believe that the meaning here is far more important outside the dojo than inside it. If more of us lived by this precept, the world would be a better place.

The Japanese word "sente" means not simply "strike" or "attack", but "initiative" - in this case, "aggressive initiative". What Funakoshi is referring to here is that moment in any conflict when one party take the first aggressive, escalatory step - the moment when the conflict leaves the path of mutual accommodation and problem-solving and instead becomes a zero-sum struggle in which each side seeks to beat the other into submission.

All conflicts have this "inflection point" somewhere. A disagreement, or a divergence of interests, in and of itself does not generate a conflict. What turns disagreement into war is a decision by one side to try to impose its will on the other - to try to achieve a unilateral solution in which I get what I want and who cares about the other guy.

Sometimes this point comes right at the beginning of a conflict, because one side has already decided to take what they want away from the other. Sometimes, it comes after a period of time in which both sides come to realize that there is a disagreement which neither was aware of before. In all cases, somebody has to make a decision to take that step - to throw the first punch, to launch the first attack, to throw away any hope of negotiating a mutually agreeable solution in favor of grabbing as much as you can get.

Prior to this point, mutual resolution is always possible. There are no conflicts on earth between humans that can't be settled in some fashion. Some of those settlements may require compromise - each side getting less than it fully wants. Some settlements may even require a redefinition of interests, even a redefinition of identity. Such things can and do happen - there are no laws in the cosmos that prevent any of this.

Peace, in the sense of resolving conflicts together, is possible. We just don't do it very well.

Funakoshi's dictum is a plea to all of us - don't be the first one to take a step down that road. Remain open to mutual dialogue as long as possible. Don't throw the first punch. Because once that first punch is thrown, disagreement becomes conflict and peace goes out the window. And everyone will suffer.

Political scientists and economists have known this by a different language. In our fields there is a game called "prisoner's dilemma" (or PD). I'll spare you the details, but in essence the game boils down to a choice between cooperating with the other player or stabbing him in the back. If both cooperate, both sides get something and are better off. If I stab and the other guy doesn't, I get everything and he gets nothing. If we both stab, we're both worse off.

Games like PD are great for modeling certain dynamics, but life isn't like that. We rarely play a game or make a choice once and then walk away. In life, we make these choices all the time, over and over again.

A Princeton scholar, Robert Axelrod, set out to capture this by inventing an artificial computer world in which players ran around and bumped into each other. At each interaction, they would play PD with each other. Each time, players had to choose not knowing what the other side would do (the game is played with simultaneous choices) - but each DID remember what the other player had done before. Players in Axelrod's game built up memories over time of what other players do.

In this virtual world, Axelrod asked a simple question: what strategy wins? That is, from a selfish perspective, what could players do to maximize their own gains in these interactions, assuming that they cared only about themselves and not the welfare of any other players in the game?

The winning strategy, which has spawned a wealth of literature, was what Axelrod called Tit-for-Tat (TFT). The essence of the TFT strategy is simple:

• On the first round of an iterated game, Cooperate.
• On every subsequent round, do whatever the other player did the last round.

Here is Funakoshi's karate ni sente nashi in action. My best strategy is to start by trying to cooperate with the other side. If they cooperate back, then we both keep cooperating with each other, with both of us gaining every round. Only if the other side betrays me first do I resort to similar responses. I never launch the first strike.

Amidst all the debate among academics about TFT, here's the reality: no one has ever come up with a better strategy. In the long run, you and I and everyone else will be better off if we start by assuming that cooperation is possible.

Most of us will never get into a fistfight or a physical altercation. But all of us have interactions every day with people near to us and far away. In every one of those interactions, we have a choice: do I want to seek cooperation, or do I want to lash out? Find common ground or try to "win"? Funakoshi's advice is as simple as it is profound: don't be the first to start a fight. Reach out with an open hand. Sometimes people will return the favor, sometimes not. But we will always be better off if we do.

Suggestion for Bystanders: Equip Yourself

Since the election of Donald Trump a week and a half ago, our national conversation has been abuzz with different reactions. Attention is turning to the obvious question: what next? What impact will this election result have, and is it already having, on our country? And what can I do to steer things in a better direction?

There are lots of things to look at here, but the one that has caught my attention is the rise in incidents of harassment, intimidation, and violence against a range of minorities and vulnerable groups both during and after the election. That rise has been extensively documented, including here and here. Near and dear to my heart, far too many of these are taking place on university campuses.

Earlier this week I wrote an Open Letter to supporters of President-Elect Donald Trump, inviting them to help make America great again by reducing incidents of harassment, intimidation, and assault against racial, ethnic, and other minorities. As of this writing, that piece has been read over 2600 times. I hope that it has an impact in empowering people on all sides of the political spectrum - but especially Republicans and conservatives - to stand up to the ugliness noted above.

At the end of that letter I wrote this:

In the end, there are only two futures for our country. We either all succeed together in building a society free of fear, a society that can prosper and grow and realize its fullest potential. Or we turn on each other in fear and hatred and loathing and tear each other apart. I know which future I want to build. I hope you will join me.

I believe this in the depths of my heart: of all of the sins humanity is capable of, the sin of hatred and violence is the one most likely to destroy us all. It is also the one that should be most easily fixed, because hatred is a choice that can be made or unmade largely at will. There is no "tragedy of the commons" here, where otherwise-reasonable individuals generate bad outcomes. Unprovoked violence (verbal or physical) is simply bad.

As Clinton supporters and others on the political Left have struggled with how to respond to the election, there have been many suggestions and pieces of advice. From wearing safety pins to adopting anti-harassment bystander tactics, these ideas have been extensively circulated and discussed. I've no doubt that people will try many of these, that some will work, and that the discussion will go on.

A friend of mine recently wrote a blog post collecting general principles which such "resistance" efforts can be shaped by. In that collection she included two important reminders:

• We must face the world as it actually is.
• No one is going to save us. It is up to us.

Along these lines, I would like to offer a suggestion to many of my friends and fellow-travelers who, like me, are alarmed by the rise in harassment, intimidation, and violence directed against vulnerable individuals. I make this suggestion because, of all of the ideas I've seen batted around so far, I'm pretty sure no one else has made this one and no one else will.

Put simply, my suggestion is this: If you want to be an active bystander protecting victims of harassment, or if you are concerned about becoming a victim yourself, learn to defend yourself. Equip yourself, in other words, to fight.

This is rare advice, especially in liberal circles. Most folks in the tribe on the left eschew violence in all of its forms. There are good moral reasons for doing so, and I am not one to argue that violence solves problems. I have made my own position clear: I am a self-defense pacifist. I believe in the use of force only when one is under attack, and only with just enough force to successfully escape the attack.

But the need to train is not primarily about fighting. It's about dealing with fear. If you are in a situation in which you need to defend yourself or someone else, you are much less likely to have to actually fight if you are prepared to.

There's been a lot of discussion online about bystander tactics and how sympathetic people can help stand up to harassment and bullying. A lot of this is driven by the fact that most of the time, bystanders remain bystanders. People don't intervene. And the reason for that is fear.

People don't intervene in harassment situations, or especially during a physical attack, because they are worried about becoming a victim themselves. They're worried that the aggressor will turn on them. When someone is screaming angrily at someone else, it's not too much of a stretch to imagine that the screaming could turn to violence, and that the screamer might direct his anger and hatred at anyone who gets in the way.

Fear paralyzes. For bystanders, it prevents them from getting involved. For victims, it keeps them from effectively standing up for themselves or repelling the attack - even when the attack is only verbal. In situations of harassment and intimidation driven by hatred, the fear is physical and visceral. The big guy yelling epithets looks scary, in part because the back of our brain is screaming he could hurt me.

The only effective counter to fear is confidence, built on learned and practiced ability. The first time we learn to drive a car, it's really frightening - a mistake could get us seriously hurt, and we've never done it before. Once you've been driving for a while, it's no big deal. The fear goes away. The situation didn't change - you did, through experience and practice.

Dealing with physical threats is no different. If you have no training and no experience, it's scary as heck. With training and practice, it becomes less so. And you will make better decisions.

Bullies and harassers are used to frightened people - they know how to push them around and get what they want, which is generally to assert dominance. They aren't nearly so good at dealing with people who aren't frightened, who are assertive. Many of them will give up, because they don't know how to handle resistance. Some will try to escalate the situation, hoping to reestablish their dominance. If you're prepared to deal with that escalation, you can usually prevail there as well.

None of this is to say that you have to actually physically attack an abuser. Most harassment is verbal, with only the threat of violence behind it. You may not engage the harasser at all - see the video linked above for strategies that are victim-centric rather than aggressor-centric. You will be more confident and capable in those strategies if you know you can handle a physical escalation by the attacker.

I've written lots previously on this blog about self-defense, its relationship to fear, and ways and means of developing yourself. If I've kept your attention this long, I encourage you to go read those posts. Read my friend Dan Djurdjevic's stuff at The Way of Least Resistance. Find training opportunities near you - workshops, classes, clubs. Treat it like a skill to be developed over time, rather than an inoculation you can check off your list once. Practice, practice, practice.

If we are going to be effective in standing up to the bullies among us who are now emboldened by this past week's events, we have to be prepared. We need a full set of tools in our toolkit, and we need to be confident in our ability to use them. Do you want to be an effective bystander, to stand up for vulnerable people when they come under attack? Then be prepared to fight. Chances are you won't have to - but you'll be glad you're ready.

Karate and Life: 20 Precepts

Much of what I write - perhaps nearly all of what I write - touches on issues of power, conflict, and peace. Across areas of human endeavor I am endlessly fascinated with how power is created and exercised, how conflict is kindled and resolved, and what paths we should take in seeking to create peace. These ideas weave in and out of my writing, both here on the blog and elsewhere.

Regular readers know that a part of my personal exploration into these issues revolves around learning and practicing traditional Asian martial arts. In this I am both a student and a teacher; I love sharing what I know with others, and I have so much more to learn myself.

Those who spend time in the traditional martial arts world soon encounter one of its central tenets: that karate, or judo, or kung fu, are not merely for fighting in a ring or practicing in a gym. The benefits of the martial arts extend throughout the student's life, and indeed should be actively sought and considered far beyond the simple practice of physical techniques. This is probably why one of my most-read blog posts of all time is titled, The Benefits of Studying the Martial Arts.

Most of what I write isn't new - far deeper thinkers have been developing these ideas for centuries. What I try to do is simply bring them to audiences that might otherwise not be familiar with the practice of Do - "way", in Japanese. Karate-do, Judo, Aiki-do - all have this common root, a call to a broader understanding and self-improvement in service to others.

One of the best synopses of this is Gichin Funakoshi's list of 20 Precepts. Funakoshi, an Okinawan master who brought karate to Japan in the early part of the 20th century, is often credited as "the father of modern karate". He wrote his Precepts as a way to pass his notion of Do along to his students, to remind them that they were engaged in a calling far higher than learning how to defend themselves in a fight.

Starting with this entry I am planning to write a series of blog posts, one for each of the 20 Precepts, with musings and thoughts on how these apply to the world around us outside the dojo (literally, "Place of the Way"). I hope these will be of interest to practitioners and non-practioners alike.

The first Precept is this:

Karate-do begins and ends with respect.

In traditional martial arts, this is summed up in the bow, or rei. Students and instructors alike "bow in" and "bow out" when they enter and leave the training space, and bow to each other at the beginning and end of each exercise. Bowing is a physical means by which we remind ourselves of the culture of respect.

Some people are uncomfortable in traditional dojos because of this formality. Where else in our lives do we have such physical, visceral symbols of respect? In some traditional churches (though fewer all the time), people bow or reverence the altar or the crucifix, but in my experience this practice isn't universal even in churches that do practice it.

The underlying principle, however, is sound - and sorely needed. When we begin and end interactions with a sign of mutual respect, it is much more difficult in between to mistreat each other. If our first thought when starting a new conversation or walking into a meeting is, "I respect the people here as fellow colleagues", our whole demeanor changes. And if things go sideways in that meeting, ending with a similar posture of respect reminds us that we're on the same team, that we're there to solve problems together, that we share much in common.

In our culture today, in 21st century America, we have almost no such signs of respect. And where we do have them, we reserve them almost exclusively for our friends, our family, for those who are inside our boundaries of comfort. "If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you?"

The Christian call to love one another as God loves us can be hard, especially today. That verse is followed by an admonition: "But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return". Even if we cannot imagine ourselves going so far, can we at least take the first step of respecting our enemies?

Funakoshi put this Precept first, I suspect, because he understood that without mutual respect (even mutual love), people will use their power to hurt each other. Karate is a form of power, but we exercise power every day in our conversations and interactions with others. When we start and end with a posture of respect, in between we will work to make sure that we don't use our power to harm, but to help. When I respect others, I want to help them. That is a Way worth following.

Guns Are Often Not the Best Tool

I have made the point here before that I am neither a strict pacifist, nor do I believe that guns cannot be used for legitimate self-defense purposes (here and here). I believe that, on balance, guns are often not the best tool for self-defense; they are certainly not the panacea that some seem to want to claim. But I do not come at this issue as a fanatic, either pro-gun or anti-gun.

From that standpoint, the following story is an interesting one. It is told by a gun owner, about another gun owner who appears to be both responsible and thoughtful - not a "gun not", and not a proponent of openly carrying guns either for symbolism or for deterrence:

Man Attacked in Walmart Won't Open Carry Again

I appreciate this fellow's perspective, and the restraint which he showed in this situation. He is certainly correct that the best use of a gun for self-defense involves NOT pulling the trigger. I give him props for properly noting that situational awareness is the best defense. I think he's also probably right in his conclusion that openly carrying a weapon in this case made the defender a target - that had he not been carrying his weapon visibly, this fellow would not have attacked him at all. There's an irony there, but I'll leave that for others.

Those who have read my writings on this subject before know that I prefer unarmed means of self-defense where possible, and am a proponent of traditional martial arts in particular (though there are a great many "non-traditional" systems, including Russian Systema and Krav Maga, which can be highly effective as well). Interestingly, the story linked above actually helps make that point - this fellow would have been better off had he not been carrying at all, even if the other guy still attacked him, provided that he was ready to deal with such an attack.

The story itself is fairly simple: a stranger grabs a baseball bat from a rack in the aisle of a store and takes a swing at the protagonist's head with it. Here's the meat of the story:

The man picked up a bat from the bat rack, and without warning, drew back and swung it at Mr. Walker’s head with full force. 

Unlike most people who would have frozen due to the unexpected nature of the attack, or who would have reflexively recoiled away, Mr. Walker stepped forward into the swing and turned his shoulder into his attacker. His reaction both reduced the force of the blow, and kept his assailant from making a potentially deadly strike to his head. 

Mr Walker then stepped back to create distance and drew his open-carried Sig Sauer P226 in .357 Sig, racked the slide the chamber a round (he carries it on an empty chamber), and ordered his attacker to the ground.

Martial artists will recognize this scenario - the baseball bat attack is one of the most common "armed attacker vs. unarmed defender" scenarios we use in training. And this guy's first reaction - to step in rather than out - was a good start.

From there, however, the best next step would have been to control the attacker, taking away his option to continue the attack by immobilizing the arm, taking away the bat, or preferably both. There are dozens of ways to do this, and most reasonably experienced martial artists could think up two or three of them on the spot.

So while I applaud the defender in this story for his restraint in not firing his gun, the fact that he didn't is not because of his virtue or skill - it's because the attacker chose to comply rather than continue the attack. As many in the self-defense community will tell you, that's a weak reed on which to hang your fate.

By his own admission, the defender "stepped back to create distance" - let's assume six to eight feet at most, a quick couple of steps. That would take him out of immediate swing range, but not so far that the fellow with the bat couldn't try again. A determined, or crazed (or drugged-up) attacker could very well do so.

This is where watching movies and TV gets us in trouble. On screen, there is a certain narrative omniscience - we see that the good guy has a gun, and the bad guy sees it to. But what if, in this case, the bad guy didn't see the gun? Or what if his judgment was impaired, or he thought he could get the swing in before the gunman pulled the trigger? Any of these is possible in the real world, and experienced cops and prosecutors will tell you they all happen.

At that point, our gun-armed defender faces a terrible choice. An attacker with a baseball bat who has already swung at him once is 6-8 feet away and charging again. That attack is going to land in 0.5 seconds, tops. In that time, the defender must make a life-or-death choice: to fire or not. Both choices can lead to disaster. It's a terrible position to be in - shoot or don't shoot, either can ruin your life.

The martial artist does not face this same choice, having a range of tools at his disposal. In response to the initial attack, he can take away the bat and immobilize the attacker. He can strike in a way that injures, but does not kill. He can break the attacker's arm, rendering another swing impossible. He has a wealth of options, limited only by his training, his skill, and his imagination. Almost none of those options leave anybody dead.

Every attack is different. One problem in debates over self-defense is that they are anecdote-based: we present stories or make up scenarios and then argue that our preferred method would be the best way to deal with this situation. Rarely in life in there one answer to everything. But in self-defense, guns present for me too stark a choice: kill or be killed. I prefer to leave matters of life and death to others, and to try to fill my toolbox with skills and abilities to cover a scaleable range of possibilities. I applaud this gun owner for the outcome of this case. But he would have been better off with training and practice in place of the gun.

Student Safety and Assault Prevention: There's Got To Be a Better Way

There's a lot of attention these days to the topic of sexual assaults on college campuses. This has been a good thing in that institutions and students are becoming much more aware of the issues. I hope that all of this attention will reduce the number of assaults, sooner rather than later. Young women (and men) deserve a college experience free from fear for their personal safety.

I have blogged on these issues several times, including a response a couple of years ago to a highly-publicized case from Amherst College. More recently there was the hashtag battle between #Notallmen and #Yesallwomen, which served to illustrate some of the battle lines in the ongoing struggle to redefine the culture of sexuality and relationships on our campuses. This is a fluid discussion in which there are stops and starts, advances and retreats. Overall I think progress has been made, but there are still plenty of challenges ahead.

One of those challenges is the tendency for people who are really on the same side of the issue to get in fights with each other. Nowhere is this more apparent to me than the continuing battle between what might be called the "don't blame the victim" perspective and the self-defense perspective. An article in today's Inside Higher Ed showcases an excellent case of this:

U. of Wisconsin faces criticism over list of safety tips

Because I work in higher education but am also involved in the self-defense community, I can see both sides of this issue. The "don't blame the victim"/sexual assault awareness folks have a point: historically, rape and sexual assault have been protected by a culture that tolerated arguments such as "she was wearing X" or "she was flirting" or "she was drunk" or "she had it coming, what did she expect to happen when Y". Many a rapist has walked free because our culture took these kinds of arguments seriously. That is changing, which is good. But these kinds of arguments still need to be rendered entirely off-limits and illegitimate, much as we have done with "boys will be boys" and drunk driving.

So I understand both the legitimacy of concerns about victim-blaming, and the sensitivity to the issue. This can be a very touchy subject because real victim-blaming has been used to mask and protect rapists in much the same way that the Confederate battle flag was used to mask and rally racists in the 1950s and 1960s.

The problem is that this sensitivity is being turned against a different point of view altogether - the self-defense community. From the self-defense perspective, nothing that was on the now-removed U. Wisconsin website was problematic or controversial. Advice about awareness ("keep your head on a swivel") and forethought ("don't look like a victim", "make yourself a hard target") are stock in trade for a community of people who, in my experience, are both extremely well-meaning and extremely knowledgeable about what they deal in.

These are folks who study the problem (interpersonal violence) closely and understand it in ways the rest of us don't. Their advice is practical and effective. And many of them dispense this advice for free out of a sense of wanting to help people lead lives free from fear and victimization. In other words, they're on the same side of the issue as their critics - both sides want the incidence of sexual assault and rape to be reduced to zero.

Certainly there are elements of context which can help. Sexual assault awareness campaigns often point out - quite rightly - that the strong majority of such assaults are committed not by strangers attacking while you are out walking in the dark, but by acquaintances who are known to the victim and who gain the victim's trust first. That kind of assault calls for a whole different set of responses, chief among them teaching college men not to engage in assault and rape (and their peers to punish them when they do).

That said, there are sexual assaults and rapes by strangers, just as there are muggings and robberies by strangers. The kind of advice that the UW police put out is standard anti-mugging advice, which nobody questions. And while we also want to engage in other strategies that reduce the incidence of such stranger-based attacks, it makes sense to educate students about how to avoid them. With other kinds of crimes, this is not a controversial idea - but then, other kinds of crimes don't have the history that rape does.

This seems to be the real crux of the matter: how can we encourage women (and men too!) to learn to be smart and take basic steps to protect themselves without sending the message that we are blaming victims for what happens to them? This is a political and linguistic problem, not a real contradiction. There is no logical way to get from the statement "I am learning self-defense in order to better protect myself and my friends" to "it's my fault if someone else attacks me". In my field we call this a conflict of perception rather than a conflict of interests.

There's a side point here that illustrates the gap in perceptions and cultural misunderstanding between these two communities. It shows up nicely in this quote from the Inside Higher Ed article linked above:

Referring to the post's suggestion that a student should keep his or her "head on a swivel," one Jezebel commenter asked, "So literally live every moment like I'm an Army Ranger deployed to Afghanistan?"

I have heard this same reaction from some folks I've trained in self-defense. They take advice about awareness to mean that they need to be afraid all the time in order to protect themselves. That's a real turn-off, and I can understand why untrained civilians would run away from that kind of "advice".

But the truth is very different. I do live with my "head on a swivel" most of the time, in that I try to be aware of the people around me at all times - where they are, which direction they're moving in, and some basic impression of who they are and what they're up to. The fact that I do this - and the fact that I have some physical training in the martial arts to receive and counter attacks - means that I am not afraid. Awareness doesn't create fear, it dispels it. It is part of a package of living in confidence that, I think, is a goal shared by nearly everybody.

But I also get that, until you have undergone some training and experienced this kind of confidence, it's counterintuitive. People outside that circle mistake awareness for hyper vigilance and decide they don't want any part of it. And because it is an experience that is difficult to convey solely with words, the words that the self-defense community (including the UW police department) uses are often inadequate to the task.

This is where we need something else I've written about recently: mutual respect. Rather than attacking each other, I hope that the self-defense community and the sexual assault awareness and advocacy community can come together for an open and honest dialogue that starts from a simple premise: they are both on the same side and they both want the same thing. Both sides need to understand the other better, and both need to recognize that the other has something important to bring to the table. If that happens, perhaps we can overcome this particular challenge and find a way to incorporate the wisdom of self-protection into our larger societal response to sexual assault and violence.

Women, Culture, and Self-Defense: What does #Yesallwomen mean for the self-defense community?

There has been a growing conversation on the internet surrounding issues of rape, sexual assault, and how we should deal with these things both legally and culturally. I say "growing" in the sense that the conversation has been taking up more bandwidth lately - driven both by more stories of sexual assault coming out into the open and by ongoing efforts to get institutions, especially colleges and universities, to do something about it. But it is also a "growing" conversation in the sense that it is getting more sophisticated, with more points of view being circulated. I think that this is a good thing, although like all important conversations it is uncomfortable and heated at times.

I wrote a blog post a year and a half ago in response to one of the early public stories of a rape survivor, this one at Amherst College. At the time, I tried to make what I thought was a somewhat novel argument: that the issue was fundamentally cultural and would require cultural solutions, and that men needed to be a big part of those solutions since the people creating the problem are overwhelmingly men. I summarized a lot of these ideas this way:

I applaud and support the conversations, public and private, that women are having about appropriate boundaries, respecting themselves, and being smart in self-protection. What we need along side those are men's conversations: what is appropriate sexual behavior? What does "respect" mean? What other kinds of attitudes and expectations do we carry around that, let loose in the atmosphere, encourage some men to push (and, ultimately, violate) those boundaries? And when guys do violate those boundaries, what do we do about it? (The answer to that last, historically, as been "nothing". That needs to stop.)

That post remains one of my most-read posts of all time. I guess it touched a nerve somewhere.

Fast forward 18 months - in fits and starts I appear to be getting my wish. The other day I read this excellent article on the Daily Beast calling out Nerd Culture and the kinds of narratives it creates that contribute to an "entitlement mentality" on the part of guys - just the sort of narrative that can lead to assaults. Yes, the UCSB killer is an extreme manifestation of that attitude - but the difference may be more one of quantity than of kind.

And since so much of our modern conversation is in Twitterspeak, we now have a pair of competing hashtags: #Notallmen and #Yesallwomen. The former appears to be a rearguard defense by some men who feel ... unjustly accused? tarred with the wrong brush? ... by a conversation that talks about men as the source of the problem. I actually anticipated that reaction in my 2012 post, so I guess I don't find it that surprising. Regardless, the former hashtag spawned the latter, the best discussion of which I found here (I'll leave aside the question of whether the title is appropriate or not; the article is an excellent one).

So far as I can tell, much of the point of #Yesallwomen is an insistence that women want to be treated decently as human beings, by all men. It is an effort to put the onus back on men to change their behavior so that women can enjoy the kind of basic personal security that most men take for granted. And though I used somewhat different language in my earlier article, I wholeheartedly agree.

But while I support the drive to get men to both behave better and to better police each other's behavior, this raises an interesting question for me from another facet of my life: what should happen to the cottage industry of self-defense training courses for women? I've blogged on this subject before, including here (also one of my most-read posts) and here (my highest hit count of all time). I have been supportive of good self-defense training and practice, and have even offered such courses myself from time to time.

So am I barking up the wrong tree? In light of #Yesallwomen and the focus on changing men's behavior, should we be talking at all about women learning to defend themselves against assault? I am sure that some in the #Yesallwomen camp would accuse me and others who teach self-defense of contributing to the problem by focusing on women, rather than men, as the source of the solution.

But as much as I support the argument that the best solution is to change male culture and behavior, I don't buy the notion that giving women self-defense tools makes matters worse. I agree that women shouldn't have to fend off a guy by yelling at him, much less by well-aimed punches and kicks. But so long as there are men who behave badly - and that will be true for some time - I think women are better off having those tools than not.

Moreover, there is a spillover effect from physical training to mental attitude and ability. There are a lot of variations on this theme in the martial arts world; here are two, from very different practitioner/teachers:

The point here is simple: when you gain confidence in your ability to defend yourself physically, that confidence works backwards to all stages of human interaction. The skill to strike, or throw, or disarm, or lock, is not just the ability to do that one thing. It also carries within it the ability to say "no", the ability to draw boundaries, the ability to walk away from a situation long before there is any need to engage in combat.

As I have argued before, this kind of ability doesn't come from taking an afternoon workshop or two. It comes from long and disciplined study. What art you study matters far less than making it a part of your life. But even a little exposure can have a significant impact on confidence and the ability to exert social control, set boundaries, and say "no" at a much earlier point.

So I believe there is still a place in the discussion for the martial arts and a focus on self-defense. Not all women will choose to make this a part of their own solution - although I think many more should consider it. But until we reach the day when #Notallmen becomes #Nomenatall, I will continue to teach and encourage women (and men) to learn to defend themselves, in body, mind, and spirit.

Gun "Rights" and Self-Defense: Listen to the Experts

Given my ongoing interest in self defense issues, I end up reading & seeing a lot of pretty dogmatic stuff about self defense on social media. A lot of is, as I've pointed out before, is based on revenge fantasies, idealized notions of righteous uses of violence, and a lot of misunderstandings about real-world threats, usually spoken from comfortable middle-class white privilege.

If you're really going to buy a gun (or, indeed, take any serious steps) for the purposes of self-defense, you need to do better than dogma. I recently ran across an interview that should be required reading for anyone with even a passing interest on the subject:

Self-Defense and the Law

The interview participants are a martial arts expert who trains MMA fighters; a prison guard/cop/military combat medic who is one of the nation's foremost experts and authors on self-defense; and a former prosecutor who now works as a criminal defense attorney specializing in violence and self-defense cases. These are folks who deal with real-world cases of self-defense (and other forms of violence) day in and day out.

The entire interview is well worth reading; here are a few particularly interesting tidbits (Harris is the blogger hosting the conversation; Levine is the lawyer; Thornton is the martial artist; Miller is the cop/guard/author. Underlining has been added for emphasis). The punch line here: if you want to talk in public about guns, or self-defense, or violence, you owe it to yourself and the rest of us to understand reality. Let's stop babbling about Hollywood fantasies and bumper-sticker platitudes about Good Guys and Bad Guys.

Sam Harris: One sometimes hears horror stories about people who engaged in seemingly necessary acts of self-defense and yet were zealously prosecuted and landed in prison. What is the worst that can happen?

Steven Levine: The worst that can happen is that you go to prison for the rest of your life, especially if you kill somebody. In California, even if you have a valid self-defense claim, the DA’s office will typically still file charges on you. I recently had a client, a 50-year-old nurse, who was in her own home when her ex-boyfriend (for 26 years) came over. He’d moved out 7 months earlier. There was a small history of domestic violence. But in fact, he had recently assaulted their 22-year-old daughter by head-butting her. While they were discussing things downstairs in the living room, he picked up a sledgehammer. She grew worried, told him to leave, and retreated upstairs. He put down the hammer but followed her upstairs and told her he did not have to leave. Once upstairs, he was yelling at her. Finally, she grabbed her gun. She’s a cancer survivor. She’s had a double mastectomy. She’s half his size, and she told him to leave. He went for the gun, and she shot him. The bullet went through his rib cage and he died. She tried to save him by doing CPR.

The jury convicted her of murder despite the fact that she said that she was scared for her life. 

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Steven Levine:  The real issue is using force on another person. And I’m telling you, most people do not succeed with self-defense claims in California.

Sam Harris: I suspect that most martial artists and gun owners will find that a pretty startling statement.

Steven Levine: The way to prevail with a claim of self-defense is to have it accepted prior to filing, because once the DA’s office is invested in your case, they’re just not going to let it go. It’s at the pre-filing stage where you need for them to say, “I’m not filing this; that was just self-defense.” If they think it’s something more, then you’re going into the system.

Matt Thornton: The fact that most self-defense claims don’t succeed doesn’t strike me as that surprising when you consider that most victims know their assailants—and much of this violence occurs in the home. 

Rory Miller: In my experience, most of the people who claimed self-defense had been involved in a mutual fight and were rationalizing it as self-defense. 

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Matt Thornton:  Sam noted that for a self-defense claim to be valid, the other person must have the means, opportunity, and intent (I’ve also seen this covered under the rubric of “jeopardy”) to harm you. But there is a fourth requirement that one often encounters:preclusion. This is the idea that force has to be the only available option (i.e., all peaceful means of escaping danger were “precluded”). My guess is that many self-defense cases fail because the victims are unable to show preclusion. I also suspect that the proliferation of “stand your ground” laws affects this fourth criterion. Can you say something about this and about whether you think such laws are a good idea?

Steven Levine: Well, like Florida, a person being threatened in California has no duty to retreat and can stand and fight. I was amused when I read so much criticism of the Florida Stand Your Ground Law when we have that here, albeit not in a statute, but as part of the common law. Just don’t be the initial aggressor here, because then stand your ground is not available.

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Steven Levine: GBI [Great Bodily Injury] in California is particularly broad: For example, a cut lip can be GBI, a broken bone of any kind, a bruise under the eye, and DAs have no qualms about alleging what to common sense seems like a minor injury as GBI. But the basic fact is that if you cause serious injury to your assailant in the course of defending yourself—if you stab or shoot him, for instance—your actions are going to be heavily scrutinized, and the DAs will err on the side of caution. This means that they will at least file the case, and you are going to find yourself hiring a lawyer. 

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Matt Thornton:  One point I’d like to make in this context is that the best defense against violence is always your own mind. People tend to overlook this because it sounds like an empty platitude, but it’s true. Some people acquire the maturity and understanding to avoid violence early on, but these days—and this is obviously a good thing—most of us go our whole lives without encountering violence, so we need to be taught what to look for. We also need to be willing to see it, and we need to know how to manage our distance from it.

From the victim’s perspective, an attack may seem to have occurred suddenly, but we know that in most cases it was anything but sudden.

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Steven Levine: If you’re actually in a fight, and you’re scared, and you think you’re about to suffer great bodily injury, then you have the right to defend yourself with deadly force. But the major criteria are: Did they start the fight? Is the fight actually happening? I mean, we have all seen the movies where the bad guys pick on the person who they think is the easy mark, and to the audience’s delight, he kicks all their asses. Well, in real life, if you are being attacked, you can kick ass, but if you pull out a gun and start shooting, you will have problems explaining the reasonableness of your conduct. If you pull out a knife and stab three guys to death, that also presents problems.

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Matt Thornton:  I am certainly not suggesting one shouldn’t learn to use a weapon. To the contrary, I am saying that every weapon comes with a great responsibility, not just when it is used, but also in the ongoing training needed to remain competent in its use. For a civilian, carrying a knife or gun dramatically increases the danger posed should he find himself in a fight—especially if he has to grapple on the ground. This is, in part, due to the fact that it will always increase, rather than decrease, the stakes (as in the example I offered above). Because of this, a weapon should make one less likely, rather than more likely, to engage in any conflict; but it takes a certain level of maturity to realize that (the lack of which was on display in the Zimmerman case). I realize some self-defense experts claim that every physical conflict is a potentially lethal situation, but what I don’t think many grasp is that the addition of weapons into the situation almost guarantees that is so. Some might ask, but what if the attacker has a knife? The question assumes that a rational response to such a situation might be to pull out my own and engage in a knife fight.

A Reminder: Fighting & Violence Are Not a Joke

There's a standard joke that floats around the martial arts world. A martial arts blogger did a good riff on it recently:

How to Register Your Hands As Deadly Weapons

The humor here comes from the way in which non-martial artists view the martial arts as being somehow vastly more deadly and dangerous than other forms of fighting. One of my own young students the other day confidently proclaimed that, once you earn a black belt, "you become a ninja!" Then there's this:

This is all good fun, and amusing especially to folks on the "inside" who know that all martial arts really consists of is applied biomechanics and a lot of hard work and practice.

But the danger underneath the humor - indeed, the danger underlying our casual attitude towards violence at all levels and in nearly all forms - is that any violence is potentially deadly. Gun-rights advocates talk about carrying guns around as if they were keys or handkerchiefs - as if they weren't in fact extremely dangerous tools. And then there's this tragic story:

Homicide by assault charge for teen

Sports Illustrated ran a feature story on this incident in a recent issue. It's not a story that fits into standard narratives about out-of-control youth sports. The 17 year old kid involved was, by most accounts, a good kid, responsible at home, and a good student. In a brief interview obtained by SI, it's not even clear if he knows why he did it.

Regardless of the outcome of this particular case, or the ultimate measure of justice therein, there is an important lesson here: any violence carries the potential for catastrophe. There were no guns, no knives, no weapons involved here - just a 17 year old kid, a 46 year old man, and a single punch that the man didn't expect and didn't see coming. That was enough to end the man's life and alter the kid's forever.

I have argued before that the measure of violence is not in how much damage it causes but how it is used and under what circumstances. This case serves as a reminder that, all jokes aside, hands can kill.

The real value of martial arts is not in teaching people how to do more damage (hence my discomfort with the popularity of MMA as a sport), but in how to control the damage they can do. Proper training in the martial arts makes you less dangerous, not more, because you have more control over what you do with the tools you have.

As this sad story reminds us, anyone can kill with their bare hands. As Thomas Hobbes wrote centuries ago, "For as to the strength of body, the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest".
I hope that, in the wake of the tragedy in Utah, more folks will remember this and treat violence of all kinds with the respect and care it deserves.

Redirecting a Situation

I wrote yesterday that one of the benefits of studying martial arts is that it takes away fear. Here's a concrete example of how that plays out, posted by a martial artist with 30 years' experience whom I greatly admire:

So I gave a man $10 in town. Why? I realize now that he started off trying to mug me. He said: "I need money," as he towered over me.I said: "Whatever's happened?"Then he started telling me that he'd just got out of prison, how tough things were, etc."That sounds terrible."So I took him to a booth at the train station where I bought an iced tea to change a $20 and gave him ten. He thanked me, shook my hand and off he went to catch a bus.

Why do I find this remarkable? There's no fight here, no battle royale, no opportunity for this guy to display his fighting prowess. But this is exactly the outcome that should come about with a true martial arts master.

What's going on here? A big man comes up to mug our protagonist. Because he is not afraid (despite the fellow's size) and because he has half a lifetime's experience thinking about confrontation, cooperation, and how to turn a situation around with a minimum of effort, it doesn't even occur to the martial artist that he is being mugged. He does not react in fear. He is freed, both by his confidence and by his advanced thinking, to response as one human being to another. It's only after the whole transaction is over does it occur to him that the tall guy initially intended it to be a mugging.

This is the transformative power of advanced martial arts. It's not in the ability to "beat people up", but in freeing the practitioner to be the best person they can be, even when others around you aren't. This interaction could easily have turned confrontational, even violent. And likely the master would have "won". But to what end? As it is, he did something nice for a fellow human being, and in the process taught the recently-released ex-con a valuable lesson: that cooperation and kindness really do exist in the world, and that you don't have to get what you need by threatening others.

If you're interested in more of this fellow's writings, you can follow his blog "The Way of Least Resistance" at http://dandjurdjevic.blogspot.com.

The Benefits of Studying the Martial Arts

The martial arts suffer from a modern problem common to a lot of activities. Studying and practicing martial arts has real value, but that value has been obscured by the obvious fantasies of martial arts movies and the subtle fantasies of the MMA world. Most of what people "know" about the martial arts comes from watching “Karate Kid” and the latest cage match on cable.

Martial arts is also a business – one that has almost no barriers to entry. Anybody can set up a studio or school. And there’s a lot of (usually obscure and petty) politics in the world of martial arts, such that schools are constantly breaking away and starting new lines. The result of all of this is that if you want to study a martial art, you have a wealth of options – but in that crowded field there’s lots of hype, fantastic promises, and fluff as schools try to grab a marketing edge over their competitors.

In all of this, the value of studying martial arts tends to get lost. People who have been on the path for a while often understand – although there is always more to learn – but we do a lousy job of explaining this stuff to laypeople who aren’t already committed. Those who do try to answer the “what are martial arts good for?” question are usually selling something.

In the interest of full disclosure: I run a branch of a martial arts school, and I would love to have more students. But I don’t expect very many prospective students to read this, since most of my blog posts get a few dozen readers at best. Moreover, I do believe in the value of martial arts study – I don't teach it to make money, but because I’m passionate about it and think it’s worth sharing. So here’s my attempt to answer the question, Why should you consider studying martial arts? What value is there in it?

• Discipline

Lots of martial arts schools talk about “teaching discipline”. This is one of the things that seems to have sunk into the public consciousness. I’ve seen many parents bring kids into martial arts schools, or consider signing them up for lessons, in the hopes that their kids will learn to be more disciplined. These parents are often frustrated when karate class doesn’t turn their child into an angel (though transformations have been known to occur, they are rare).

The reality is more complex and unfortunately disappointing to some. Tools of “traditional” Asian discipline – negative feedback, often accompanied by physical punishment to some degree – have largely been abandoned in the martial arts world, which is a good thing. Those tools didn’t teach discipline anyway – they just teach behavior modification, often with unintended consequences.

The truth is that discipline is, and always must be, cultivated from within. It is the virtue of doing something over and over again with focus and determination, towards the achievement of a future goal. As an instructor, I can only do two things: I can demonstrate discipline, and I can give you the opportunity to practice it. These things most martial arts schools do accomplish – with some caveats.

Studying a traditional martial art is a structured activity. That structure of basic movements gives students the opportunity to cultivate and practice discipline. Lots of other activities do the same thing – the study of a musical instrument, or practice in another sport, or pursuit of the arts. If what you are looking for is simply a chance to practice discipline, the opportunities are nearly endless.

With its ranks of promotion (a modern invention of Jigoro Kano and Gichin Funakoshi), modern traditional martial arts offer students a means to gauge their progress – and thereby a means of rewarding discipline. But this only works if promotion is tied to actually achieving what is required of a given level. Schools that promote on the basis of “time in the program” – and there are many such “belt factories” – destroy the value of martial arts as an exercise in discipline, because there is no link between discipline and achievement. If I’m going to get the next belt anyway, why work hard?

So if you are looking to develop discipline in yourself or in your child, by all means give martial arts a try. But discipline only comes from your efforts – the martial arts merely provide the medium. If that medium does not otherwise appeal to you, it probably won’t work.

• Physical Fitness

Unlike playing clarinet or painting, martial arts is a physical activity. And in order to develop as a martial artist, most people need to improve their physical condition to some degree – to develop balance, stamina, coordination, and strength. Some schools place more emphasis on physical conditioning, others less. Some traditional arts, like taijiquan (or Tai Chi), do very little for your cardiovascular fitness or limb strength, but are great for balance. Like any other form of physical exercise, you should match your activity with your goals. If your goal is to develop a muscle-bound, Arnold Schwarzenegger body, martial arts isn’t what you want. But if you’re looking for a good combination of strength, speed, endurance, flexibility, and balance, martial arts can get you there.

If you want to get a good workout, find a school or a class that will give you that. Watch a class or two to get a sense of the level of physical activity demanded. As with discipline, martial arts provides an opportunity for physical fitness. Whether you actually get that benefit or not depends in part on how hard you work at it, and also in part on whether that’s a part of what the school emphasizes.

• Self-Confidence

A lot of parents enroll their kids in karate or tae kwon do classes because they want their child to become more confident. This is one area in which martial arts really is a good choice. If you successfully pursue martial arts, you will gain self-confidence in a couple of different ways.

First, practicing martial arts gives most people confidence in their own physical self – that they can, if called upon, defend themselves (more on this below). This is important for both children and adults, but probably more so for kids. Even though in most neighborhoods and schools actual violence between children is a vanishingly rare thing, most kids don’t really understand that yet. There will always be other kids who trash-talk, bully, or otherwise intimidate by threatening to “beat somebody up”. Just knowing that you’re not helpless in that situation can be a huge confidence-booster.

This is true for adults as well. Although it’s even more rare for adults to run into confrontations that have any possibility of escalating to violence, most untrained and unpracticed adults are very much afraid of such situations. They assume that an aggressive person has probably been in fights before, whereas most people (because schools and neighborhoods are so safe) haven’t. Obviously there are exceptions, and there are adults who are already quite confident in their ability to stand up for themselves. But they are a minority. The rest of us tend to be afraid of even the mildest forms of violence – and so we often lack the confidence needed to defuse a tense or aggressive situation. As with kids, some experience and some practice can really help take the edge off that fear.

More broadly, the structure of traditional martial arts (with a defined curriculum of skills and standards and a visible system of promotion) encourages the development of self-confidence more broadly. Everybody comes in to the martial arts as a neophyte, and at first everything seems strange. Many people at the white belt stage will watch what advanced belts are doing and think, “there’s no way I could ever do that.” But as people advance up through the ranks, and are rewarded for their efforts with new belts and certificates, they learn that they can do things they never thought possible. Achievement – especially the achievement of goals that seemed insurmountably difficult – is the greatest self-confidence builder there is. Indeed, concrete achievement is the only source of self-confidence that will stand the test of time.

• Self Defense

Many people come in to the martial arts specifically because they want to learn how to defend themselves. Some of these folks have been victims in the past; others are simply worried about being victims in the future. Next to firearms sales (a topic I’ve dealt with before), martial arts is the most common and visible “product” marketed for self-defense purposes.

There are lengthy debates within the martial arts community about how effective traditional martial arts are for self-defense, and which style or techniques are best. These debates will probably always continue, but they are of very little interest to outsiders. The layman walking in the door wants to know: if I do this, will I be better equipped to defend myself?

The answer, in general, is Yes. Martial arts practice does increase people’s ability to escape a dangerous situation unharmed. It’s not a panacea – there are always folks (often, I’ve found, 10 year old boys) who want to play “what if”: “But what if he does this, or what if he has a knife, or what if there are four of them, or …?” The truth is that there is nothing in the world – not mastery of a martial art, or a gun, or body armor, or anything else – that can protect you in all situations. It’s all a question of relative risk; if I can defend myself against the most common attacks that constitute 80% to 90% of the assaults I’m likely to face, that’s a lot better than 0%.

Unfortunately, this is another area in which school (not so much style, but school) matters. Every style of martial arts is rooted in practicality, else it would never have been developed in the first place. Some schools make sure that those roots are still strong, and include practical applications as a part of their curriculum. Others are more interested in the artistry of traditional forms, or in sport fighting applications (Olympic Tae Kwon Do comes to mind), that are further removed from “street” applications. If self-defense is important to you, find a school that includes practical application as a part of their curriculum. I guarantee that you can find such a school, probably pretty close by, if you look.

• Greater Than the Sum of Its Parts: Body and Mind Together

To this point, the argument for studying martial arts looks OK but not radically exciting. It’s an opportunity to develop discipline and get in shape – but so are lots of other things. It’s a good way to boost self-confidence. It’s a means of learning self-defense – if you go to the right school. These are all good things, but they are mostly things that can be obtained elsewhere.

So why martial arts? What’s special about this arena? It’s tempting for those of us “on the inside”, who have already travelled some way down the path, to say “you have to experience it to understand. Trust us – you’ll Get It once you get far enough into it.” As a marketing approach, that’s lousy. And I think it’s not unreasonable that somebody thinking about starting something new and strange should expect those already in it to be able to articulate why this is such a good idea.

So here’s my take: the truest benefit of studying martial arts isn’t found in any individual thing, like fitness or self-defense skill. The gift that the founders of traditional martial arts have given us is that the martial arts, practiced as a whole system, are a means of bringing together our bodies and our minds into a coherent, balanced unity. Learning and developing as a martial artist is as much a mental exercise as it is a physical one. The farther you go in practice and development as a martial artist, the more you have to learn about yourself; the more you have to think about other people, and how you relate to them; the more you see how thin the boundaries are between the practical and the aesthetic. The best martial artists have mastered not only a set of physical skills, but abilities in thinking philosophically, morally, socially, spatially. Becoming a good martial artist requires focus, discipline, drive, stamina, and confidence. In a phrase, it pushes you to become a better version of you.

It has been argued that studying martial arts makes you better at everything you do. This sounds bombastic, but it is in fact true. I would not argue that it is the only discipline in the world that has this result; it may be that mastering any number of other things will have the same effect. But I can say, from personal experience as well as meetings and relationships with many martial artists at varying levels, that they are all better people for walking the path.

So here, finally, is the real benefit of studying the martial arts: not to make you a different person, but to improve yourself in who you are and who you can be. And that, it seems to me, is a pursuit well worth the effort.

An Odd Conjunction of Interests: Politics & Self-Defense

I've been resisting the urge to blog further on politics in the aftermath of the election, if for no other reason than that pretty much everything worth saying has been said. I've been sorry to see many in the GOP make fools of themselves post-election, but I hope that this is a temporary condition and that the party will manage to pull itself together and forge a new coalition in the future. It would certainly beat further whining about the "new divide" between "takers" and "makers".

So why go back to this well? I was alerted to a very odd conjunction that brings together two interests of mine - politics and self defense. (H/t to my friend Erin Jenne for finding the original story.) The conjunction emerges from a post-mortem story by CBS News in the immediate aftermath of the election:

Advisor: Romney "Shellshocked" By Loss

The particular bit that got my attention was this:

"There's nothing worse than when you think you're going to win, and you don't," said another adviser. "It was like a sucker punch."

Here's the thing about "sucker punches" - the sucker is the guy who got punched. In the world of self defense, the "sucker punch" is the attack that you should have seen coming but didn't. There's all kinds of excellent advice out there for how to be prepared - see here for one excellent discussion. But the common denominator is that "sucker punches" are thrown by people who are in plain sight. They are different from sneak attacks or other kinds of things that you really didn't or couldn't see coming.

Why bother with this particular phrase, which the unnamed Romney advisor was probably using without thought? Because I think it's unintentionally emblematic. Lots of folks (Nate Silver being the most famous, but hardly the only one) accurately predicted the election well ahead of time, using nothing but publicly-available polling data and some mathematical smarts. All of this was easily available to the GOP - they chose not to avail themselves of it. Just as there is plenty of knowledge about how to defend myself, or even to avoid or evade confrontations altogether - so if I get "sucker punched," I chose not to take advantage of those opportunities.

This, I think, is a key lesson that either will or won't be learned. Not everything is predictable, but many things are - and a lot of very smart people have spent a lot of time and effort coming up with good ways to make those predictions. If you choose not to avail yourselves of those, you are choosing to get sucker punched the next time.

Right now the GOP is (to borrow Karl Rove's phrase) at a crossroads. It can choose to learn the lesson and avail itself of knowledge and understanding it apparently lacks at present. Or it can choose to retreat into what it thinks it knows, and get sucker punched again in the future. I really hope they choose the former. As a previous Republican standard-bearer once tried (but failed) to say: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

Am I Teaching the Wrong Way?

I've been teaching in higher education now for about 15 years. Like most academics, I'm pretty comfortable with my "style", and since I am now teaching a rotation of courses I've taught before I tend to take the easy road and do what I did before. That's not to say that I don't put a good bit of passion into my teaching - I still find the material fascinating, and I hope that comes across in class. But like many of my mid-career tenured colleagues, it's easier to stick with the well-worn grooves.

Exhortations to "keep things fresh" and "keep adapting" are important, but often not enough. Re-thinking what and how we teach is a very time-consuming exercise, and unless you're gunning for Professor of the Year the rewards for doing so are pretty thin. In most departments, as long as you're meeting your teaching obligations and your students are happy, you can keep doing the same thing for years.

In my field the emphasis has tended to be on learning ideas. We make students read things (textbooks or, better still, original intellectual works), we make them write about the ideas therein, we lecture in class about those ideas, we discuss them. Although we don't like to think of it in these terms, at its core there's a rote-learning heart to this approach. I gauge the success of an Intro to International Relations class, for example, by seeing whether students understand what anarchy is, can identify sovereign states, or can write an essay using concepts like levels of analysis or realist theory. Success is defined, on exams and in papers, by answering the questions "What did they learn?" or "What do they know?"

I am increasingly wondering whether this is the right approach - or, at least, whether it is the only right approach. This is partly in response to a growing conversation about critical thinking and learning outcomes (see this article from today's Chronicle for example). This is one of the responses we in higher education have put forward to the "is college worth it?" question - that we teach students "how to think", even if we don't have a really clear notion of how to measure that.

But a big part of my shift in thinking has come from my experience teaching in the completely different field of martial arts. When you teach a karate class, the focus ultimately is not on what students know; it's on what they can do. We do ask them to learn some facts along the way - usually, foreign terminology or particular traditions. But, at least in the tradition I've come up through, we don't teach these things by telling and then quizzing; we simply use the terms and do the traditions and over time, students pick them up. We expect students to know these things as they advance, but memorizing isn't the focus. We don't test them to see if they can count to ten in Japanese or Korean.

There's an element of this that can't apply in higher education - time. In studying martial arts, everyone learns at their own pace. Someone else may take a year to master something it takes me three years to be able to do. That's fine, since ultimately the emphasis is on the journey and how long it takes to get through the ranks can be different from person to person. That doesn't work in higher education, where we have defined time frames (quarters or semesters) and a lot of expectations about everybody finishing within (more or less) the same amount of time.

But maybe the focus on what you can do would be a useful shift. If I taught with an eye on skills and abilities rather than knowledge and facts, what might that look like? Maybe I'd play more games in class. Maybe I'd have to invent drills. Maybe I should go watch some math teachers, who may know more about this than I do (no one says, "do you know the math?" It's always, "can you do the math?")

I hope I can find the time to experiment with this in my next class (which just so happens to be Diplomacy & Negotiation). Will I be able to figure out how to assess students' abilities, or even what skills I want them to learn? I don't know. But for all our talk about helping our students become "critical thinkers" and "problem solvers", maybe we should start rethinking the way we teach. Or, at least, maybe I should.