LITMIR.BIZ

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not alleviate but stoke, especially when faced with intolerable values like those that threaten, harm, torture, and murder innocents in the name of culture or creed. Distorting reality through groupthink and manipulating language and popular culture to claim the mantle of the right and the good is to deceive fundamentally on the matter of rightness and goodness. Consensus is never a worthwhile end if it means consensual suicide. Only the ignorant and dishonest are assured there is nothing worth risking themselves for. But this reasoning is as twisty as a Gordian knot. Fidelity to truth is not about unraveling these knots but, like Alexander, cutting them.

      Intervention is often underrated in the aftermath of horror, usually by the bystanders who did nothing. It is hard to imagine, however, that these same folks would have discouraged passengers from coming to their own loved one’s aid. Would they have asked them politely to stop? Encouraged them to look out for themselves? Do you think Kevin Sutherland appreciated in those last moments the fact that no one dared intercede? After all, these folks only did what normal people think they should normally do: stay out of it.

      Hardly.

      Our absolute needs become our fiercest desires when we find them in short supply. Just ask anyone saved from drowning. No one is more grateful for a life saved than the saved life.

But try telling that to those who are convinced there is no magnetic north on the moral compass, like the writer at the Washington Post who softened the blow of her own nihilism with cooing solidarity: “It makes a lot of us uncomfortable to think we would have cowered instead of confronting Sutherland’s killer.”1 Of course it’s uncomfortable. It should be. We are all perfectly capable of intervening. We make a conscious choice not to.

      Everyone has the mental, spiritual, and physical fortitude to intervene on behalf of another who needs protection. Who would be unwilling to shield their child, sibling, or spouse under brutal attack? Those who love them can throw themselves on their bodies to shield them from violence. Anyone mobile is capable of doing this, from Grandma to Junior, and people of all kinds have. No one has to be made of steel to intervene, because doing violence to the aggressor is not the point. Protecting the victim is.

      If we do not acknowledge this difference, then we stand to applaud the claptrap and confide in the con that says we are powerless. This is irrational fear, the worst kind, and it seduces into that cult of victimhood—a cult of death—where we expect to be a victim at some point, and our only defense is the condemning hope that sheer numbers safeguard us from being next.

      If you’re unwilling to risk your life to protect a complete stranger, congratulations, you’re a member of the club called human. There are plenty of folks—good folks, mind you—who will never bring themselves to intervene. But do not confuse that raw fact of our humanity with the moral, ethical, or virtuous, should, ought, and must.

      However, if you are willing to risk yourself to protect others, that makes you above and beyond—superhuman, in fact—and we have a name for those people: heroes. And just so we’re clear, those willing to risk their lives to protect the lives of others, and physically engage attackers to rout them, kill them, or subdue them, well, we call those rare folks by another name: warriors.

      The best that martial training can do is not simply provide the necessary mental and physical skills to respond to conflict, but calibrate ourselves justly to know we ought to respond. That’s another of those ancient martial secrets. In fact, you will find these secrets have one thing in common: they all concern, touch, and overlap the realm of ethics.

      Placing ethics first, ahead of physical, tactical concerns, isn’t simply more difficult because it requires more training, more study, and skill. It’s more life threatening because it forces us to risk our lives for ourselves and others and thereby requires greater fortitude of will for the courage to act. Any book can splash photos of techniques across its pages. I admit, this book aspires to something more: to articulate why it is harder, tougher, requires more competence, more strength of character, and more faith in oneself, to be ethical before we are tactical.

      The best definition of ethics I ever heard did not come from some inscrutable ancient philosopher or religious exponent or secular concern, although each of these has contributed in some capacity to its historical meaning. It actually came from a US Marine Corps captain, a mentor of mine, who stated that ethics is nothing more than our “moral values in action.”

      Damn.

      The simple and sublime from someone trained to shoot and blow things up. From a man trained to fight.

      We ought to protect others. We ought to shield them and defend them if we must, so as to escape threats and violence. And we ought to want to.

      Soldiers and police officers are protectors by duty. But so are moms and dads and schoolteachers. So is the pizza guy, the investment banker, and old lady Smith down the street. So are the ten passengers on a metro train when a predator sets upon an innocent.

      We can ask ourselves that question again. We can ask it and attempt to answer with examples from the martial way’s significant history, or the hallmarks of its traditions, or the extensive beliefs that the antiquity of its thought communicates to us today in its myriad cultural forms. Or we can accede to its simple, undeniable answer and the resolve it compels us to accept.

      Why train?

      My God, how can we not?

       NOTES

      1 1. Petula Dvorak, “Passengers Watched Killing on Metro Car. Should They Have Intervened?” The Washington Post, July 9, 2015, accessed September 25, 2017, www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-38500002.html?refid=easy_hf.

       Introduction: The Martial Is Moral

       Know Your Ought

      When scientists looked to record data on the stimulation of a frog, they used a bell to startle it into jumping. They rang the bell, recorded how far the frog jumped, and then cut off one of its appendages. This ringing and snipping continued until the frog was but a stump. And when they rang the bell for what would be the last time, and Stumpy did not jump, their conclusion was this: when all of a frog’s appendages are removed, it loses its hearing.

      This story was told to my father in his first year at dental school, and its point is simple: do not disregard the obvious. That’s essentially what this whole book is about: rediscovering and clarifying what is, or rather what should be, self-evident truth. Bear in mind, this is not the stuff we all agree on—nobody really agrees on everything anyway—but rather that which we cannot deny.

      Imagine training the chest-compression and breathing techniques of CPR but divorced from their purpose of saving lives. Without their purpose, why learn them? What’s the point of the skill if we’re training ourselves to be incapable of recognizing when it ought to be applied? In fact, without that “ought,” that sense of obligation, what makes it at all necessary?

      Some years ago I traveled to the West Coast for training at a weekend event. During one of the segments, I was called to the front to physically defend a fellow who was to be attacked. Now, I was a highly adept martial artist who’d been training since I was a kid, and I’d even lived in Japan for several years, getting my butt kicked by the very best teachers of my art. I was little concerned about defending anybody from anybody because I knew something the attacker did not: I was about to attack the hell out of him.

      The moment my protectee was threatened, I leaped into action with more than twenty years of expertise to thwart the assault. I remember feeling pretty satisfied as I loomed over the aggressor, now facedown

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