Why Martial Arts? A Discussion

Given how much of my free time winds up being devoted to martial-arts-related pursuits - between the SCA and other activities, I wind up doing it more than any other hobby at this point - I think it's important to discuss why I consider it worth doing.  There are obvious advantages, such as it gets me exercise, but there are other, more direct ways of achieving that same objective.  However, there are considerations that martial arts address that nothing else I've found quite addresses.

At this point in my life, I think it'd be safe to call me an intellectual - I tend to approach problems by picking them apart in my brain first, and letting the actual execution come second, if at all.  This is a terrible approach in martial arts, but it's a great approach to the philosophy behind it.  It also means I internalized the process of "literature review, hypothesis, experiment, results, publish" pretty early, so let's look at the literature review side of this.

The best explanation for why practice martial arts that I've ever come across was by Miyamoto Musashi.  Musashi is a maddening figure to me: his work has been pushed as this secret curative to everything from sword fighting to business, but Five Rings is dense, allegorical, and difficult to comprehend to someone who is not ready for it.  It suffers the exact opposite problem from most western books on fighting, in that it is completely free of visuals.  However, the Earth book is relatively straightforward, as befits the foundational book.

"What, you expect to take me seriously? I'm wearing a rope as a belt!"

The basic premise Musashi lays out is this: There are lots of ways to get through life, and none of them is inherently better than the others.  The way of the warrior is not inherently better than that of the farmer or artisan; they all demand the same kind of attention to detail and practice to master.  They are all equally necessary, in fact, and knowing the place of each is essential to success.  This principle extends to the tools used for each job - the right tool for the job, whether that's a chisel or adze, or a bow or a spear.  The difference between a martial artist and an artisan, therefore, is one of degree and not of type.  If you can thoroughly understand the principles of a martial art (or building a house, or planting a field), you can probably thoroughly understand the principles of another discipline.  It is less an argument in favor of martial arts than it is an argument against specialization, and of cultivating the understanding of those principles, their application, and more importantly, when to apply them and when not to.  This becomes especially telling when you remember that Musashi refused more duels than he fought, and he was a very successful duelist (one doesn't reach sixty as an unsuccessful duelist).

Martial arts, in theory, teach discernment - the exact same term used by St. Ignatius, drawing on his military background, to describe cultivating the sense between right and wrong.  Martial arts are at their heart about appropriate action - act inappropriately around a sword, and you can die.  That is the primary difference between combat and the other paths: the risks of inappropriate action are more immediate than those in other fields.  That doesn't make them better; there's a reason that Musashi's examples for strategy are all about building a house, rather than mastering the sword.  It just makes the feedback loop for poor discernment much more immediate.

Every training system I've gone through begins teaching discernment early, in a variety of ways, often unintentionally.  For instance, engineers are taught to cultivate what is called "engineering judgment," which is just a fancy professional term for discernment.  Engineering judgment is so ingrained in the field that it is actually given legal protection, but it comes with responsibility to document how the judgment was derived, and poor engineering judgment can end a career and end lives just as easily as reading your opponent's movement badly.  The difference between discernment in engineering and discernment in combat is that an important component of most martial arts systems is when not to engage; very few engineers start from the premise of "should I do this project?"

The ultimate goal of any training system is to teach appropriate decision-making, starting from "how do I use the tools" and moving through "which tools do I use," ending with "should I use the tools?" Each level of that builds on the levels before; it's hard to decide "should I shoot this guy" without establishing "how do I shoot this guy" first.  Each level of training should also build an understanding of the decision-making process at the lower levels.  One of the frequent problems encountered in the military, for instance, is that senior leadership gets so removed from the lives of lower ranking service-members that they give well-intended, seemingly reasonable orders that will never be executed the way they meant; my morning commute includes a gate guard manually scanning my ID card, which sounds like a great force protection measure until you remember that each of the installation's thirty-odd entry gate lanes sees several hundred ID cards an hour, for eight hours a shift, and the gate guard has no particular interest in any specific ID card, a great interest in his shift going by smoothly and quietly, and that the odds of his relief on time drop like a rock as traffic backs up.  This occurs because the general who gave the order is so far removed from the execution that his well-intended idea is never going to be executed the way he expected it to be done.  All of this indicates that the general's understanding of the lower-level decision-making process is insufficient, and that his subordinates, who are closer to the situation, failed either to convey his intent, and why it matters beyond "do as I say or be punished," or to convey the problem to him for resolution.  It is a very real application of the story of Sun Tzu and the concubines.

Discernment, then, is not merely appropriate decision-making in the moment, but an understanding of consequences.  There are obvious limits to how far consequences can be understood - I doubt the general who made the decision, or even his staff, has the capacity or hours to explore to the point of "will soldiers actually check each ID card?" and what the answers mean - but cultivating an awareness that each action has a reach beyond the immediate action is essential to mastery of any subject.  Martial arts, because of the immediacy of consequences, merely teach that early.  Don't block? Get bruised.  Foot position wrong? Meet Mr. Ground.  Sign up for a tournament? Okay, but be prepared to face the hottest fighter on the circuit.  Want to get good at it? Okay, you can either read that book, or you can practice, and both have valuable lessons, but you only have the hours for one.

This is substantially different from "the wrong choice of bolt can cause this bridge to fail" only in its immediacy, not in its end effect.  I use that example specifically because it has actually happened.  An understanding of the consequences of being wrong is part of why there is so much written on the subject of both engineering decision-making, and military decision-making.  This is not meant to say by any means that the martial artist is exempt from poor decision-making or a failure of discernment due to arrogance or overconfidence, far from it, they tend to be, especially early in their progress, prone to it, indeed most martial cultures have a word specifically for this (for instance, the Norse is ofermod, literally over-full, but meaning "prone to biting off more than you can chew," which, well-executed, is a virtue).  It is meant to point out that discernment is a universal prerequisite for successful decision-making at multiple levels from practical to ethical, and that martial arts, done well, are a way to teach discernment, and that is what I get out of them.

To go back to where I began, having used all these words to describe it, martial arts are a laboratory for decision-making and cultivating the ability to make a decision quickly and decisively, then living with the consequences.  Everything else - technique, mental preparation, conditioning - exists in support of executing the decision, and each of those must be trained to allow that execution.  I find this no less true in any other field than in martial arts, and I find that martial arts practice supports decision-making in other fields... funny enough, just as Musashi and Loyola did.