Author Archives: jmmarti@mac.com

Judging Others

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Recent disclosures in my karate life have led me to reflect on the impossibility of knowing what’s in another person’s heart.  I believe in the goodness of people, at least that all people are capable of heart-felt connection to others that makes our humanity possible.  Capability, however, does not equal reality, and sometimes those among us who are most willing to believe in the best people have to offer are therefore vulnerable to the realities created by those whose hearts are driven more by a desire to dominate, control, or manipulate others in ways that are entirely self-serving.  Unfortunately, the short-sightedness of this self-serving approach to life can be concealed in a world where the easy momentum of day-in-and-day-out of life allows us to live within our hopeful presumptions rather than examine our relationships themselves — because it is only in relationships, active, involved communicating relationships, that we can come to see beyond our presumptions (often hopeful, idealistic) to the realities that are present.  This helps me to understand moments in my life when I have recognized a certain toxicity in a group of people working in close proximity.  It is like a slow gas leak, I suppose.  One is breathing just fine.  The headache that starts as the atmosphere becomes more toxic is easy to dismiss.  As the headache persists, and aspirin is easy enough at hand.  So, just take it and the presumption that all is well remains.  But then the drowsiness sets in and if we haven’t recognized the toxicity of the very air we are breathing, then we will lay down to rest not realizing that death is nearby.

When it comes to human toxicity, actual death might be a good outcome compared to the alternative.  Because in human environments we adjust to the toxicity, and in doing so forget what the air felt like going into our lungs prior to the toxic fumes invading our atmosphere, and our presumptions about our own health remain in tact.  Denial about this toxicity, or hopefulness that it will simply go away is a common response.  And, sometimes the toxicity runs itself out, or the non-toxic air overwhelms the toxicity.  But in cases where the toxicity has abundant resources (like the trust of the leaders of the community), failure to act against that toxin, or hoping that it will go away is a retreat from the human responsibility we have to each other.

It’s not that these things are easy to sort out.  Assessing the health of a community, its relationships and communicative practices is the central driving feature of the manuscript I have been working on for the past eight months.  All this involves making judgments.  Judgments can be very dangerous because they tend to close us out from seeing alternatives.  People who make snap judgments and then doggedly refuse to consider other possibilities are toxic.  People who refuse to re-examine their own presumptions about others, or who assess situations and position themselves as knowing better than anyone else, are toxic.  To be around these kinds of people and to support them even in the most general ways — like socializing and cultivating friendships with them — gives their toxicity more potency and more reach.

It takes courage to act in response to a toxin that is hidden because it is concealed within the healthy aspects of the environment.  Let’s just pretend it’s not there.  Let’s just wait and it’ll go away.  These are dangerous responses.

Acting against human toxins like this is not straightforward.  It requires a great deal of involvement in those very relationships.  It involves a dedicated effort to examine relationships and practices to try and discern what makes the difference between toxic and healthy.  And, it requires that we be open to seeing and doing things differently.  We live in a world with so much inhumanity.  Why would we not take every opportunity to look, see, and live in ways that allow to keep re-seeing the possibilities and the limitations of each of us and the communities in which we live?

I welcome your thoughts.

Thousands and Thousands of Repetitions

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Over the many years I have been training with Koyama Sensei he has told us many stories of the “old days.”  “Old days,” of course, are always relative.  For me, and many of the 50 some year-olds training today the “old days” in Shotokan karate refer to the that period just before the heyday of popularity of martial arts in the United States that came with Bruce Lee and then the Karate Kid movie.

During my “old days” of Shotokan karate women were not allowed to train in the most advanced classes.  There were many reasons for this, most rooted in tradition and a belief that the physical differences between men and women made women too delicate or unsuited to the severity of training that came at the most advanced levels.

Even though I resist any idea that presumes the unsuitedness of women for anything, it is true that in these “old days,” advanced training could be brutal.  We didn’t use gloves or any protective gear in those days, and the ethics of the dojo were often like street gangs that required a “jumping in,” required that you “pay your dues” by getting beat up to one degree or another by the more advanced students.  The process could involve a straight out acknowledgment that you will be hit — and not “tapped,” but hit in a way that can fracture bones and split skin wide open.  The process could also be more subtle, involving a “feeling out” period wherein the senior students tacitly evaluate the junior students testing their courage or determination, the sincerity of their effort and quality of their character.  Someone seen to be lacking in one of these respects could be eliminated from participating by abuse, or disregard.

The ethics of all of this get murky because there can come a point where a junior student needs to be put back into line, and my ability to make it absolutely clear that I can and will do that is a necessary part of my fulfilling my responsibilities as a senior member.  If I am driven to do this by virtue of the best qualities of character, or by an egoistic need to elevate myself by dominating others can be very difficult to determine.

So, let me be clear about the “woman-thing.”  There are not a lot of women who want to put themselves in the situation described above — most of us have too much good sense.  And, to be fair, there are a lot of men who wouldn’t put themselves in that position either because they, too, have too much good sense.  So, when we get to this situation of these “old days,” you have a special breed of person who, for better or worse, seeks out these kind of extreme high stakes activities in which perceptions of respect and dominance rule the dojo and the enforcement of these through the physical training leave do doubt about the difference between junior and senior students.

When Koyama Sensei talks about the “old days” he’s referring to a very different context — he’s referring to the context of his life growing up during World War II and its immediate aftermath.  Koyama Sensei talks about being a young boy when the B-52s were dropping bombs on them, about having very little food and other hardships that came with that time and place.  After the war, when Koyama Sensei was studying karate at the university, some of his teachers were the returning pilots trained to have been kamikaze pilots.  It is difficult for me to really grasp the significance of what it means to have been trained in that way — but it does strike me as similar, perhaps, to the suicide bombers of today.  At any rate, clearly, when Koyama Sensei is talking about the “old days,” he is talking about things that I probably will never be able to really understand — certainly not at the gut level.  Traditional karate-do is what Koyama Sensei teaches us, and the time and place of his growing up presents us with reservoirs of knowledge that may, ultimately, be beyond our ability to understand no matter how faithful we are in our effort to learn.

One illustration that Koyama Sensei uses to differentiate the “old days” from today is how in the “old days” training often involved thousands and thousands of repetitions of a single technique or a single kata.  It is something that he asserts students today would never tolerate, and I am sure that students today could never tolerate the training that he went through as a young karate-ka.

On the other hand, I remember my “old-days” when advancement to the more advanced training (first “B-Team,” then “A-Team — and that was before the television hit by the same name) involved a very explicit weeding out process that didn’t rely as much on the brutality described above, but more on the testing of one’s character and level of determination through endless repetitions.  Technically, class is one hour long, but once we moved to these advanced training it became clear that class was however long the Sensei wanted it to be.  I remember often stepping onto that floor and as we went through the mokuso ceremony thinking, “oh, god, please let me just get through this.”  And then we would start.  Twenty people on the floor, two punching techniques per count, each person counts to 10, then switch sides and repeat.  Next, kicking techniques, four techniques per count, each person counts to 10 then switch sides.  That was the warm up.  From there we would begin working on advanced kumite or sparring.  Whatever drill or sparring sequence we might be doing, we would repeat the same thing over and over again until every person on the floor had repeated it with every other person.  And, it was often in this portion of the training that if someone got sloppy, punishment would come in the form of anything from a light tap to a laying out.  And, of course there were always for real “accidents,” where people unintentionally hit each other.  Because we didn’t use pads of any kind, the training itself always resulted in banged bones —  shins, forearms, elbows, fingers, toes.  It was often at this point in the training, body physically exhausted, in pain, and having no idea what will come next much less when it will end, that one’s character and determination is revealed.  Try being that exhausted, in that much pain, and standing across from someone who you know is capable of knocking the shit out of you, who is looking for the slightest hint of weakness to exploit, then you will understand how I experienced my “old days.”

I don’t feel especially proud of my “old days” in karate.  I was young and had grown up within a very volatile and violent environment, so in some ways this kind of karate training allowed me to transcend that by seeing the violence as a way of developing character and a higher sense of morality.  And, I didn’t see myself as less capable than men, although the difference in size and strength was obvious, and there was no doubt that a man could tolerate a blow that would totally disable me.

So, here’s the point:  by going through the endless repetitions of techniques that exhausted everyone physically, it levels out the risks that come with egoistic people training so that they can feel dominant, “tough,” or powerful at the expense of others.  A man who is bigger and stronger than me (which is pretty much all of them) becomes much less so as I face off with him and see his fatigue and uncertainty.  And at this point men are usually glad to have women training with them because it means they get a little break from sparring with other men so they can relax some.  Silly mistake.  It only took one time for a new member of the team to make that mistake with me.  That was the reality of being a “senior student.”  No formal rank could ever override the absolute knowledge we had of who was “real,” who had “guts,” and who was genuinely interested in more than an egoistic reward for being a “tough guy who knows karate.”

The real upside of all of this, of course, is that the men in the dojo didn’t take it easy on me, and that meant that I could never be free of fear or humility because I knew that there was always a point at which I, too, could succumb to pain and exhaustion, that there had been many times when I wished to have an injury that would allow me to leave the floor “legitimately,” or back out of training without being recognized for my weakness.  That kind of honest confrontation with the self was, in many ways, the “essence” of character development through karate-do as I learned it from my first sensei.

I think that Koyama Sensie is right to say that things are different today and that people would not tolerate types of training that we did years ago and that Koyama Sensei did even longer ago.  But I miss the clarity of knowing my fellow karate-ka’s character by the way we interact with each other during training.  I think we’ve lost some of that today, and it allows people who come in new to karate to think that just because we treat them with respect that they deserve it.  I have a level of skill that would make it relatively easy for me to make the point very clearly during training.  But, I agree with Koyama Sensei when he talks about the “low-class” aspects of karate training that fail to grasp the true purpose of it.

I welcome your comments.

 

Our Local American Family

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In a recent post I wrote about some of the less comforting aspects of the metaphor of “one American family” as invoked by President Obama after the murder of 3 Muslim students in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Today I am much less concerned about the members of our American family who live in Chapel Hill, than I am about the members of our American family living right here in Phoenix, Arizona.  The violence that erupted from the man who murdered those 3 students in Chapel Hill, much like the violence that is constantly erupting in America’s fight against ISIS and extremism, can easily be reduced to an idea that is very separate from the fact of my very comfortable daily life.  However much outrage I might express at any one incident of violence, such outrage is easily put on and taken off.  That, of course, is part of the problem.  As an American from the United States it is easy for me to forget that a war is being conducted this very moment in which other people’s families are violently destroyed — some of them “collateral damage” in our war against the apocalyptically minded ISIS.  As I live consumed in the details of my daily life there is nothing tangible that makes me shake out of my ability to easily ignore (a willful ignorance) the violence that is so much a part of so many people’s lives.

Recent events at Arizona State University have brought to light the many reasons why we cannot be satisfied to see the problem of extremism as something “over there,” as something that when pressed out of our mind is easily pressed out of existence to us.  The English Department at Arizona State University offers a course entitled, “U.S. Race Theory & the Problem of Whiteness,” and it is taught by Assistant Professor Lee Bebout.  This course and Professor Bebout became the focus of national media attention when Fox News ran a segment that itself promotes extremist thinking.  The claim made in this news segment was that the main point of the course is to treat “all white people as the root cause of social injustice in this country.”

The video can be viewed here: (http://video.foxnews.com/v/4007055760001/problem-with-whiteness-course-offered-at-arizona-state/?#sp=show-clips)

This assertion was made without the benefit of reading the course material, talking with the students or with Professor Bebout himself.  The assertion itself reveals a deep ignorance about what scholars who study the complex and long history of race, racism and race relations in the United States actually do.  It is a judgment that is itself extremist and based in an ideological presumption that to talk about race or racism is to perpetuate “reverse racism.”

ASU’s English Department issued a statement in response to the publicity generated by this Fox News segment.  The statement affirms ASU’s commitment “thoughtful conclusions” over “gut reactions.” The full statement can be viewed at http://english.clas.asu.edu/eng401-statement.

This is my point — it is easy to live our lives following gut reactions, but thoughtful conclusions require thought, inquiry, and evidence discovered rather than presumed.  Yet, without motivation to see more than what our initial way of thinking tells us, we will never reach thoughtful conclusions.  And in the meantime our initial way of thinking about our place and comfort in our American family allows us to miss the fact that herein lies a person capable of acting in murderous rage against people whose names allow him to have a gut-level reaction that in his mind legitimates his actions in the moment he pulls the trigger on the gun leveled at people he otherwise knows nothing about.

Here in Arizona, on the campus of Arizona State University we have people who are actively promoting violence driven from the same logic of extremism displayed in the Fox News piece quoted above.  The Phoenix New Times has reported on this group’s activities.

See: http://blogs.phoenixnewtimes.com/valleyfever/2015/02/white_supremacists_neo-nazis_target_asu_professor_and_his_family.php

Professor Bebout and his family have been directly targeted through a vicious campaign of fliers spread in his neighborhood, on campus and through social media.  This kind of extremist campaign ferments the misplaced rage that speeds the movement from gut level reaction to forever undoable action that can shatter the lives of people we know and love.  Professor Bebout and his family are close personal friends of mine.  Professor Bebout’s teaching and work is essential in the effort to help us all “reach thoughtful conclusions” during these racially contentious and complex times.  His family brings the kind of human relatedness that is essential for any community seeking connection through love and genuinely human understanding.

ASU and its police department are monitoring the situation, and the local police departments are also at work dealing with these direct and violent threats against Professor Bebout and his family.  Fortunately, there are organizations, and the police are among them, that keep somewhat regular track of these extremist groups that are part of our communities, part of our “American family.”

I pray that these efforts are adequate to keep Professor Bebout and his family safe.  Part of me wants to put together my own “posse” and set up permanent body guards around Professor Bebout and his family.  But in the absence of being able to do that, I can refuse to be comfortably ignorant of the realities of what constitutes our “American family” and be ever aware of the thinking that leads to extremism and the gut level reactions that level a gun aiming to kill someone who happens to be an easy target for rage.

I welcome your thoughts.

 

Our American Family

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It’s pretty common for people in positions of leadership to invoke the metaphor of “family” to suggest a set of relations among a group of people who are not family in the strict sense, but who share some common endeavor or identity.  Often times, this metaphor is invoked during times of crisis or strife within a group to suggest a boundedness that extends beyond the immediate struggles, contention, or grief and into a shared and more peaceful future.  President Obama recently invoked this metaphor in memorial for the three Muslim students who were brutally murdered in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.  President Obama asserted that in our grief, “we are one America family.”

President Obama’s appeal in invoking the  “one American family” metaphor was certainly aimed at uniting all Americans in the U.S. in grief at the loss and share the outrage at these senseless murders.  And while there is something soothing about hearing our President assert our unitedness in grief and outrage, there is another sense, far less comforting, to which this metaphor aptly applies.  Because, it is true that family members do sometimes murder each other.  Sometimes the meaning of “family,” far from being a term that signals a fundamental love and caring connectedness, instead signals a lack of care or regard.  For many people, family signifies places of violence and abuse, of disregard and spitefulness. And this, too, is part of our “American family.”

The man who murdered Deah Shaddy Barakat, Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha, and Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha was nurtured in a “family” bound less by care and love than by violence and spitefulness.  How can I know this?  I know nothing specifically about this man or his family.  But, I am a member of the “American family,” and this “American family” exists within a world community where we are at war, that at every moment of every day is poised to kill those with whom we are at war, that at every moment at every day makes millions of calculations over the tiniest bits of information that might tell us how to deploy our power to kill and destroy those who we determine to be our enemies.  The “American family” is a violent family, and despite the fact that we can find many places within our “family” that are quite nurturing and loving, our “family” cannot separate itself from the fact that to have a name like Deah Shaddy Barakat, Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha, or Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha places one in the category that everyone in our family recognizes as those with whom we are at war.

I am not a pacifist, and the inhumanity of the laws and customs sought in ISIS’s “caliphate,” particularly as they relate to girls and women, cannot be allowed to exist freely. The US military is one of the institution that must take on this fight.  The US military is the part of our family that is decidedly capable of violence, and when it is called on it is compelled to use violence.

My point is that in offering the metaphor of an “American family” united in grief, we cannot forget that there are other, far less comforting aspects of this “family” that also unite us.  Whether we “agree” or not with President Obama’s orders taken by our military and intelligence organization in the fight against ISIS, is irrelevant to the fact that this is OUR family from which the killing and destruction are being carried out every moment of every day.  My point is that we like to invoke the idea of family to give ourselves some peace or comfort.  And while I, too, am comforted by such words, if those words allow me to forget the fact that there is more to my family than just that, then in the end I am doing nothing but embracing a willful ignorance that allows my sense of righteousness to dominate even while members of my family are killing, maiming and destroying other human beings.  My willful ignorance does not erase the boundedness I have to our “American family” that is united in our war against “Muslim extremists.”  It is much better if we chose to recognize our condition of war as something essential to our boundedness here, at this time, in 2015.  This is not the kind of boundedness I want within my family, but it is the reality of what we live today.  Examination of that boundedness as it reaches from our most public declarations to our most private feelings must be the call for the day.  Had that kind of examination been at work for this man who coldly murdered three innocent people, perhaps his internal rage would have been tempered by an understanding of the difference between those he killed and those with whom we are at war.  Only then, with this kind of reflective understanding, might we imagine a future where that boundedness can be transformed into something characterized less by war and more by love.

I welcome your comments.

 

On Getting Married

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Some little girls grow up imagining their wedding day with great excitement and anticipation.  Me, not so much.  I just never “got” what the big deal was, and anything having to do with me wearing a dress and being in a spotlight was the last thing I wanted to imagine for my future!  And, wearing a tux instead of a dress didn’t help much either.  Such is the life of a tomboy and nascent lesbian growing up in the 1970s.

Lisa and I have been together for over 17 years.  We met at Purdue University, where we were both professors, and we both came into the relationship cautiously.  Neither of us was interested in making West Lafayette, Indiana our permanent home, and so we weren’t planning too far ahead.  I think we both just wanted companionship and connection.  The last thing we did in those early days was talk about commitment or a long-term future.

The big “commitment” came when we moved to Arizona together, where we both secured jobs as professors at Arizona State University.  We bought a house together, and that, more than anything else was our formal or legal assertion of commitment to our relationship.  The idea of marriage had been circulating in the public for quite a while even then, but given my childhood feelings about it, it was never something I wanted even though I sensed that Lisa did.

Then we came to a point where the momentum for the Federal recognition of gay marriage was gaining tremendous momentum.  I finally asked Lisa to marry me.  It wasn’t anything like a romantic, down-on-my-knee event.  In fact we were driving in the car–very unromantic.  But there was something very special about that moment because we had been talking about it, and there came that point when I uttered those words, “Lisa, will you marry me?” in a way that was absolutely real.  And it was very special because at that moment Lisa knew that I meant it, that it conveyed something of my love for her that couldn’t be expressed in any other way.

So what’s the point of my going on and on sharing my personal life in this blog?  The point is that I think that what the Federal recognition of same-sex marriage gives us is a chance for all of us to rethink what marriage is as we live it with our intimate partners.  Too many marriages are less than happy or successful.  Too many marriages are places of distress, violence, and abuse.  We need to all re-think marriage, not as a matter of the sex of the partners, but more as a matter of what our particular “marriage” is, as we live within it through the everyday mundane aspects of life.  We need to think about the reality of what happens and what we experience in our “marriage” relationships.  Because, the word “married” ultimately means nothing outside of the relationship to which it is applied.

Thus I’ve come to re-imagine marriage.  It’s no longer for me what I saw as a little girl tomboy and wanted nothing to do with.  It has taken me a long time to re-imagine marriage in a way that befits how I feel about Lisa and having her in my life.  And that I’ve been able to do this is largely because our dear friends, Lewis and Jane Gordon, offered to hold a marriage ceremony for us in conjunction with the Caribbean Philosophical Association’s annual meeting at UCONN in 2016.  Lewis himself offered to marry us, and upon his doing so I was immediately struck by the gift that we give to each other through our relationships–that Lewis and Jane gave to us, that Lisa and I could give to each other, that we could share with a community gathering with a common sense of care and recognition.  The reverberations of those gifts move in every direction — from couple to community, community to couple, person to person within and outside the couple, and person to community and back.

It says a lot about a scholarly community that wants to celebrate the lives of its members in such a way.  Jane and Lewis are, of course, two key leaders of the Caribbean Philosophical Association, and it is their deep and abiding sense of humanity and human recognition that literally births relationships capable of sustaining the best in all of us.  Lisa and I together do that as well, but we do it better with others doing the same.

What if we re-imagined “marriage” like this?  Far from being the end of anything, it could, instead, cultivate more humane communities where the valuing of each other is what sustains the connections that bind us.

What do you think?

Energy, Karate, and Communication

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Last night during training, Koyama Sensei discussed the topic of energy, or ki in Japanese. He was talking about the importance of bringing intensity to our performance of techniques. It’s important to put ourselves into our training like we would put ourselves into the words, “I love you” when we utter them to someone we care deeply about. Practicing karate-do is much more than learning technique. It requires that we bring the energy and spirit of who we are into our practice.

Negative energy is often obvious and easy to understand. You say something that makes me angry an my body bristles, my eyes narrow and later you say you felt arrows flying out of my eyes and into you. When we do kata we want that kind of energy emanating from within us. The only difference is that this is not a “negative” energy that comes from me being angry or wanting to hurt you. It is more of an energy generated by our commitment to the proper execution of the technique, the commitment of expressing through my body the meaning of the kata and the techniques that make it up. Thus, one thing karate can offer us is the opportunity to take the negative energies of life and turn them into positives by directing them into the development and beauty and grace through kata training.

Energy is also something I study in the context of culture and communication. In studying energy as it functions in communication and culture it is important to remove the valence — to remove the presumption that energy is either positive or negative. Because energy itself is neutral. It is neither good nor bad. It just is. It may be generated by something negative (e.g., fear) or something positive (e.g., love), but either way energy is just energy. The fact that it exists more strongly in some instances or places, and less strongly in others is what we must study to understand what is created by it and what it sustaines. If we classify energy as “good” or “bad” too quickly, we miss the opportunity to understand how energy creates and re-creates the worlds we live within.

When it comes to learning and teaching karate-do, paying attention to energy is absolutely essential. Paying attention to energy—particularly our own—must be as much of our karate practice as is our effort to exert it in a positive and powerful way. Some days I go to the dojo and my mind is preoccupied with the stresses and struggles of my day and my relationships with others both within and outside the dojo. My energy is consumed by these stresses and struggles. Other days I go to the dojo and the struggles and stresses of my day easily recede into the background and the energy I exert finds its expression in the movement of my body, the easy flow of energy and the lifting of spirit that comes when my presence of body to mind allows me to experience myself and those I am sharing that energy with in a more pure and direct way. If I compare these two kinds of days at the dojo, I am tempted to say that the day dominated by stresses and struggles was a “bad energy” day, and the one where I was more freely present to my body and its movement was a “good energy” day. But, this would be a mistake because in doing this I will be led toward presuming that I can and should prevent future “bad energy” days while creating “good energy” days. That’s not a bad thing to do. It’s just that doing so takes me away from the more basic point, which is to pay attention to how energy is present in me and how it moves through me to others in the world.

 

What do you think?

On Studying Karate-Do

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Koyama Sensei always emphasizes the importance of karate-do as a philosophy. Unlike a sport, the purpose of karate-do is the development of character. How exactly we do this is dependent on many things. Some of these things are dependent upon the individual, and others are not so much.   For example, I make choices about how I practice karate-do, the meaning I make of it, etc. But, I don’t control the kind of instruction I get from my Sensei, nor his understanding of karate-do or his students. Although Master Funakoshi wrote much about his life and his philosophy, it is still up to each of us trying to following his teachings to interpret and apply his life lessons and philosophy to our own lives within the context of our time and our culture. This means that we can’t say that any one of us today knows the “true” or “authentic” philosophy developed by Mr. Funakoshi. But, what we can do is take account of our own understanding and interpretation, and this means that we must be able to reflect on our own experience taking his words and stories and applying them to our own life. I cannot, in this effort, prescribe what is right or wrong either about Funakoshi’s messages itself or another’s interpretation of it. Neither can I judge the value or goodness of others’ efforts in this regard. We can hope to cultivate a community in which we seek to reach the ideals of Funakoshi’s philosophy even though we will never be able to actually know for certain how we have progressed toward these ideals.

What does the practice of karate-do offer? It offers an opportunity to reflect on oneself, one’s life, and perhaps most importantly, one’s relationship to oneself. I’m interested in how karate has created space for self-reflection for others. What’s your story about karate-do and its influence on your thinking about and understanding of yourself, your relationships, and life?