Before I started fencing, if I would have stopped to think about the term martial art, it would have struck me as an oxymoron, an absurd. How can anything martial be an art? Martial, ordered, organized, square, rational, authoritarian. Art? free, creative, new, unordered. Irrational, for sure.
And anyhow, art is not about killing people, isn’t it?
I suppose that the term “martial art” has been coined in asia, given the baffling facility that eastern cultures have of putting insights in the form of absurd and contradictory statements. And, anyhow, the history of the martial arts that I am learning, Iaido and kendo, is the history of the killer instinct being tamed by art. We are told that after long centuries of internal strife, Japan was finally pacified, and her warriors were, suddenly, out of work. What to do with trained warriors, efficient killing machines, when there is no enemy to kill?
A question that today, few days into the flight from Kabul, is particularly relevant.
The answer of the japanese, at least in the version that dummies like me receive, is that a whole repertoire of ritualized violence was created. Sets and sets of replicated wars, battles and individual encounters, where the warriors could encounter each other and fight, without killing. There is no bigger taboo than to kill somebody that is not your enemy, I believe. So the Japanese dealt with this problem, with this impossible taboo, creating a whole art, the art of performing deadly techniques without killing anybody. An art indeed, since ultimately we, martial artists in the making, strive to express ourselves through our fighting skills. And indeed, the more advance the practitioner, the more we can see how the person that performs shows through her act, through her own representation of a mortal combat.
But what if we would reverse the logic of the japanese solution? What if violence, actually, can be restorative?
Actually there is no need of a great leap of invention here. On video games, we are not yet close to a consensus on the effects that violent games have on real world violence (take a look at the research linked here under, one article connecting violent video games and increase of violent behaviour and another denying such relation) Yet the experience of uncountable persons practicing the array of activities grouped as self-defense speaks for itself. It seems that for many of us, learn to and being capable of exert acts of great violence into others, makes us way less violent. One of those contradictions that could be better expressed in a zen koan, and that being foreign to our western lineal logic, still captures truth. Could it be that implicit in learning the use of any weapon, being a pencil, a sword or a well aimed foot, is the learning of the real damage that we can inflict into others, and that, only that knowledge, is what make us less likely to try? Could it be that we need to learn of what we are really capable, in order to be able to control ourselves?
In the end, that question and many others that arise, and their possible answers, are not that relevant. The mechanisms of our minds are mostly beyond the scope of the vagaries of my prose. But the idea is still tumbling around my mind. If indeed ritualized violence restore our peace and our well being, if only by showing us the consequences of uncontrolled rage... is it not time to think in violence as a restorative force too?
Violent video game engagement is not associated with adolescents' aggressive behaviour: evidence from a registered report, in Royal Society Open Science
Metaanalysis of the relationship between violent video game play and physical aggression over time, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA