As readers of these lines already know, I strive to learn a fairly traditional martial art, Iaido. The name refers to the fast drawing and further use of a japanese saber, a katana. The group of people with whom I share this occupation can be described as a fairly traditional group, even for the standards of martial arts practitioners. It is understood that we not only try to learn what to do with a katana, but we rather try to attain some of the traditional values of Japan, like a certain form of courtesy, understood as a way to improve our personalities. If I am not mistaken (since I am a real beginner in this), that is. What there is little doubt is that we are fairly strict about it.
Now, even a group of people practicing an abstruse japanese martial art can not escape from the societal changes that #metoo has brought along. So a couple of months ago, teachers and assistants did have a workshop with an official coming to us from the National Federation of Martial Arts to which we belong, to motivate and explain the mechanisms that our federation have to foster inclusion. Not surprinsingly, our federation is committed to the practice of sports (even if we do not think of Iaido as a sport) in inclusive environments, that accordingly have to be safe for a diversity of persons to participate. In the workshop we explored several potential tensions fields in the practice of a physically demanding activity, that also has a strongly built-in sense of hierarchy… and inclusion. In general, as far as I remember, we all agreed that our group needs to be inclusive, and actually wants to be inclusive. Perhaps even it is inclusive already.
Yet yesterday, in another meeting of our group, we end up talking about our sense of strictness linked to the existence of safe spaces, and inclusion. In an open conversation one of us posed that we are way too strict with our rules of courtesy, that anyway, are different than any other club that practice our martial art in The Netherlands. We need to chill and enjoy, it was said. Counterpointing that, another one of us said that we do practice a traditional art, that comes from an old tradition. In some cases, the counterpointer argued, courtesy might even trump personal wellbeing. Reference was made to a lady that once upon a time did cut her scalp with her own katana in the middle of a demonstration, which she did not stop. After ending her performance, she attended herself, and eventually cleaned the blood from the floor herself.
Whether this apocriphal tale is true or not is beyond my powers of fact checking. But the reality that this tale is still making the rounds of discussions like what we had last night shows that at least for some of us suffering should not come on top of courtesy… because we are strict about it.
Thinking about it, I came to think about my own latino heritage. One of the unexpected comical and contrary-to-expectations things of being a latino in The Netherlands is that actually we have been brough with fairly strict courtesy rules… which the dutch or doesn’t know, or despise. As a matter of fact latinos are raised way more formal than the dutch, and it is fairly common that, in the work environment, we are told to chill out, call the boss by her first name, and the like. The horror, one would say. Eventually, we do chill out, I think. Or at least I did. Or tried.
But the fun is not only that we, the sensual-salsa-dancing-lazy-cheeky latino’s are more formal than the dutch. That is just a joke. The real fun starts when you consider why we are brought up to be courteous. As a matter of fact, it is all about inclusion. The only way that you can include a wide diversity of persons, with a wide diversity of forms of communication, costumes and, most important of all, different levels of power, is to have a fairly strict set of rules on how to deal with each other. So that you know what is expected from you, so that there is little space for misunderstandings, and, perhaps most important, there is little space for abuse of power. The whole point of being courteous is to be able to deal, on a regular basis, with a person that has a lot more power than you. Or way less. In an unequal society, the only way to escape the affront of inequality, is courtesy. It is possible to say that courtesy is a way to make powerless people swallow their weakness. But I rather believe that courtesy is a protocol that allows respect to flow from the weak to the powerful, and from the powerful to the weak. In other words, strict courtesy is what allows strict inclusion.
No wonder that egalitarian societies are so crass.