The Coward's Bargain

My students reached a new level this week. After a year of muddling about, they have finally reached the point where they can engage each other definitively and with malicious intent. They have learned how to increase their emotional content without losing their structure. They can now move with authority to exploit their opponent's weaknesses. Most importantly, they are no longer making the "coward's bargain."

Perhaps the "coward's bargain" irks me so much because I was guilty of it as a kid. It shows itself by a forced courtesy. Apologizing to someone after you have it him as if you were genuinely sorry. It's truly pathetic. Such an impulse does not rise out of compassion. It is born of fear, plain and simple. An apology is meant to blunt the sharp edges of a reprisal. It is using society's norm to take advantage of a situation. It makes me sick.

Think about how much we do this in our lives. We apologize not because we genuinely feel regret. We apologize because we fear repercussions. We know we acted wrongly and fear what might come as a result. It means no more than the mea culpas of a criminal when he stands before the judge at sentencing.

I recognize that this impulse is the birthplace of courtesy. When I shake your hand, I am offering my weapon hand to show you that it's empty. As I often like to say, there is no place in the world more polite than a gun convention. When the expectation is that everyone is armed and has lethal capability, courtesy becomes the norm. But we have taken this too far. Courtesy means something in a society where violence is a possibility. When courtesy is the norm, it becomes a defense for the deceitful. We hide ill intent behind kind words today and think nothing of it. Hence, our litigious society where we parse words and attempt to obfuscate their meanings. When there are no lethal repercussions, spin becomes the weapon of the day.

In the martial arts, we learn to dispel this. You see that the "coward's bargain" gets you nowhere because it exists only in your head. LTC Grossman noted in his book, "On Killing," that in WWII, only 1 out of 10 soldiers actually shot to kill. The rest made the "coward's bargain" which in that case was "if I don't actually try to shoot anybody, nobody will try to shoot me." In countless wars before that time, the primary role of NCO's were to ensure that the men actually fought.

This truth about human nature disturbs me greatly. When we have power over our fellow man, we behave horribly. Take the Stanford prison example where common people who were placed as guards slowly developed habits of cruelty that was incongruent with their everyday behavior. But when our opponent can fight back, we aren't so brave or so cruel. We wither and make a false claim of morality. Is this human nature? Is this what we are doomed to be?

I think martial arts are a way to train this base impulse out of us. Through hard training, I think we can become genuinely compassionate when we do not have to be. We can afford to be gentle because we know we are strong. This strength is where human dignity begins and it is the only place where it can find its foundation.