20100918.0747

The new term at the school where I teach is a week old, now, and I am adjusting to the increased teaching load.

On September 15, the online New York Times offered an article by Professor Marino, "Boxing Lessons." In the article, Marino espouses the benefits to the thinking mind of training in boxing. He does comment that there is some resistance to the idea among the intellectual community. He argues, though, that training as a boxer allows a person to develop self-esteem through the realization that power and control can be exercised. Such training also allows fear to be negotiated; it will be present, but it can be overcome, and a fight in the ring facilitates practice in doing so.

Fundamentally, I agree with Marino. Although I have never been a boxer, I do have some years of training in other martial arts (classical jiujutsu, judo, and aikido) and have made a study of the literature of war and warriors; my approach is a bit different, but it gets me toward the same kinds of truths.

There is, as Marino notes, some resistance to the idea that there ought to be something of the warrior about the scholar (as some of the comments posted to the article point out). The monastic beginnings of Western scholarship account for some degree of this (though there were monastic knightly orders and a fair bit of hagiography details militantly saintly acts). My own experience suggests to me that a lot of us in the academic world(myself definitely included) were on the unfortunate receiving end of quite a bit of violence during youth; if my experience is even vaguely representative, then it is no surprise that a great many adults in the academic world would repudiate the value of violence and the ability to exercise it.

To be fair, my experience also suggests that there is a fair bit of resistance to the scholarly among the warlike. It is seen as an Other, and all too often, the Other is made the target of violence for no other reason than that it is the Other. Whether that violence is physical or is sublimated into aversion or--where my experience has seen it--resistance makes no difference.

Both forms of opposition to the idea are misguided, and have been recognized as such by many people in many times and places. Classical Greece offers up Theseus and Odysseus as examples of a balance between the virtues of mind and body; there were other heroes and greater warriors, but most of them came to much worse ends. The Biblical Samson was a strong man and ended up blind and buried under a pile of stone; did not David, a shepherd and musician, and Solomon, evidently a collector of wisdom and thus a scholar, fare far better? Musashi speaks in The Book of Five Rings to the principle that those who practice the sword must also cultivate knowledge of the other arts. The fairy tales that sink into the minds of our children valorize those who blend strength with understanding. The current positions of the various service academies in the United States also address the need for those who will use force to have insightful minds, to be scholars as well as warrior-leaders, as noted here.

And, yes, there are other avenues to develop many of the things that training in the martial arts provides. There are many paths to truth, as many, perhaps, as there are those to move along them. But there are also times when violence is, in fact, the appropriate response. Knowing when those times are...that is one of the values of the scholar to the warrior.