Putting the fun back in fundamentalism – kobudo and religion

Fundamentalism is always an ugly thing. As long as you think your beliefs give you the right, or worse the duty, to deny someone else there’s, you’re on shaky ground, and it doesn’t even matter if you think you are in the right.

It might be a surprising admission, but I have some admiration for people who hold beliefs that are different from mine. For example, I admire people who have the courage of their convictions to actually remain faithful to the tenets of their religion, as the modern world doesn’t make that an easy choice to make.

What puts this thought in my mind this morning? Excuse the digression. I’ve been involved in studying kobudo (old style Japanese martial arts) for over 16 years – quite a long time by any reasonable measure. In that time, I’ve seen lots of different people come and go, with lots of different motivations for pursuing training, lots of personality types, insecurities and biases, and some of them have even been mine.

However, the one consistent factor in my study has been time. Over time, many of the flakier types have drifted off. Some have lost interest and some have realised that the motivation they initially started training with isn’t enough to sustain a long term interest. In general those who maintain long term study tend to be fairly laid back individuals, and the intensity that characterises the beginner’s zeal is rarely present in the veteran.

However, in recent years I’ve seen the rise of the God Shaped Hole syndrome in the motivations of the people that are attracted to martial arts studies. In other words, I think a growing number of people who are attracted to training are attracted by a void in their lives, or their perception of their lives, left by the general abandonment of religion in society.

This was brought home to me recently during the trip to the US documented elsewhere in this blog, because of the strange (for me) experience of being in a part of the world where everyone seemed to be religious. They weren’t ‘Holy Joes’, but rather just people for whom religious faith is taken as a matter of course.

In Ireland, the vast majority of people I know under the age of 40 are not religious. In fact, I don’t think I can name a single person in that age bracket that goes to church. They may profess a spirituality of sorts, but if they do it’s of the DIY or a la carte variety where they pick and choose which parts of their professed religion they believe in. (I know some people who have actively changed religion, or adopted new ‘faiths’ such as Buddhism, but for the purposes of this blog entry, I’m discounting them.)

For me, an interesting observation has been that most of the people who turn their backs on the religion of their parents and culture - as I have done - have not really educated themselves in it. They haven’t investigated the faith in any particular depth, but have more or less just stopped bothering. Leaving the church has been a passive act, not an active one. It’s more hassle than it seems to be worth to attend church, or profess a faith. In addition, in Ireland, it’s become easier to rationalise the decision because of the failings of the Roman Catholic Church and the hypocrisy of much of its representatives in this country with regard to child abuse and clerical scandals.

To maintain faith amongst the younger generations would be a divisive act – most urban under-40s would probably be a bit embarrassed to admit they regularly went to church. (Of course, such people still want to have church weddings and baptise their children, but then, isn’t that about social rather than religious need?) In short, religion is highly uncool.

Likewise in the US, I get the impression that amongst the religious community, professing faith is also a passive rather than an active decision. If you live in the bible belt, then deciding to stop attending church would be a difficult decision, considering that the church community seems to be at the heart of the social life of many people.

Of course, it goes without saying that these are rather gross generalisations, and there are almost certainly vast numbers on both sides of the issue who have thought through their decisions thoroughly and are confident and happy in them.

So back to the God Shaped Hole, fundamentalism and martial arts. It remains a fact, in so far as I can discern it, that there has yet to be a single human culture discovered or retrospectively researched by anthropologists that has developed without religion of some sort. What this tells us is not that there is such a thing as God, but rather that there is a universal need to believe in a greater power. It allows us to make sense of the world around us.

Now you can hypothesize that as a race we are evolving and no longer need the crutch of religion to make sense of the world. You can also postulate that religion is only embraced by the ignorant, and that as we become more educated and worldly, we are leaving the need for god behind. Really, though, there is no way to prove any of that.

(Ironically, people who have abandoned their traditional faith in favour of atheism, because they feel unconvinced about the truth offered by religion or because they doubt in the existence of God , have simply swapped one faith for another - faith in God for faith in man. But you can't proove either of them, and to embrace an absolutely clinical approach to life is foolish. Everyday experience provides us with many examples of things science can't explain and that only make sense through the lense of the soul - what makes good art good? Or good music good? How many scientists are married - can they explain love? It's a very recent thing in human development to turn away from religion alltogether.)

So instead, we have tossed out something that while it has its drawbacks and has been the indirect source of much suffering, also has been quite useful. What have we replaced it with? I won’t bother with running down the list of lightweight disposable culture we have placed in the stead of religion – most people will be familiar with the ideas. The point should be clear – we haven’t really replaced it with anything that serves the same purpose, yet the requirement remains.

This isn’t necessarily a problem for the people and I’m certainly not trying to suggest that only the stupid abandon religion, but because in my opinion this has been a passive process for many people, they are left with a void in their lives. And so they go looking for something to fill it. This has been good news for disciplines like tai chi, yoga and martial arts in general, and it has also been good news for people promoting new age alternative spiritualities which give people the illusion of opting into a belief system of their choosing rather than the one imposed upon them by birth. Because these aren’t organised religions, they feel more liberating and non judgemental. After all, we all know that all opinions are equal and valid and no one has the right to judge us, don’t we?

How does this have anything to do with budo? Well, some of the people who wind up in martial arts schools seem to be looking for something. Some of them are there because they think they need to learn self defence and some for health reasons, but many are there because of a search for meaning, whether they realise it or not.

(Interestingly, I found myself sitting next to a state pathologist at a function recently and couldn’t resist asking her about the most likely causes of death for people in her area – she told me that heart disease is a bigger killer than violent crime, suicide, cancer and road accidents. The moral of the story is that if you are really interested in self defence – stop eating fried food and take a run, don’t bother learning martial arts.)

So how does this new ‘need’ for meaning manifest itself in martial arts – well one of the most interesting effects is the need some people seem to have to shove their dogmatic faith in their chosen discipline down other people’s throats.

The Internet is replete with discussion forums and chat rooms where people revisit the same old arguments day in day out. They do this until they get bored with it and a new drone steps up to the plate and raises the same arguments. Depending on how well the forum is moderated, and where its bias lies, these people are either labelled as trolls and booted or indulged to the detriment of members of those forums whose ‘faiths’ differ from the majority.

If you are not familiar with these forums, then it’s entirely possible that this might seem like an extreme set of comparisons, but trust me, the degree of vitriol and bad feeling generated by these discussions is really stunning. Some common factors amongst the people who take part in these endless circular arguments is that they tend to be young men, usually in their late teens or early twenties, and they are almost always quite idealistic in their outlook.

They usually haven’t been practicing their chosen art for very long and seem to be threatened by the choices other people when those choices are different from them. Can you see the comparison yet?