The Virtue of the Sword - Essay

I feel the need to make a point or two here. I have had this conversation with other men and women who thought they understood the samurai pretty well but did not, not really.

There is nothing wrong with the ideas of being a gentleman, or the literary fantasy of chivalry or even the literary fantasy of Bushido.
The reality of the gentleman is very real, but the other two just never existed.

The knights of Europe and the Samurai were killers and rapists and gangsters, basically. They fought other gangsters to protect their territory.

Again, I think the modern literary fantasy of these ideas is fine, but if you want to truly study budo and understand what it was and how it worked, you cannot have some fantasy in your head, you need to see the naked, bloody corpse as it lay on the ground. If you think for one instant that those men wouldnt kill you as you lay helpless on the ground, think again. They were bloodthirsty in the true sense of the word. A samurai's idea of good sex was a 10 year old boy at a monastery. This is well documented. These ideas dont sell products very well.

It wasnt all bad, and it certainly wasnt all good, but if you want to actually understand it, you have to look it in the eye.

It reminds me of the original versions of the old European folk tales and the modern versions our kids learn. Like the original red riding hood - she has sex with the wolf and then she cuts his head off with an axe herself...
 
I'll take some of the good, and leave the bad. I have enough of that on my own!

It seems like that things are heading towards the brutal more and more.

The ability to respond to trouble vigorously and decisively would be a good thing.

At least the will to try and resist.

Avoiding it altogether even better, if possible.

Thanks for the food for thought.

Tom
 
I'll take some of the good, and leave the bad. I have enough of that on my own!>>>>>>> Gravertom


Amen to that!



munk
 
BrentH said:
Sometimes reality is a tough chew..

We ignore it at our peril.
Click to expand...

And sometimes our dreams become our realities. Sometimes our realities are greater than our dreams.

When I was a child we lived in a four room house with a coal stove as our only heat. We had an outhouse. My grandfather had lost everything in the Depression.

We lived in Georgia, but it was still cold, very cold. For instance I have always loved fountain pens. I remember my bedroom being so cold that the ink froze in my fountain pen.

But my father believed in education, so he took every penny he had and sent me to a private school where I could get a good education. I hated the school at the time, but now I am very grateful for his sacrifice.

The teachers knew my circumstances. One day I was given the assignment to write what I wanted to become. When I grew up.

I put all my dreams into that paper, describing a lifestyle that was beyond, so far beyond, the possibilities that lay ahead for someone in my financial circumstances --- that my teacher told me it was "pure fantasy" and that she insisted that I redo the paper in "more reasonable terms," or she would give me an "F" for writing fiction!

I remember standing in front of the class crying at the outrage involving the destruction of my dream. But I pulled myself together and told her, "I AM keeping my dream and my goals, even if it means getting an 'F' on this paper.”

I got an 'F' (tough school) and even though I lost the paper, I also kept and exceeded my dream.
 
"It seems like that things are heading towards the brutal more and more." gravertom

I don't agree with this. The human condition is brutal, and has always been so. Don't you think there is less brutality today? There are more people, surely, but I think we have civilized ourselves a bit during history.
 
I think the ideas presented in this article are all well and good. However, I think many of them belong to a "keep it to yourself" profile, a bit. I mean, could you imagine going up to a mother waiting outside of a public restroom for her son and saying, "Don't you fret little missy. I'll keep an eye on little Johny. He's not getting abducted or raped on my watch...oh and i'll even make sure he washes his hands. The warrior way is clean hands for good deeds."
I'm making light of it, but some of the things that the warrior way has you do puts you in positions where you yourself could be called into question even if your intentions were the best. Personally, I practice a modified form of chivalry. The doable stuff. If a lady is walking toward the building I am heading toward, I open the door for her with a smile. If i see a woman walking alone at night I give a very quick check to see if anything feels wrong. Very quick. If a man and woman are in a heated argument in a public place and things are obviously getting out of hand, then i give pause and gawk a bit. That usually stops it long enough that they don't get any more heated. I'm not a tough guy. I'm not that big, not the strongest, and not the most brave. However, I do agree that manners are the lubrication for society. While I don't think we have become any more brutal, i think our respect for others has decreased...or more accurately, I believe our selfishness far outweighs our selflessness. You couple that with immediate media (sometimes reported before all facts are in) and an ugly picture can be painted in a hurry.
The romance of bettering ourselves and helping others is not a bad thing. Stories, fables, myths, and religions are based on such principles. However, as Danny said, we can't confuse ideals with fact. Knights and Samurai were professional killers, plunderers, and rapists held in the same awe and high esteem that we hold Paris Hilton. They were powerful and larger than life.
Dream big, live big, but help each other out.

Jake
 
Personally, I suspect DIJ has overdrawn the 'reality' of Samurai. Somewhere between the glory/honor hype, and sociopathic plunderers, the truth lies.


munk
 
we should always have ideals to strive for, we may not achieve them, but the glory is in trying.

i'm glad to see someone else sign off with the quote from simonedes:
===================================================
Ω ΞΕΙΝ ΑΓΓΕΛΕΙΝ ΛΑΚΕΔΑΙΜΟΝΙΟΙΣ ΟΤΙ ΤΗΔΕ ΚΕΙΜΕΘΑ ΤΟΙΣ ΚΕΙΝΩΝ ΡΗΜΑΣΙ ΠΕΙΘΟΜΕΝΟΙ

ô xein', aggeilon Lakedaimoniois hoti têide
keimetha tois keinôn rhêmasi peithomenoi

Dic, hospes Spartae nos te hic vidisse iacentes,
Dum sanctis patriae legibus obsequimur

Go tell the Spartans, you who pass us by
That here obedient to their laws we lie
===================================================
i use the latin version in my forum signatures here & elsewhere:
if you do not know what it referrs to, you should.
_______________________________________________________________
CAVE CANEM ET SEMPER PARATUS
Dic, hospes Spartae nos te hic vidisse iacentes,
Dum sanctis patriae legibus obsequimur

BlueMillieSig.jpg

If they don't want me to eat animals - why do they make them out of MEAT?




 
DannyinJapan said:
It reminds me of the original versions of the old European folk tales and the modern versions our kids learn. Like the original red riding hood - she has sex with the wolf and then she cuts his head off with an axe herself...
Click to expand...


You know something, Danny, I always thought that there was something kinky/freaky about that Little Red Riding Hood! LOL!!

I kinda liked it ;)
I would have tried my best to please her freaky side, but I don't know if she would have been good enough to lose my head over ;)

You make some very good points, buddy :)
 
maybe I should have said, "more brutal as compared to recent history in the west", or something like that.

I hope things don't get as bad here as they have been in the past,(F&I War, Rev war, Civil war) or as bad as they have been in China, Soviet Russia, various parts of Africa, etc.


In general, I think the US is in a state of decline and decay as a society. I agree, human nature has always(since the fall) been brutal, if left without some mitigating influence.

Tom
 
DannyinJapan said:
.

It reminds me of the original versions of the old European folk tales and the modern versions our kids learn. Like the original red riding hood - she has sex with the wolf and then she cuts his head off with an axe herself...
Click to expand...
O.K. So which head did she cut off, anyway?
 
This thread was recently brought back to the top, and it is evident that the original link is broken.

As I searched the web for it I discovered this essay with the same title and on the same subject, dated 2 years after my original post at the top of this thread.


It also references the samurai, who without doubt many times abused their power, and the Spartans, who were perhaps the first large scale communists and had young men kill worker slaves as a rite of passage. Although flawed peoples, they are referenced in a discussion of particular virtues they illustrated.

It is perhaps apt as we approach Memorial Day to relink an essay and again reflect on this topic. For many of us, our nations have engaged in wars we can’t in good conscience support. Even so, strength often protects from malevolent powers. Are we able to recognize those foundational virtues which enable our higher function, even while we maintain an awareness of how those virtues can be twisted to become vices? Are we able to honor those who have not only cultivated the virtues, but maintained them uncorrupted through their lifetimes?
 
It's an interesting essay. One thing that occurs to me is that people tend to speak or write as if warriors and soldiers, small scale combat and large scale wars as if they are all the same, differing only in size. Like thinking that a child is just a small adult. This is usually not the case.

There is a common tendency to glorify the military and vilify politics and politicians. Clausewitz famously wrote that war is the continuation of politics by other means. If that is so, and I believe it is, then the military is (usually) an arm of the politicians, at least in wartime, and must be judged together with them. In Ukraine, for example, there are soldiers and military machines on both sides, but they are not morally equivalent, nor are they waging the war in the same way or with the same values.

As Howard points out, there are supportable and unsupportable wars; powerful armies can serve noble or evil purposes, etc. We should keep that in mind and try to ensure that our own forces are used only when necessary for defense or to support our values. Most of all keep in mind that in the larger scheme of things we are no better or worse than any other peoples on this planet, though that varies over time.
 
I don't agree at all that the military is an arm of politicians, perhaps the very highest ranking military commanders etc partially so. But soldiers are just pawns, trained to do what they are told to do by their leaders who are told what to do by their leaders who eventually are told what to do by politicians.
No pawns in Vietnam for example wanted to be there nor did they understand why they were there but they were there because they were told to do so.
 
What you're saying is what I meant. I didn't mean that the military takes part in domestic politics, at least not in the U.S. I meant that when the military engages in wars (whether major or minor wars) they are following the policies of the political leaders. So we may praise the military for bravery and other qualities, but how we feel about their actions depends on how we feel about the orders and policies set by the politicians. No argument here, I think.

What prompted me to make this comment is that there have been several threads in which some people have given blanket praise to "warriors" because of an affinity for their fighting methods or weaponry, without considering that sometimes those skills and weapons are employed in ways that are hard to justify, such as attacks on the U.S., to take the most obvious example. Another obvious example is Nazi Germany, which had an efficient, well-organized and well-armed military, but which became a tool in the hands of a depraved political leadership.
 
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