Only a value for life provides the set of inclinations humans have to naturally protect, defend, and sustain it. Our cells fight off viruses; our immune systems create tolerances to bacteria; our brains process fear and purpose adrenaline, driving neural instincts to concentrate blood and raise our heart rates to help us defend ourselves or flee from an attack; and our consciousness teams with our proprioception to navigate a world that can harm us. From our cellular structure to our spiritual consciousness, even to the surprising number of failed suicides—most—we humans are designed to be life-sustaining creatures.
The value of life is the nature of our human nature, the book that is read, and thus revealed to us, and is the wellspring for our sense of normative obligation, one that recognizes self-evident behaviors that support our care and protection.
It’s no mistake that within the annals of martial history, the highest order of mastery has always been to undo the enemy while sparing his life, if at all possible. And within the philosophic realm, the value of life is the source of justification for our visceral instincts of obligation to care for ourselves and others. What other earthly validation exists to make sacred our highest conception of values, in the form of morals, ethics, justice, and rights? What good would any of these notions be if they were twisted to violate and ravage, operating in contradiction to the existence of human “being”?
If you’re not convinced that the power of morals, ethics, justice, and rights is due to the value we place on life, then ask yourself this: Why do these things matter anyway? What is it that makes them valuable in the first place? Is it simply because we agree they are? Do they only matter as much as the prevailing opinion held by those who vote for them at the time? A 51 percent rule is a dangerous precept for discovering moral clarity considering that collective human agreement is as foolproof as picking up a bucket while you are in it.
There is an intrinsic quality that makes these metaphysical concepts valuable, even if the majority of us agreed they were not of value. What invigorates them must be the value of life because that is what they aim to protect and defend. If the dignity of human being were somehow of no importance to our experience, then these concepts would not exist because they would not have mattered enough to be articulated over the course of history. You can’t have ideals like morals, ethics, justice, and rights if there is nothing about life ideally worth protecting.
And just why do we value life? What is it that compels us to value our lives and judge everything else by its sustainable accord? Here’s my answer after years of research, study, teaching, and contemplation: we don’t know; we just know.
Did God put it there? Maybe. Is it evolutionary residue? Perhaps. The fact that humans value life is an inescapable truth of the natural world. It shares the stage with other natural truths, such as the four fundamental forces of physics, or the elements that make up the primary constituents of matter.
If we can fulfill the protector ethic—protecting ourselves, those around us, and even our enemy, if at all possible—we will have realized the essence, the root, the core of every core value that has ever shaped the martial way. In fact, we cannot formulate any martial value, including self-confidence, honor, integrity, loyalty, humility, discipline, or inner peace, without respect for the value of life that makes any of them a worthy conception to begin with.
Thus, in taking any martial action for the purposes of defense, what more is there to do than aspire toward the protector ethic? Seriously, I’m asking.
What else ought we try to do? Reduce property damage?
The architect of James Bond, Ian Fleming, drew inspiration from the seventeenth-century Japanese poet Matsuo Basho when he wrote the following iconic words:
You only live twice:
Once when you are born
And once when you look death in the face.3
Purposeless death is always an unmitigated tragedy because it thieves from the living. At its least, it’s an object lesson that the deceased can never recover and profit from because it denies any chance at renewal, forgoes any do-over, and disallows any potential “rebirth.”
Obviously, we live once we realize we are alive. But we also face living once we recognize that we will one day die. This sense of impermanence is an existential crisis we’re forced to reconcile throughout our lives by managing our health, our lifestyle, and how the world treats us. To say the crisis does not exist or doesn’t impact us is to cast oneself as fool or fraud. Everyone wants a second chance because we are only authentic once we realize it will all end and then play by those rules—the life-preserving ones we want to be judged by and respected for upholding. The same is true for the martial way. It is only authentic once we recognize, train, live, and act on it in ways that correspond to the moral instincts of our humanity.
I have a saying: good people who want to be better people get trained. One of the best ways to become someone who can do more for oneself and others is to train to be more martially able, because there is no better metric for one’s improvement than the ability to mitigate both inward and outward conflict.
This is why every individual ought to endure martial training for some period, if only to reveal the profound ability its skills and philosophy have to empower our sense of self-worth. The protector ethic, to stand up and defend ourselves and others who might not or cannot defend themselves, is a habit-formed behavior. Carrying out this ethic is the heart of any martial art.
Knowing we should do this, and knowing how to accomplish it, is the difference between accruing mere skill for reenactment and cultivating life-protecting habits. Should we learn the movements of CPR but devoid of their purpose? A sharper understanding of what is valuable affords acute mindfulness of what is moral—what we know we ought to protect. It provides recognition of and clarity regarding our obligations, and training becomes the direct action of our ethic.
But when we, as this time’s undaunted defenders, neoteric teachers, and persevering guardians of this path, supplant this truth, we get confused: rather than training techniques to protect and defend life, we train a life to protect and defend techniques.
If we are to do right by those in conflict, including ourselves, we must know that which unlocks the universal. We must apprentice in honor, integrity, vigilance, and rectitude as the keys to steadfast warriorship. This is nothing less than recognizing the reciprocity of natural justice, instilling temperance in our reasoning, and exhibiting prudence in our judgment, so we can, above all, have the courage to act. These cardinal virtues, at least as old as the Greek Stoics, make for the best map to the protector ethic because if we define ethics as moral values in action, then martial ethics are moral protector values in action.
To pass on real knowledge and deliver it as wisdom, to teach the tactical and perceive the ethical, to be exposed to our naturally binding obligations and by them hold fidelity to their truth so that the next generation might protect and defend themselves and their families—I’d argue that’s nothing short of God’s work.
If we are to fulfill this role, we must hold firm to this certainty: the martial way only lives once we treat it as something that can die.
NOTES
1 1. Gichin Funakoshi