15/11/2023
Scott Sensei's latest article.
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=839960928137377&id=100063704311806&sfnsn=mo
Othering
I have an identical twin brother. He is an extremely clever and handsome chap… as I said, IDENTICAL twin brother 😊
Recently, we convened for one of our regular family get-togethers. Over a glass of wine, we talk about his work. He runs a successful consultancy company, dealing with equality and equity within institutions, companies and organisations. There had recently been some high-profile accusations of deep-rooted discrimination within a certain institution. I knew people involved and believed their line that it was just ‘a few rotten apples’ which was sullying the progress that had been made over recent decades. My brother had a lot of experience within this space and has spent the last number of years working with said institution to push them forward. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘But the issue is intuitional’.
‘How can both things be true? Surely, they are mutually exclusive?’ I asked.
‘No… they aren’t’ he said, with a level of expertise beyond me.
The problem, he explained, was that any institution, company or organisation that is put under pressure starts ‘othering’. That is to say, as a reaction to stressful situations, members of the pressurised group begin to identify people that are recognisably different and start to highlight those differences. There is a ‘them and us’ mentality that arises. From an anthropological point of view, I know that this has been hard wired into our evolution. Most hunter-gather communities had an evolutionary advantage in being able to recognise people that don’t belong to their (on average) 120–150-member group. The outsiders are literally ‘other’ and evolution has taught us to treat them with suspicion and mistrust. Within the confines of our group or tribe, we have a need and desire to trust those around us on a daily basis; this limited the numbers within our community by the physical limitations of our brain’s ability to form connections. It was only later, when ‘shared narratives’ were used, that we were able to grow our communities in size. However, instead of the communities being more inclusive, they were turbo-charged by numbers, specialisation and wealth. Religion and statehood became the new ‘us’ and everyone outside those constructs became other.
Bringing it back to my brother and the institutions mentioned above, those differences started to become the lens by which all interactions with any member of the highlighted group are viewed. Individuals that may truly believe they don’t possess a prejudicial bone in their body, could start to exhibit discriminatory ideology as a result of the pressure they experience on their resources and time. This, my brother highlighted, is the institutionalised part of the discrimination… Interesting (and frightening), I thought.
As with everything in my life, new information is fed into my karate mind to see if it could be used to help with my understanding of our art. This, I thought, did. For sure, we can all easily relate to the ‘them and us’ mentality within karate. For example, we only have to look at the reaction to the recent running of several seminars by two high-level Japanese instructors in Europe. The response from the organisation these instructors once pioneered was swift and unambiguous. I know a little about the ins and outs of the whole situation. The inevitable harshness of the organisational edict is really the result of a (maybe necessary) black and white response to a very nuanced situation. It is a good example of othering, were karate-ka support the badge of the organisation, rather that the people who (once) wore it. If that person no-longer wears the badge, then they become persona non grata.
I have experienced this myself and relive it occasionally when Facebook throws up a memory from a decade ago or more. I try not to, but sometimes click on to the original post, whether that be from the WTKO or JKS days, and look at who liked it back in the day. I realise that almost no one who previously chose that small demonstration of social inclusion would do so today. Those karate-ka weren’t liking my karate post, they were liking the badge it was associated with. To them, I have now become ‘other’. That one difference is highlighted; the badge, because for sure the karate is the same.
However, I am just one of an endless number of karate-ka who have experienced such things. And, like any community, individuals become groups and groups become associations. We can all cite associations (national or international) who have more than a simmering rivalry between each other. Rivalry can be a good motivator, but not when it deteriorates into othering, when real or perceived pressure for limited resources produces an ugly scramble for supremacy. And the more pressure a group feels, the more entrenched this becomes. Alliances can be consciously and subconsciously formed, quietly growing in size and strength. There are karate-ka out there that see the karate world in terms of east and west. Japanophiles who believe that if you aren’t connected to the east, your karate is illegitimate. Equally, there are karate-ka who believe no good has ever come from the east, proclaiming that karate has made a quantum leap since its arrival to the west: Two competing ecosystems of belief that are feed and reinforced by othering and aided and abetted by social media algorithms and confirmation bias. At this point, for many it is a zero-sum game; one cannot have victory without loss on the other side. In a world where there is an eye-for-an-eye mentality, everyone becomes blind.
For sure, there are associations out there that are pariahs, denigrating the name of karate to all uninitiated. This is without question, and contributors like McDojo Life eloquently say what the rest of us privately think. However, even this, on occasions, goes too far. We are all willing participants of group schadenfreude, in our mind’s eye quickly flicking through the list of groups we have opted in, to determine the intensity of our rejection of what we watch. The more opt-ins we share with what we are viewing, the more forgiving our appraisal. The less, the more vicious we are… to the point that our subjective assessment may have little connection to objective reality. This is especially true with karate, were ALL styles come from the same origin. We fail to see the catalogue of choices that has taken individuals to a certain point and ignore the fact that all our various associations descend from the same origin – the Abraham to our collective ‘shared narratives’. We practice almost identical ritualistic movement and wear almost identical uniforms. If an alien suddenly found themselves plonked on earth doing an anthropological study, they’d be unable to discern any tangible difference. However, we still insist on othering, entrenching generational discrimination… the epigenetics of karate destined to have segregation hardwired into its evolution. A black and white, them and us, binary view, trying to make sense of the complexity of the world and the constant ebb and flow of a dynamic system. By the click of a mouse, or misspoken comment, friends become enemies and foe become friends. In a world where the most simplistic, binary mind-maps are used to make sense of the complexities of reality, we are destined to constantly resort to othering, forever dividing our world until we are an island of one.
Such a shame ☹
Key
Karate-ka = People
Badge = Flag
Association = Country
