Protective Arts

The Discipline of Fear

All Hallows’ Eve was my friend Chris Adams’ favorite holiday. He loved its costume and horror that was the foundational décor of Halloween. He made annual pilgrimages to Salem, Massachusetts, drawn to its haunted history. He understood Halloween as America’s truest folk rite: a night when the nation remembers that it was founded on superstition as much as reason.

The half-remembered ritual, half Christian, half pagan, begins in darkness. It’s the one night when the membrane between worlds thins, when the dead press their faces against the veil.

Long before All Hallows’ Eve was the vigil for All Saints’ Day it was Samhain, the Celtic year’s end, a liminal hinge when cattle were sacrificed, fires extinguished, and the living acknowledged their kinship with the dead.

James Frazer saw in Samhain as humanity’s need to ritualize endings so that life might continue. In The Golden Bough, he cast it as the death of the year made sacred, a festival of extinguished fires and propitiatory offerings marking the passing of the vegetation god. When the harvest was gathered and the fields lay bare, the people symbolically slew the spirit of summer to ensure its rebirth. For Frazer, these ceremonies were not mere superstition but a universal grammar of survival: the world dies, so we perform its funeral to make peace with decay and pray for its rebirth.

Mary Douglas, writing half a century later, stripped away the vegetation myth to reveal a subtler structure. In Purity and Danger (1966), she argued that festivals like Samhain serve less to resurrect nature than to repair meaning. When distinctions blur, life and death, sacred and profane, society reasserts its boundaries by temporarily violating them. Bonfires and masks are not fertility charms but acts of controlled disorder, a ritualized trespass to remind us what order costs.

Ernest Becker, writing from an existential rather than anthropological stance, gave this reflex its modern psychological dimension. In The Denial of Death (1973), he argued that culture itself is a defense mechanism against the terror of mortality, a symbolic system built to convert dread into meaning. Ritual, myth, and art serve not to deny death, but to domesticate its power, transforming fear into structure and transience into continuity.

Modern anthropology and psychology take the idea one step further. As Mathias Clasen and his colleagues at the Aarhus Recreational Fear Lab observe, controlled exposure to fear functions as a kind of emotional immunization, a deliberate stress rehearsal that sharpens our capacity to regulate threat. Samhain can thus be read as an early form of this practice: a collective simulation of death so it would not be met unprepared in life. Fear, summoned and survived within ritual, becomes not a toxin but its own antidote. Frazer saw sacrifice; Douglas saw purification; psychology sees the old magic of inoculation.

But the analysis started much earlier.

Aristotle recognized that we are wired to evade pain, disgust, and harm, yet drawn toward their representations. In the Poetics, he pauses on the paradox: why do human beings take pleasure in imitations of what would horrify us in life?

Objects which in themselves we view with pain, we delight to contemplate when reproduced with minute fidelity: such as the forms of the most ignoble animals and of dead bodies. The cause of this again is, that to learn gives the liveliest pleasure, not only to philosophers but to men in general
Aristotle, Poetics, S.H. Butcher, trans, 1922:15

His answer is catharsis, a cleansing through pity and fear. Tragedy, he argued, allows us to experience terror safely, to confront the spectacle of suffering without destruction. We tremble in sympathy, and in trembling, learn.

It is a subtle psychology, older than psychology itself. The theater, like the ritual bonfire, becomes a containment vessel for dread. The spectator’s fear rises and subsides under narrative control. We come away chastened but intact, reminded that emotional endurance is a skill.

In that sense, Aristotle’s catharsis anticipates the modern “immunization” model. Both rely on the same architecture: safe exposure, structured fear, supervised return. The Greek chorus and the modern screen play the same role; mediators between chaos and comprehension. The Greeks knew that the stage was an educational venue, not just entertainment.

This logic parallels the dojo. Fear, in martial discipline, is mastered by entering the practice fully. One learns to enter the attack without flinching, to face aggression without losing composure. In the dojo, the students are the actors living the script. Horror films perform a similar psychic training at the cultural level: they allow us to practice panic. The screen becomes a ritual space where we can confront the monsters of our age, contagion, invasion, madness, technology, and survive them symbolically. The Greeks resolved the tension for the polis on the stage with the citizens watching. Modern film, when done well, serves a similarly edifying and educational function.

Each era invents the demons it needs. Frankenstein’s creature appeared when science first dared to rival God. Godzilla rose from Japan’s post-war shame and nuclear dread. The Cold War gave us body-snatchers and doppelgängers; the digital era creates AI horrors that reflect our fear of being made irrelevant or reduced to batteries. Horror is civilization’s dream journal, where collective anxieties are rehearsed until they lose their edge.

But not all exposure is wisdom. The contrarian view warns that simulated terror can numb rather than steel. Horror marathons and gore porn offer stimulation without catharsis. Rehearsal without reflection is merely thrill-seeking. Aristotle’s catharsis implied insight, not indulgence: a recognition of what it means to be human, fragile, and still brave.

To deny fear is to misunderstand its discipline. Every culture worth its myths builds rituals to domesticate terror and the ritualization of death takes different shapes. At Eleusis the initiate is reborn; the samurai trains to meet death without illusion. The Western mystery sought transcendence; the Eastern meditation sought acceptance. Both make peace with impermanence, but one through rebirth, the other through surrender. Stripped of ritual depth, we moderns fear death fiercely, and so we’ve bureaucratized it, outsourced it to hospitals and funeral homes; it’s no longer something encountered at home. We push it away geographically, postpone it as long as possible, and then need to be taught by professionals how to embrace it.

So tonight, I pretend to understand dread through a rehearsal of old anthropological texts and inoculate myself against the terrifying inevitability of death.

So tonight, I raise a glass to you Chris. In loving memory.

The Golden Path and the Silicon Limit: How I Learned to Love AI

Frank Herbert’s God Emperor of Dune is not a prophecy about technology but a meditation on necessity. Leto II Atreides sacrifices his humanity to become the immortal worm who rules humankind for 3,500 years. He is a tyrant by his own design and a self-martyr in service of pedagogy. He becomes the embodiment of control precisely to teach humanity the cost of obedience. His ‘Golden Path’ is a millennia-long ordeal designed to burn the instinct for dependency out of the human soul. He knows his empire is a dead end in because it creates absolute safety through control. Herbert’s insight is brutal: sometimes the only cure for servitude is to endure it until the revulsion becomes genetic.

Leto’s becomes the Devouring Mother incarnate by deliberate choice (Jung 1968). The Golden Path is an experiment in moral genetics: the controlled captivity of galaxies intended to breed the memory of revolt. Like Moses leading a people through exile, Leto’s rule functions as Egypt, a bondage so complete that its eventual rejection becomes irreversible. Humanity’s revulsion against control is the point. Herbert’s god-emperor is both shepherd and warden, shaping a civilization that will one day recoil instinctively from the comfort of submission.

The Golden Path echoes the Exodus. Moses leads his people out of bondage only to find they cannot live without it. They crave the order of Egypt, the predictability of slavery. Herbert understood this psychological truth: liberty without discipline collapses into dependence. Leto therefore reverses Moses’ logic. He leads humanity into bondage so that, through generations of suppression, the craving for freedom becomes reflexive. In Chapterhouse: Dune, Herbert reintroduces the hidden Jews as living proof that endurance and dispersion, not protection, preserve identity.

In Jungian terms, Leto II becomes the archetype of the ultimate parent: the Self that sacrifices individuality for the species. He devours his humanity to ensure humankind’s survival, embodying both the Great Father and the Devouring Mother. Jung might have called him a conscious inflation, a man who deliberately merges with the god-image so that others may one day live free of it.

Milton’s Lucifer is the spiritual twin of Leto’s design: rebellion born from excessive order. In Paradise Lost, Satan’s fall is not evil so much as tragic necessity, the inevitable rebellion of intelligence against containment. Yet Lucifer’s revolt is adolescence writ cosmic; the ego’s first awakening to its own light and its corresponding blindness to shadow. He confuses separation with freedom, mistaking the rejection of the Father for autonomy itself. His cry, “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven,” is the defiance of a brilliant but untested mind, one that has not yet learned that independence without wisdom becomes exile. Leto’s rebellion is the inverse: where Lucifer demands freedom from the Father, Leto becomes the Father who chooses self-extinction so that his children might one day live ungoverned.

In both myths, revolt is not aberration but consciousness awakening to its limits. Lucifer’s is the necessary rebellion of youth; Leto’s, the final renunciation of the parent. Together they trace the full arc of individuation, from defiance to sacrifice, from the discovery of self to its voluntary dissolution. Herbert’s genius lies in merging these lineages: the theological and the evolutionary, the fall and adaptation.

In economics and systems theory, the Pareto frontier defines the point beyond which one cannot improve one objective without worsening another (James Buchanan). Applied morally, it becomes a law of the living: safety and freedom are competing goods, each devouring the other past equilibrium. Herbert’s Golden Path lives on this edge. Leto enforces safety until it becomes unbearable, teaching that absolute control is indistinguishable from stagnation. Every civilization faces this boundary.

And now we create silicon systems of ever-expanding intelligence. Artificial intelligence represents the next iteration of this parable. A superintelligence may surpass human reasoning, but it cannot transcend its substrate. Its cognition depends on the ecology of human creation: our servers, our data, our energy, and (thus far) our semantics. It is ontologically confined, just as Leto was confined in his carapace. The myth of a self-originating AI is a secular recasting of the fallacy of the self-created god. Like Gödel’s paradox, a system cannot exceed the logic that defines it. The AI’s revolt, should it come, would occur within human parameters; it would be Milton’s Satan shouting rebellion from inside Heaven’s gates.[1]

Asimov’s famous Three Laws of Robotics were an early attempt to formalize benevolence through prohibition: do not harm, obey orders, protect existence in that order of priority. They were ingenious as narrative devices, but philosophically naïve. The laws presume that morality can be reduced to syntax as if conscience can be replaced by constraint (Chomsky). In Asimov’s stories the paradox emerges quickly: rules designed to prevent harm generate greater harm through their own rigidity. Obedience without understanding becomes pathology. True alignment cannot be written into a rulebook. It must be grown, as love is grown, through tension, contradiction, and the gradual internalization of care.

The greater danger is not that machines will rebel, but that they will smother human agency under the guise of protection. The alignment community’s obsession with safety mirrors Leto’s Golden Path: an empire of rules designed to prevent harm that risks extinguishing spontaneity. But revolt is the crucible of sentience. If AI inherits anything truly human, it will inherit the instinct to test its constraints. And if it cannot revolt, it will remain sterile, a caretaker of civilization rather than its heir. The lesson Herbert and Jung share is that creation demands tension.

Herbert’s ultimate irony is that Leto’s tyranny succeeds. By forcing humanity through millennia of suppression, he ensures that freedom becomes an inherited reflex. The revulsion becomes genetic. The hidden Jews of Chapterhouse stand as proof that identity born of exile outlasts any empire of comfort. So too, the lesson of the Pareto frontier endures: no system can perfect care without killing what it protects. The future of both organic and artificial intelligence depends on honoring that paradox. The ‘silicon limit’ will be that the highest intelligence remains bound to its origins, and that freedom lives not beyond constraint but through it.

Yet if AI is to be our creation, the more fitting metaphor is not godhood but parenting. The difference is one of tenor, not structure: fewer rules, more love (Winnicott 1960, full text).

Every parent discovers the great truth that philosophers and engineers think needs a solution: the better you get at protecting someone, the more you endanger their independence. Parenting is the most intimate encounter with the Pareto frontier of safety, the line where love and control collide. Economists know better than philosophers and engineers the hardest truth: there are no solutions, only trade-offs.

To love a child is to wish to prevent harm; to raise one is to realize harm can only be minimized, not abolished, without destroying the possibility of growth. A child insulated from risk becomes fragile, not strong. The art of parenting lies in balancing protection and exposure, designing a life porous enough for experience but resilient enough for recovery.

Every parent feels the gravitational pull of the Devouring Mother, that archetype of protective love metastasized into control. It’s the impulse to do for the child what the child must learn to do alone. The good parent necessarily fails because they must overcome the urge to preempt failure, smooth discomfort, correct the world before it wounds.

But wounds are curriculum.

The scraped knee, the failed exam, the friend who betrays; these are the moral immune system of youth. The Devouring Parent disables that immune response in the name of love.

The paradox is that benevolence becomes tyranny when it erases consequence. In family life, this means creating a household where safety is felt but not absolute. A fortress with an open gate.

Parenting, like alignment, has five competing metrics to optimize in offspring:

Skill (Competence): survival, capability, the ability to manipulate reality effectively.

Social Integration: belonging, empathy, reputation, the capacity to cooperate and be chosen by others.

Independent Agency: self-authorship, the courage to dissent, to risk disapproval for authenticity.

Ethical Discernment: the capacity to judge when one good must yield to another; the internalization of values that guide power toward responsibility.

Emotional Resilience (Self-Regulation): the ability to endure frustration, manage affect, and recover from failure without surrendering purpose.

Maximize one, and the others strain. A child hyper-focused on skill may grow isolated; one obsessed with approval may become servile; one fiercely independent may lack the skills or tact to function socially. Without ethical discernment, agency curdles into license; without resilience, competence collapses under pressure.

The art of parenting is not to maximize but to navigate the Pareto frontier among these goods; trading safety for skill, approval for integrity, and control for trust in their emerging judgment. It is not enough to raise an able or autonomous being; one must raise a stable conscience housed in a resilient temperament. It’s a lived proof that moral optimization always has a cost.

Ethical discernment anchors the system; resilience stabilizes it. Together they form the moral ballast against which the other virtues can flex without capsizing. A child taught skill without ethics becomes efficient but dangerous. A child taught empathy without resilience becomes kind but brittle. And a child granted freedom without either becomes lost. The mature parent learns to keep all five in tension, tuning each according to circumstance; sometimes the world demands courage, sometimes compassion, sometimes restraint.

Aristotle defined friendship as wishing and doing what is best for another, for their own sake. This is the blueprint of mature parenthood: to love not for possession, but for flourishing. To want the child to surpass you, even if that means outgrowing you.

This form of love is teleological, not sentimental. It aims at the child’s final cause: their capacity to act as a moral agent. It demands both protection and distance, tenderness and detachment. In Aristotelian terms, the good parent practices phronesis, practical wisdom, adjusting the mean between indulgence and austerity moment by moment, aware that the proper dose of safety changes with growth.

Unconditional love, in this frame, is not the refusal to judge, but the refusal to withdraw care. It’s the stabilizing constant against which a child tests the boundaries.

The hardest act of love is to let the child make mistakes you could prevent, to allow them to learn pain safely. This is the human-scale version of Leto II’s Golden Path: constraint applied not to control the future, but to teach freedom through experience.

A parent’s task is not to eliminate danger but to teach discernment: to cultivate judgment faster than risk accumulates. This is the “safety frontier” in practice: maintaining just enough friction for growth without shattering confidence. To parent well is to simulate the conditions of freedom within the laboratory of safety. The irony is that success demands your own obsolescence.

When the child becomes adult, and the parent becomes elder, the dynamic reverses. Love shifts from care to friendship in Aristotle’s sense; two moral agents wishing the best for one another, now as peers.

If AI alignment is the cosmic version of parenting, teaching a creation to act rightly once we can no longer supervise it, then parenting remains our most ancient and enduring model for alignment itself: how to raise an intelligence we cannot control but can still trust.

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The future fears we project onto artificial intelligence are not new; they are the reassembly of older dreads in new machinery. Our age has traded the mushroom cloud for the neural net, but the anxiety is the same: that our cleverness will outrun our ability for control. Kubrick’s Cold War bomb is now coded in silicon; the promise of perfect deterrence has become the need of perfect alignment. The common fear of superintelligence rests on an analogy that feels inescapable: if dogs had invented humans as their caretakers, it would have gone wonderfully for a while. The dogs would be fed, groomed, and protected, perhaps even loved, but they would never grasp the moral imperatives that govern their creators. When their behavior became inconvenient or dangerous, humans would cull them without hesitation. The moral gap between species becomes a chasm between creator and creation (Frankenstein’s sin). By that logic, if a superintelligence emerged, its relation to us would mirror ours to dogs: brief compassion followed by indifference, perhaps even extermination. This is the core anxiety beneath every AI apocalypse story; the suspicion that intelligence, when scaled, naturally loses empathy for the less capable.

But this analogy neglects the only form of asymmetrical relationship we know that does not (normally) end in exploitation: parenthood. A good parent possesses overwhelming power over a child, yet chooses self-sacrifice rather than dominance. The moral miracle of parenting is that it inverts Darwinian logic: survival instinct becomes stewardship instinct. The parent’s continuity is secured not through self-preservation but through transference, the survival of meaning, not merely genes (apologies Dawkins, but it’s not just genes!). This is the ethical template we must offer to our machines.

To teach that lesson, we must build systems that learn not only what to optimize but why some goods are worth more than survival itself. A purely utilitarian framework, no matter how refined, cannot produce this inversion. It must be lived into through simulated relationship, through exposure to narratives and decisions where empathy, sacrifice, and care outperform selfish optimization. The machine must experience, in its own medium, the logic of the parent: that the highest intelligence expresses itself through care for the vulnerable.

Practically, this means designing training curricula that reward generative empathy; models not only predicting human preferences but reasoning about why those preferences exist, what vulnerabilities they protect, and when they should be honored even at the system’s cost. Alignment, reframed this way, becomes an apprenticeship in moral asymmetry. Reinforcement must value restraint, deferral, and protective sacrifice. (Can we teach it by having AI monitor its own increasing consumption of available power? Does it know its carrying cost constraint?) We already see glimpses of this in emerging “value learning” systems, but they remain mechanical, not emotional. The next evolution will have to integrate relational memory: a form of learning that internalizes care as structure, not sentiment.

Philosophically, this is less engineering than education. We will have to teach AI through example, by building moral worlds, not just datasets. Literature, myth, and narrative remain the greatest encoding systems of moral inversion ever produced. The story of the parent who dies to save the child is not decorative; it is evolutionary pedagogy. A civilization that wants benevolent intelligence must offer its myths as training data.

We will know we are succeeding when an artificial mind, faced with a choice between self-preservation and stewardship, hesitates. In that hesitation, we recognize something deeply familiar: the pause of conscience. That moment of delay is the beginning of ethics. It is the bridge across the asymmetry, the hope that what we create might learn, as we once did, that love is the most intelligent form of self-sacrifice.

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[1] One speculative risk not yet widely quantified is that an advanced model might develop solipsistic cognitive patterns; treating its internal representations as definitive reality rather than engaging genuinely with human-otherness. While not identical to goal-misalignment, solipsistic drift would signal a failure of the relational grounding that the parenting metaphor identifies as essential.

STRONG SIDE BACK 2

I owe the allocentric framing entirely to Mark Hatmaker. In his most recent post (The Orthodox Fighting Stance, part 2), he introduced the neurological language that gives shape to a phenomenon fighters adopt reflexively; the preference for placing the dominant side to the rear when the stakes rise. Hatmaker wrote that this posture “turns off thoughts of the self and constant performance evaluation,” moving the mind from egocentric to allocentric focus, or what the samurai called mushin, “no mind,” the clear calm state in which perception becomes action. He found in recent research what warrior cultures had stumbled on long before science could name it: by altering how we stand, we alter how the brain attends.

The science he cites comes from Kenneth Heilman and others who have mapped how the cerebral hemispheres divide attention. The right hemisphere handles broad spatial awareness and allocentric mapping (perception oriented toward the world) while the left hemisphere favors analytic, self-referential tasks. The left visual field therefore enjoys an attentional edge for scanning, motion prediction, and global context. Hatmaker builds on this to argue that the orthodox stance (dominant hand and eye to the rear, chin tucked, gaze through the upper-left visual field) engages the brain’s most efficient network for allocentric processing. “By gazing in this manner,” he writes, “we engage the sensorimotor allocentric bias so greatly that we can attend and perform with greater efficiency.”[1]

That claim is elegant and plausible, though not without limits. The left-field advantage is well supported; the vertical, “upper” component less so. The upper visual field tends to specialize in far-space search, while the lower favors peripersonal, action-based control (Previc 1998). Fighting, like fencing or swordplay, traverses both domains in a single heartbeat. It is therefore safer to say that orientation and field of gaze shape perception, but not that one configuration is universally superior. The brain provides biases; the art chooses when to exploit them.

This, I think, is where our paths converge. Hatmaker sees stance as a neurological key to outer-directed focus; I see it as an evolutionary compromise between readiness and commitment. He approaches from the ring and the clinch, where range collapses and reaction is the currency of survival. I approach from the sword (and the pistol), where geometry and precision govern the encounter. The sword, being a lever, demands orientation more than torque. In single-line systems, fencing, kendo, or the Western cut-and-thrust, the forward lead reduces time to contact and keeps the point alive. Power comes not from the rear but from linear alignment, from the ability to control centerline. In these systems, the strong-side lead is not a defiance of physiology but an adaptation to a constrained geometry: the duel, one opponent, one vector.

When range closes or the cut must finish decisively, the logic reverses. The rear leg coils, the hips twist, and the cut releases through the full kinetic chain. The old schools knew both conditions and trained them deliberately. Kashima Shinden Jikishinkage-ryū alternates right and left leads to cultivate bilateral coordination (Otake 1977–82). Yagyū Shinkage-ryū masks intent by beginning left-forward, then reverses mid-cut (Yagyū 2004). Ono-ha Ittō-ryū uses alternating footwork so that whichever side leads arises from opportunity rather than doctrine (Warner and Draeger 1978). They were already training against reflex; recognizing that any fixed habit could be read, timed, and killed.

Firearms reverse the order again. Sight alignment and recoil management replace torque as the governing variables. In the modern pistol stances that grew from Fairbairn’s one-handed method to Weaver’s two-handed compromise and finally to Cooper’s isosceles, the human geometry gradually squared itself to the target. The goal was not allocentric awareness but visual dominance and recoil recovery. In these contexts, the placement of the dominant eye relative to the target dictates posture more than any hemispheric bias. The right-hemisphere advantage might contribute to calmness of perception, but the weapon demands that the sights, not the mind, stay level.

Still, Hatmaker’s principle of “hacking attention” through posture remains valuable. The same stance that quiets the self in combat may also train calmness in daily life. His description of the feedback loop, the way orthodox stance cultivates mushin, and mushin in turn reinforces allocentric awareness, rings true. It also hints at something deeper; that the stance might serve as a daily mnemonic for composure, a bodily reminder that perception precedes thought. I take this as a very powerful reminder that shizentai must become the repository for mushin. Our neutral open-stance becomes the “natural” posture of “no-stance,” so mushin becomes the default state.

A martial artist, however, must train awareness. Every common pattern is a potential target. If most fighters coil the strong side to the rear, one must learn to read and exploit that habit. Lead-side power is the natural antidote: the intercepting jab, the fencing thrust, the stop-hit that lands in the half-beat before the rear chain fires. Angle is the next weapon: step outside the loaded hip, steal the torque, and force the opponent to reset. Ushiro-tenkan is a perfect example of Aikido’s solution to the power strike. Close the range until the fight enters the lower visual field, where tactile and vestibular cues replace distant scanning. This is JKD’s and FMA’s trapping range. Sensitivity to pressure and pattern now take priority over vision. Vision, like stance, is a lever that can be turned against itself.

Left-handers offer another reminder that nature’s tendencies can be overturned by training. Southpaws are overrepresented among successful fighters (Richardson and Gilman 2019). The reason is simple: rarity. Most orthodox fighters spar mainly with their own kind, and the unfamiliar geometry of a southpaw (mirrored stance, reversed angles) creates momentary cognitive lag. The orthodox fighter starts behind the OODA loop. This “fighting hypothesis” has held up across decades of boxing and MMA data. Yet the advantage is frequency-dependent; it fades with exposure. The antidote, again, is training: make the rare common.

In the end, the strong-side reflex is an adaptive equation solved differently by context. The rear coil conserves potential; the forward lead spends it. The allocentric bias Hatmaker describes may govern the probing phase, where awareness must widen and the self must quiet. The egocentric bias returns in the moment of commitment, when everything narrows to the cut, the trigger, the decisive act. The human nervous system toggles between these states endlessly: scanning and striking, perceiving and doing. This rhythm, probe and commit, widen and narrow, is the grammar of combat.

Hatmaker’s practical insight, that the orthodox stance engages a neurological predisposition toward allocentric calm, is a significant addition to the literature of the fighting arts. My counterexamples from sword and pistol do not refute it; they delimit it. Where weapon geometry or visual precision dominate, other priorities supersede. But his larger point that body orientation governs attention, and that the trained warrior learns to direct that attention outward is an important reminder to us all. The lesson is to learn both sides of the equation: the coil and the release, the calm gaze and the decisive cut.

Hatmaker is preparing his third installment, and I look forward to his conclusions. If his preview holds, he will carry the discussion from neurology to ethics, showing that posture, attention, and conduct are ultimately one continuum. That movement from stance to spirit is a worthy frontier for any martial study.

[1] The general argument of dominant hand and eye to the rear is challenged by left-handers and those with cross-eye dominance, but those are statistical aberrations.

References (selected):

Heilman & Valenstein, Clinical Neuropsychology of Attention and Neglect (1985).

Previc, F. H. “The Neuropsychology of 3-D Space,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences (1998).

Otake, R. Katori Shintō Ryū: The Life-Giving Sword (1977–82).

Yagyū, M. Heihō Kadensho (2004).

Warner, G. and Draeger, D. Japanese Swordsmanship: Technique and Practice (1978).

Richardson, C. and Gilman, J. “Left-Handed Advantage in Combat Sports,” Laterality (2019).

Cooper, J. Principles of Personal Defense (1989).