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Old 01-26-2011, 10:09 AM   #95
Basia Halliop
Join Date: Jun 2006
Posts: 711
Canada
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Re: The Essence of Training

Leisure's probably not the best word to use, but I think I see what Mary's getting at, more or less...

If everyone in the country is a substistance level farmer, if because of soil or climate or whatever it literally takes a single person 14 hours of labour a day to provide enough food to not die of starvation, then that is what every single person in the country will basically have to do, all day, otherwise starve.

If the land is richer (better soil, lots of fish, whatever) then maybe some people might farm but for the sake of argument now they will have a few hours of time left at the end of the day to do something other than farm. And maybe a few people will start to do other things other than farming or fishing and there will still be enough food for them to not starve to death.

What economic model is used to distribute the food might vary -- they might be given food because they do something useful for the farmers (trades, etc), or they might manage to take it from the farmers (or by neighbouring farmers) by force, or by buying or accumulating enough land that they can act as landlords and take a share of farmers' food.

Either way, these people are not directly involved in producing food and if I understand right, Mary is using the term 'leisure class' to refer to them or perhaps she just means some subsets of them. I would argue though that there are really at least two groups of non-food producing people --

a) those that do some other trade all day and get payed for it, and

b) the group of people that has got hold of land or power or capital of some kind and can in some way get people to give them food without taking all their waking hours working to provide some service they can trade directly for food. (this is the group that could most accurately be called a leisure class, if you want to use that term at all)

And you could argue there are those
c) that are somewhere in between, perhaps taking half their day to do whatever it is they do to get food...

So where do martial artists fit in? They're not producing food, but are they 'tradespeople', using their martial art directly to provide a service that others pay them for by feeding them? Or are they more like groups b or c, getting fed for some other reason and doing the martial art with their left-over time?

I think for those studying traditional martial arts in modern western civilization, the answer is clearly b or c (mostly c). No one is paying us for our training.

A professional military would fall more under group 'a'...

So I guess if you want to talk about history we can argue about which japanese martial artists in which part of history fell more under group a, which under b, and which under c...

It's the 'c' group that seems to best describe most of us today...
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