The Way of Harmony
Aikido on the Social Dance Floor
Developed in the early 20th century by Morihei Ueshiba, aikido is a unique form of defensive martial art in which peace and harmony are the ultimate goal. In the dojo, defenders perform aikido by blending with the movements of their attackers and harmonizing with the forces of the attacks, rather than directly opposing them. By blending with and gently redirecting the attacks, the defender is able to protect themselves, while simultaneously protecting their attackers. The goal of aikido is not to revenge and destroy (injury is frowned upon, and killing forbidden), but rather simply to guide the situation toward the most harmonious and peaceful resolution.
The parallels with social waltzing are clear: the most effective and the most satisfying kind of waltzing is really a form of peace-time aikido, the result of peaceful, harmonious blending with one’s partners, other couples, and of course, the music. But the parallels run deeper still.
Aikido is traditionally viewed as a martial art, but from the very beginning it has also been more than this: a way of approaching not only defense, but life, a way of fostering harmony in every situation. So why is the “Art of Peace,” and “Way of Harmony,” practiced primarily in the context of battle? By learning to create harmony in the relative chaos of the dojo (for example, in randori or “chaos taking,” where one defender improvisationally harmonizes with multiple attackers), the practitioner of aikido becomes uniquely well-prepared to create harmony in the other, less chaotic situations that they face in their daily lives outside of the dojo.
The same is true of social waltzing. On the social dance floor, like randori in the dojo, we are challenged to harmonize a multitude of continuously changing variables: our desires, abilities, and actions, the desires, abilities, and actions of our partner and of the other couples on the dance floor, the meter, tempo, and quality of the music, and the characteristics of the dance hall itself. The beauty of this challenge is that if we can learn to harmonize these variables on the dance floor, in the concentrated form of life that we call waltzing, we can also learn to harmonize the variables of the continuously changing world outside the ballroom, and use the skills that social waltzing teaches us to bring greater harmony and peace to the world.
A Psychological Aside: Two fascinating studies have recently confirmed the wisdom of this non-retaliatory strategy for conflict. One study, entitled “Two Eyes for an Eye,” demonstrated the danger of tit-for-tat fighting: when a pair of people were asked to take turns applying pressure to the other’s finger with the same force that the other had just exerted on their own, the force actually escalated 38% each turn, as a “natural byproduct of a neurological quirk that causes the pain we receive to seem more painful than the pain we produce, so we usually give more pain than we have received.”
In another study, researchers found that although we believe that taking revenge will feel good, retaliating in this way actually makes us feel worse. Those who were allowed to take revenge felt worse than those who were not allowed to take revenge, while believing instead that they’d feel even worse if they couldn’t, and those who weren’t allowed to felt better than those who were, while believing instead that they’d feel better if they could.
Also interesting are the statistics from World War II which demonstrate our strong aversion to real-life mortal combat. According to surveys by S.L.A. Marshall, only 15 to 20% of U.S. riflemen in WWII ever fired a shot at the enemy. In subsequent wars, intensive desensitization training “succeeded” in significantly raising that number (to 55% in Korea and 90 to 95% in Vietnam), while also significantly increasing rates of post-traumatic stress disorder.
This was a stub which never quite found a home in Waltzing: A Manual for Dancing and Living. I’m glad to be able to publish it here on Medium.
