There’s too big a disconnect between how we see war and how we see the martial arts. We are much more willing, it seems, to accept the nobility of martial arts than we are to accept the nobility of war. But fighting with a gun is another form of martial arts, and a fairly successful one judging by it’s host of disciples. If as a culture we accept Jayden Smith as a hero for being the best at battering, why do we reject the idea that there’s a certain nobility to gang violence and global wars?
As a martial artist and a peacenik, this troubles me.
There is a certain level of operational fairness and organization in martial arts that is just missing in war. You face your opponent in martial arts and win over or get defeated by your opponent against whom you had an even chance of winning against. In war however your opponent is faceless, often not even YOUR opponent but the opponent of your country. When you fight in MMA, you defend YOUR name, your honor, while in war you may simply be out there to collect a paycheck in a war you don’t necessarly understand or support.
In an MMA world, you would have Tillman, football here, Rambo his way through pencil neck enemies. In the real war world however, he was killed by friendly-fire.
Martial arts are developed during peacetime by the ruling military class to sublimate the violence that serves as the justification of their existence. This is particularly clear in the case of combat involving weapons. Look at French foil fencing, German saber fencing, or Japanese kendo. None of those are actually a viable technique if one were to use a real sword in a real, life-and-death sword fight. Instead they are ritualized forms of combat with sets of goods entirely distinct from real combat. This is less apparent in weaponless martial arts such as grappling or punching techniques. But even there, the same ritualized environment remains. A clear example of this would be Krav maga was developed by the IDF because traditional forms of martial arts are surprisingly ineffective in real combat situations. Not to mention, that since weapons do exist the non-weapon forms of combat are already placed within a smaller ritualized sphere, one that is distinct from actual combat where weapons are permitted.
There are martial arts surrounding guns, but like the other items listed, they are distinct from actual combat with guns. A gold medal biathlete would fair poorly in the ghettos of DC.
Hmmm… that depends on which traditional form your talking about. The Israeli army invited my Wing Chun instructor to teach properly effective punching, and they incorporated his techniques in Krav Maga.
Systema is a good example of how traditional techniques (for example taken from Aikido) are used into a highly effective combat martial art developped for Speznatz special forces.
Omar, Jet Li as a trained secret agent takes on dozens of peons, or Tillman would pop the heads of off twerpy others in a fist fight, and we consider that fair, where as the United States, in a quest to restore its honor after a surprise ambush, goes around beating up badguys. There is a face to your enemy, as there is ever a face on abstract injustice.
I agree that the relationship between soldiers and the country is different from myself and myself, but when those soldiers are citizens fighting on behalf of their own country, they are a part of the country. And this also goes to what Xunzian said: war is incredibly ritualized, even in times of active combat. Soldiers operate in formation, in unison, and have rigid manners systems whereby they salute their ostensibly more capable seniors. Their lives are nearly as austere as a monk’s. They are devoted to the hive; individualism is repressed and integration is enforced both institutionally and by vigilantism. To such a mindset, war is fighting for oneself when one fights for one’s country.
Xunzian, the epee is a very effective sword for one-on-one weapon combat. It was designed, and the formal art was designed, for a specific combat context. Pikes are effective against cavalry, catapults and cannons are effective against castles, missiles are effective against airplanes, and IED are effective against occupying forces (we haven’t found anything effective against guerrilla reistance).
Kendo is a good example. It came out of training for Samurai, and incorporates aspects of Bushido and Zen Buddhism. How different is that really from the religio-jingoism of the US army, once we control for the advance in technology?
Hello Carleas,
War is not necessarily refined (especially gerrilla war), nor are combatans molded into a regular army (as we see in the employment of children as bombs, or as soldiers). War is highly ritualized, often, but not necessarily. Not all soldiers operate in formation, in unison. That is what the Bush administration exploited to circumvent the Geneva convention.
In a martial arts contest you know your specific opponent. In war there are civilian casualties. You battle corruption and spies, so the face of your opponent, who you want to fight, is not seen, is hidden. Martial arts present an ideal situation that no longer presents itself very often in modern combat, to face your opponent.
Soldiers are not brain-washed, nor are they ripped or their individualism, but in fact their indiviudalism is often encouraged because when you excell in rifle marksmanship, for an example, it is the individual and not the unit to which he belongs that is recognized. The Army is not intended to be made of zombies. It is supposed to be compossed of professionals. You’re not required by the Army to sign about how wonderful the President is or your Commander is, but you are required to obey the orders of those appointed over you. The Army does not care if you don’t want to fight in a particular war, but that you fight regardless.
I agree that the martial arts are rooted in the martial tradition. That is why they are “martial arts”. But just because particular aspects of a martial art are useful in combat doesn’t mean that the entire discipline is useful in a combat situation. You say your teacher was recruited to teach punching. Punching is, no doubt, and important part of krav maga, but it is one component out of many. That is also kinda the point of martial arts. Your discipline, rather than “fighting” is “awesome punching”. Obviously related, but distinct.
You talk about kendo coming from training samurai in the art of swordplay, but it is actually more complicated than that. It developed during the Edo period, when Japan had been unified under a powerful warlord and remained unified for a very long time. The warlord and the military elite based their right to rule off their martial prowess. But they also had no one to fight. So ritual forms were developed. Modern kendo, stemming from that period, is great if you want to practice kendo. However, if you want to fight someone to the death with a katana, it is freakin’ terrible. There were a huge number of schools in WWII-era Japan devoted to recovering the lost sword fighting techniques (mostly devised using live prisoners as practice dummies).
Likewise with the ritualization of the military. Many of those elements stem from the transition away from mercenary armies to national armies. Within nations, there was a clear hierarchy and that was recapitulated within the military structure. Additionally, before rifling was developed having very clear formations was incredibly important to victory in combat. Indeed, there are numerous examples of smaller, lesser armed groups with better command and control structures beating superior forces. That started to change with rifling, was dealt another blow by the existence of automatic weapons, and with automatic weapons now being incredibly widespread, it is all but gone. The control of American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan really don’t help defeat guerrilla-style insurgency.
Those old forms remain a vital and important component of the martial existence, but let’s not mistake the forest for the trees here. Martial arts, by their nature, belong to the upper realms of the social strata. Actually fighting in a war? You know that disproportionately falls on the lower social strata.
The prime distinction is that the martial arts are taught and seen as a supreme discipline wherein a challenge from an aggressor is met with suburb skill and artistry to a conclusion of peace and tranquility. But gang fighting and war are seen quite differently wherein battles are chosen based on profit and the winner advances to conquer even more from others.
“It takes a thief” was a TV show revering and promoting the skill of expert thievery, after which many were proud and willing to sign up to the government to be their Robert Conrad. Pride can be taken in any direction. The only real distinction is whether it is aggressive or defensive and aggressiveness can always be hidden behind a veil of self-defense.
Martial arts are displayed as defensive skills so as to develop a field of players. War is displayed as aggressive skill so as to develop an means to conquer.
I once took a few sabre classes from someone whose teacher had been in one of the last British cavalry charges. He spent a class showing the differences between sabre fencing and practice, which is mitigated by having a horse between your legs.
Pretty much anyone trained in fencing given a sword would kill anyone untrained, or even noticeably less trained, in “real combat”. The principles and dynamics of using a long piece of sharpened metal to defend oneself remain the same, and a foil fencer will be under no illusions that scoring points and disabling opponents are different things.
The key difference is in the level of application of training. Judo was developed from jujitsu by taking the techniques that could be safely practiced at full speed and power against resisting, trained opponents, and within a couple of years it had demolished the jujitsu schools of the time in sparring situations. Looking at modern no-holds-barred matches, it’s (kick)boxing and muay thai that dominate the striking styles of all of the top people, wrestling and judo (and judo’s derived groundfighting specialism Brazilian jiujitsu) that dominate the grappling styles. Styles that can train at high intensity and against well-trained resisting opponents refine and develop their techniques to work against well-trained, resisting opponents.
I’ve trained and sparred with all sorts of styles. Krav maga and Jeet Kune Do, both taking a very similar pragmatic approach to technique selection, are by far and away the most variable students of all. Some schools are very effective, some are worse than useless. And the difference is in every case the level of intensity of training, in my experience.
Interestingly, BJJ was clearly developed in an environment of one-on-one matches with no time limits, as rolling around on the floor for half an hour isn’t advisable in an uncontrolled situation. But the techniques developed that way were phenomenally effective against people who had no experience against it, and for a few years BJJ appeared as a miracle solution; groundfighting is an acknowledged “theatre” by every serious unarmed martial art. To the extent that the seriousness of a martial art as applied self-defence is now in part defined by its attitude to groundfighting.
But to go back to the OP, war and martial arts are not comparable. War is about position, movement, supplies, support, co-ordination - it’s a management exercise. An army need organisation and discipline. Martial arts are variously about technique, physical condition, spirituality, calmness, aggression… but they are fundamentally atomic, war is fundamentally holistic. And so in martial arts it makes sense to talk of the internal goods of self-improvement, whereas in war one looks at efficiency and parsimony; the chief overlap as far as virtue goes is courage.
Xunzian, it seems here you are talking to me, whereas further down your post you address Carleas. Ill respond first to what you say to me, about ‘aswesome punching’.
Krav Maga is a discipline in development, which started out with techniques like testicle grabbing and eye scratching. Since that humble but effective beginning (also fit for the female part of the Israeli army), theyve been looking for other techniques which are relatively fail proof, low risk, both defense and offense in the same move. So they arrived at Wing Chun, and they use the basic strike now.
Where traditional sublimized martial arts meet present day combat form is in their scientific approach, working with leverage from anatomic realities. Some martial arts are ‘deeper’ in this sense. Aikido works, Wing Chun works, Systema works, but Karate doesnt work, neither does Kempo. Basically, all disciplines where offense and defense are the same work, disciplines where you have separate blocks and strikes dont. Like in war, offense is the best defense. Or rather, the only effective defense is one where during the ememy attack, the root of the attack is broken, instead of one where only the effect of his attack is minimized.
And yet the principles still count.
The Wing Chun strike is a hand to hand version of a strategy without which it is nearly impossible to win any battle unless you are vastly superior in strength.
Martial arts, at least the effective ones, are based on tactics, just as the actions of a commander of the atlantic fleet is. Where is the weakness of the enemy, where is your strength, and what is the shortest and most certain way to connect.
I think the attachment of nobility requires a focus - an individual to attach that narrative to. War is a bit too blurred on the whole - messy, grey, whatever. Martial arts - you got some guy posing crane style on a stone in a nice garden somewhere, pruning bonsai with his toes while punching a rapist in the face. All fairly black and white.
There’s also the ‘skill’ as opposed to ‘any fucker could do it’ aspect. Just compare an archer to a guy with a sawn-off shotgun.
Right, Tab, skill and style. Thats whats so disarming about martial artists, whether mano a mano or commanding an army.
Goethe thought Napoleon possessed the greatest mind in history, I doubt he would have thought that about Hitler. Napoleon had style, Hitler didn’t…
The Nazis were the best-dressed cats on the battlefield, man. Stepping out with some sharp Hugo Boss threads. In fact, the Nazis and Soviets both had the whole Heroic Modernist chic going for them.
Most sports and skills practised to a high level of skill give the practitioner something of an ‘aura’ when practising, a sense of confidence and stability and effortlessness. With martial arts you have the added element of personal danger/safety that you don’t get from, say, chess or yoga.
Oh I know, and the nazis were extremely effective on the battlefield.
My point was meant to pertain to Hitler, the man - who didnt look very stylish at all. Compare that to Napoleon - the name alone!
“Hitler”… come on. What is that?
When a human is fully involved in action, he is most conscious, most directly conscious of what he is, of what the world means in comparison to what he is, what he means in relation to the world. Only in fully involved action a man completely exists, when there is no part of him left latent, to be guessed, hoped for or feared. When fully immersed in correct action, (by correct I mean action flowing unobstructedly from the potential of the actor in his space) there is no fear and mistakes are impossible to make; the grace that emerges from this state is hypnotic, puts a spell on whoever is watching.
You start out talking about martial art which we connect with Bruce Lee, Chuck Norris, Steven Segal …etc …etc. They fight for a noble purpose, with little colatteral damage and abhore any violation of civilians.
When you speak of warfare, it’s like you only studied warfare in 5 min and only read all the politician speeches. Warfare is a very dirty buisness, with massive colatteral damage, rape, molesting and massacars of civilians, friendly fire …etc.
Psycosis, PTSD, suicide …etc.
I now think I understand why I never agree with most of the moderators here.
