Do it with style

During our Christmas holiday in my hometown, I visited the dojo that played such a formative role in my teenage life. I don't have any intention to resume practicing Karate, but I always like to catch up with old friends whenever I'm back. Still, since I was already there, I thought I might as well join the training. It was like a trip to the past. But the reason for this post is not nostalgia, but that sometime after the training I experienced a gentle revelation. I think it just broke to me why people are attracted to traditional martial arts (never too late, eh?).

I wrote about the topic earlier, and before I get to my newfound insight, I want to briefly reiterate my previous arguments.

The main selling point of martial arts is of course is to become a self-defense expert the easy way. Everyone would be happy to be as tough as a boxer or a wrestler, but man, to get there is not a walk in the park. Years of hard training, running, skipping ropes, thousands of sit-ups, being punched in the face all the time, who likes that? And you can rarely see a small boxer beating a much bigger one, so why should I start it if I'm small in the first place? If only there was a way to be that good with tenth the effort. A more effective way, perhaps. Maybe through learning some exotic techniques developed by exotic people hundreds of years ago? Enter martial arts in Hollywood movies.

Then there is the traditions and rituals package for people who like traditions and rituals.

Then the moral code that purportedly comes with Eastern martial arts. I wrote earlier that I am skeptical of this because I think that being submitted by your training partners several times on the mat at every BJJ session teaches you more humility and the value of hard work than mandatory bowing and a strict hierarchy. But lately, thanks to a book on the history of BJJ, I had a bit of rethinking. UFC fighters have years of grappling practice behind them, and there are few more obnoxious sights than those guys (or gals) on a pre-fight press conference. From the aforementioned book, I learned that the grandmasters of the art (the whole Gracie-family, basically) were, in some respects and besides their other qualities, a bunch of thugs, who habitually bullied rival schools and provoked fights with their teachers and students on the street (it was true in both ways). Not to mention taking all the credit for developing the art by driving their juggernaut of a PR machine through BJJ's history. So, there is no silver bullet for character-building either, and I'm willing to accept that a traditional dojo can offer as much as any other institution. Even though stories like the one above are not unique to Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.

Then, of course, the touch of the supernatural. Legends about superhuman feats of old masters, demonstrations of Shaolin monks, the application of internal energies ("chi"), the science of lethal pressure points... For those who are into those things. 

And with that detour, finally, I got back to describe my latest epiphany. From this point on, everything is armchair-psychology and it might reflect more on me than on the subject. Nevertheless. I think that traditional martial arts are appealing because people want dignity, even in physical struggles. Or, perhaps more precisely, we are afraid of losing it. Unlike gymnastics or figure skating, box, wrestling, or MMA don't possess some inherent aesthetic beauty obvious to a layman. Short spans in a fight can be beautiful in their own way, but very rarely, and only if someone really great can demonstrate his or her skills against someone who is not. Muhammad Ali could make a fistfight look amazing, a journeyman boxer can't. Full-contact brawls in general are sweaty, brutal, and chaotic. Violence is demeaning. The fighters are bleeding, sweating, panting, grimacing. Nothing like the smooth, refined choreography we are familiar with from the movies. 

So this is what traditional martial arts (and to be fair, Krav Maga and the like) promise by not actually practicing often undignifying sparring, but instead honing techniques executed either in the air against imaginary opponents, or against complying partners. Elegance and Dignity. Perhaps fencing and its etiquette emerged from medieval duels partly for similar reasons. If forced to resort to violence, which was often inevitable in bygone eras, gentlemen at least wanted to kill and even die with style.