In reading this Vice Magazinestory on "systema"a martial art of Russian origin it appears like a lot of other martial arts it has an elaborate ethical/philosophical unpinning that addresses lots more than just the attack- defense aspect.
Do the ethical/philosophical aspects of any martial art have any effect on how effective it is as a self defense system?
In a way: they teach the stupid to avoid fights. Best way to avoid getting beat up.
Baking smart rules into a higher-order Mission for a discipline or religion is common, isn’t it? One can look at the No Pork rule of some religions as an example.
Remaining focused and calm in the turmoil of combat is essential to some disciplines vs more of a Berserker frenzy approach. No surprise that it is baked into many/most martial arts. Isn’t that what defines a martial “art”?
Nothing too surprising about the need to be “calm, free of anger, irritation, fear, self-pity, delusion, and pride”. Any sportsman will tell you that to perform at any reasonably high level the psychological state is going to matter. Matter a lot. It is astounding how much this matters even for sports where skill is less a factor than raw muscle. The body can drop in performance remarkably with only a little mental turmoil.
In Judo - which is one of the very few martial arts that you can compete in as a sport - with full exertion, and use your full set of skills on the opponent (as opposed to forms where to do so would involve at least one competitor being taken away in a box). Here you will commonly find that the competitor that is pissed off, angry, or otherwise not on his game will not win. They make mistakes. Judo is an art that punishes overly aggressive moves. OTOH, there is no doubt that you need to be somewhat fired up. But in a clear-headed way.
Judo is however not a streetfighting art. It is a sport.
Not quite exactly the same thing, but some of the illusions they teach, such as focusing your ki, or aiming beyond the board you’re trying to break, while not real, do have an actual pragmatic effect. The philosophy and metaphysics are bogus, but who cares, because you break boards more effectively for practicing them.
This is just an armchair statement. I’ve taken a number of martial arts, but most of them only at an introduction level (for a few different reasons), so I’m not an expert.
Any martial art which has real potential to maim or murder your opponent is, likely, going to operate on a somewhat similar system as Rock, Paper, Scissors. That is to say, if you’re given two people of similar physical capability and martial knowledge, then the odds of one winning over the other should be even. One of them will win half of the time and the other will win the other half. But the reality is that one of them will be “better” and will win more often. The difference between them is that one of them is better at predicting what the other will do, because humans aren’t random.
We see the same thing with race car drivers. By all logic, it should just be a matter of driving the perfect line consistently. And if you get out a bunch of pro drivers, and put them on a track all by themselves, they’ll all do just that and clock in effectively the same time. Yet, if you race them all together, one guy will win far more often than all of the others because he understands what they are thinking, he reacts to the other cars better and he is able to set up situations that throw them off of their game.
So while two computer components will always come out even in a game like Rock, Paper, Scissors, between two humans you’ll usually get the same winner out of a series of tournaments. It’s just a matter of knowing the limited options available to your opponent and - regardless that the options are all in theory equal - being able to predict which they will go for, due to human fallibility. In a sword fight, it might be, “Is he going to go for my face or my arm?” In a karate fight, it might be, “Is he going to kick or punch?” The person who can predict this more often will win, even though otherwise they might be completely even in terms of knowledge, physique, and technique.
Different martial arts were started by different men who were better at winning than others. When asked what they were doing differently, they had to have an answer. The guy who could clearly articulate his thought process and teach it to others is the guy would earn the most students and the most rewards from the local lord or king. A guy like this is probably also the one most able to think of better ways of practicing and, based on whatever it was that he said to describe his thought process, is going to try and come up with new moves that follow that philosophy. Stasis will allow the other schools to figure out what the new school is doing and figure out how to counter it. But over time, as the philosophy becomes a central aspect of the school, the techniques will drift away from what they were doing before, and end up being its own art. How well you compete against those other martial arts will cease to be relevant.
But, at the same time, the fact that each art has its own philosophy behind it will make it more suitable to different situations and more appealing and more natural to certain individuals. If the philosophy ‘works’ for you, it might be that your mind works the way that the founder’s did. His movements and the nuances of the thought process might make more sense to you than it does to others.
There’s a former air force pilot who invented a military philosophy called the OODA loop, which basically says, “Between attacks, step back and think for a moment, before moving back in.” While perhaps not that mystical, this statement still allows for better guidance on how to get into your opponents head than if there was no such statement. It gives teachers a criteria on which to judge their pupils and try to get them closer to a learned duration for thinking. It gives them a vocabulary for discussing the thought process of the battle, which they can use to review and collaborate with their students. Minus that, and you’re just at, “Uh, kick his butt and don’t get yours kicked.”
Granted, a lot of it is probably mystical woo, but there probably is some core bit in there which is actually useful for the purpose. The OODA loop would be an example that lacks the mysticality.
This.
I’ve certainly seen modern practitioners say as much. Given the prevalence of duels and every day fist fights in history, I’m not sure that was true then. (Though, I suspect that the emphasis of the teachers has changed to match modern sensibilities.)
I’m struggling to see anything even slightly ethical or philosophical in the OP’s quote reproduced here.
I see them saying that during a fight to do well the body needs to be strong and trained and the mind needs to focus on fighting, not on BS. That’s not philosophy; that’s performance enhancement 101. It applies equally to cooking or woodworking.
There’s certainly nothing in Systema that says you can’t use the skills to mug grandmothers and cripples. So it seems ethically empty as well. Which is not to say that it’s ethically bad; it’s simply orthogonal to any question of ethics.
I wonder what the OP really meant by “ethics and philosophy”?
Point taken “spiritual” might have been more apropos. In most martial arts there is a metaphysical aspect overlaying the specific strike-defense techniques and Systema has this just like most other martial art paradigms.
The emphasis changed when people realized that duels might not be the best way to solve grudges. It took place at different times in different places, but it boils down to that, to changing from “hey, if you’re the tuffest guy in the room you’ll win” to realizing that you know, there’s a pretty high probability that either you won’t be or the other guy will have friends, and then we get these waves of funerals, and ok, funerals can be pretty good entertainment (specially when movies haven’t been invented yet and parties of mourners are likely to get into fistfights) but let’s not overdo it.
Not really.
Peace and inner tranquility are nearly the worst possible frame of mind from which to approach a fight. What you want is a state of controlled rage. That’s why (IME) many good fighters, especially street fighters, are crazy, assholes, or both. Much of this is because assholes have an already-available store of rage to draw on at a moment’s notice, and also because assholes get into a lot of street fights and that kind of practice is better than most dojo experience.
The first example I can think of is Isao Inokuma, world and Olympic judo champion, All Japan champion, and one of the best of the early era judoka. There was a fight in the 1964 Olympics in which one of his opponents blocked his attack and almost scored on him. Inokuma went nutzoid, and deliberately slammed his opponent on the raised edge of the platform they used to compete on. It didn’t score, because under the rules at the time, the opponent had to land with most of his body inside the boundary. Inokuma did it twice, and then threw his opponent again so that he landed with just enough of his body inside the edge to score. He was just pissed off that somebody almost scored on him.
Inokuma wound up committing suicide.
Many martial arts start off concentrating on winning fights, then develop into systems to make you a better person and end up sports. Fencing did it, kendo did it, judo did it, boxing did it.
Japanese martial arts are particularly prone to this kind of drift. Witness Daito-ryu jujitsu, which became aiki-jitsu, which became aikido which has almost nothing to do with combat, and is sort of a way to pursue Zen enlightenment thru physical movement.
Fighting is a set of physical skills, combined with a mental attitude that makes it more likely that you will win. Assholes and jerks are, unfortunately, just as likely to be determined to win at all costs, and get more practice at developing the skills to win along with it.
Martial arts training can make you a better person, but I have seen many instances of people becoming very good fighters without internalizing the ethics of the art much, or at all.
Regards,
Shodan