Ever since the Rise in popularity of Brazilian Jiu-jitsu, in North America, we have had to suffer through an on-going kind of stylistic and cultural backlash. The now ubiquitous mantra from old school “stand-up” self defense advocates goes something like this: “you never want to be on the ground in a real fight.” Aside from being one of the most prolific baseless assertions, on which the fallacious “pseudo-profession” is built on, it also brings to mind a natural question. This question is: all right “pseudo-expert”, if we should not be fighting on the ground, what is your alternative?
The answer of course, is by accepting a false premise as fact, which they hope uninformed laypeople will do, it forces us to return to the same old tired “stand up striking” paradigm by the back door and without having to prove its effectiveness. Therefore, they want to force us to return to a largely discredited self-defense paradigm by default because they eliminate the alternatives. Yea, pretty clever… if sixth graders studied philosophy.
This is a topic we can explore later in detail, in another post, but what I have always found very interesting is not the sophistry of the “pseudo-profession” but the idea that so many people are so desperate to return to a stand up striking self defense paradigm that they may or may not realize is not really “evidence based” but mostly culturally induced.
By “culturally induced” I mean as North Americans we used to grow up watching boxing to a degree that the heavy weight champion of the world was invariably the highest paid athlete in world, in any given year. When not watching boxing we were watching countless movies and TV shows where all the heroes and best fighters were also fist fighting. If we were going to except some new-fangled foreign fighting method then it had to be some esoteric version of our own way of fighting. After all, wasn’t that Kung-fu stuff also called “Chinese-boxing”?
Therefore, when we had to fight or defend ourselves that meant we did it the tried and true way by walloping someone with our fists. Everyone knew that this was the best and most effective way to fight. Therefore, it is natural that a lot of people are going to get defensive when a bunch of foreigners show up on your shores and start telling you that there is a much better way to do things.
However, when I point it out to them, most people suddenly have a kind of mini epiphany and realize that they have a “below the surface” kind of cultural understanding of why we have such an emphasis on fighting standing up, and that they knew it all along.
As the scales fall from our eyes, we can see clearly that it is not because “fist fighting” is so natural and works so well. In fact, it is actually the opposite! The real reason that North America embraced stand up fist fighting as a Society and so readily was because no one got hurt! When you walk even the most ardent proponent of standing fist-a-cuffs through it, if they are being honest with themselves, they realize it too. Let me lay it out for you as well.
Within North America many of us grew up in a time and cultural milieu that found fighting, even among children, non-criminal and more or less socially acceptable as long as it was “fair”. What defined “fair” was generally “consent” and that you fought standing up with your hands. This was in part a cultural throwback to dueling with weapons but dueling with weapons had to be replaced because of how dangerous it was.
Most men of a certain age participated in, remember seeing or at least understand this idea of the “fair” consensual fist fight. Why was it acceptable for even children to do this? Because it was almost impossible for anyone to be seriously hurt of course. Otherwise it would have been simply socially unacceptable. The stereotypical Black eyes, bloody noses and fat lips were almost always the worst things you could expect. Many parents saw this as a healthy thing for their sons because it developed bravery and fortitude at a minimal physical cost. Our culture as a whole, generally embraced these values. The whole idea is even built into our language. How many fathers across the generations have told their bullied sons to: “stand up for yourself”. Or how about the opposite perspective: “I’m not going to take that lying down”!
This cultural acceptance of a little physical harm for a greater social good overlapped with the whole idea of settling disputes through a version of very “non-lethal dueling”. From British soldiers in the 1700s who helped popularize boxing by this practice, to more modern kids in the school yard; If you had a “beef”- form a ring of people (thus the term for what should be more properly called a “Boxing square”) and let the antagonists “duke it out”. What followed was rough maybe but not really dangerous since without gloves a fighters hands could get a worse beating than his opponent’s head. As the fighters tired tempers would cool and dignity was restored while the social balance maintained by this manly display. Harmful social pressures were cathartically released and all for the cost of some contusions and minor lacerations. Sociologically, that is a very good trade off.
However, if one or both parties got knocked down, that is when the danger began. This danger was both to the fighters and to the community and society at large. Decent people intuitively understood this when actually watching these real fights so they intervened. That was the social role of the adults or spectators; they played the same role as the “seconds” in the old duels to make sure the rules were followed, honor maintained and positive social norms enforced.
If the fighters went to the ground it should be stopped . This was the socially excepted practice even by those who didn’t entirely understand why. This was especially important if only one person was pushed or knocked down. At this point a person who is barely able to pose a threat with his hands in the standing position becomes potentially lethal since he can now stomp his grounded opponent.
Nearly any person has the potential to kill another human being from this position because of the gravity powered much greater strength of the leg stomps and the sandwiching effect of being against the hard ground. This is really, really dangerous and fairly easy to do; it takes no training, so it had to be stopped before it started. This cultural “safety valve” is so wide spread that no one even thinks about it, we see exactly the same cultural ideas expressed in Hockey fights,( let them swing at each other as long as they are standing).
The same idea applied to both antagonists being on the ground, it could be extremely dangerous for one fighter to pin his opponent down with his body weight and rain blows, even hand blows, down on his trapped opponent. In the standing position those blows would mostly buffet the opponent around, maybe “tattoo” his face and do little damage but when the adversary is trapped and can’t move his head takes the full force of the accumulated blows and can be seriously hurt or even killed.
No healthy society can allow its members to seriously injure or kill each other in public brawls. This is far to culturally damaging and can lead to generations of vendettas or reprisals as we have seen in some cultures. Europe went through a dueling craze that took so many lives in places like Renaissance France, that the government had to impose the harshest penalties, they struggled to find a less violent method of interpersonal conflict resolution. In England Boxing served this role perfectly,especially among the lower classes, and therefore spread through all the English speaking world.
Therefore, I always find it amusing that people with in the “pseudo-profession” keep wanting to get back to this culturally induced stand up striking paradigm, trying to convince the public that it is the most effective when in fact its whole development and acceptance by our culture was for the very opposite reason-that it most certainly does not work very well (from an injury point of view) and protects the society and individuals from harm. Just ask the generations of school yard scufflers, playground pugilists, barroom brawlers, back ally battlers, wine swilling swingers, punchy punchers and haymaking heroes. (OK, OK, I got a little carried away but tell me it wasn’t fun reading that.)
Of course, the exception is people who are very much larger than their opponent, it is obvious that any adult could harm a small child by striking it but that still is much harder standing then if held in place by the ground. Our culture equally recognized the danger of the bully and mismatch to the point that we had a universal cliché: “pick on someone your own size”.
Ergo, next time some “pseudo-expert” in self defense tells you that you should use standing punching methods to defend yourself in a high risk self-defense situation, tell them “no thanks” because you are not interested in some Victorian age ritual that will preserve your dignity while protecting and not badly injuring your antagonist. With that being said, I have to sign off now and go wax my mustache.