Radical Civility

Cross posted from Blog Them Out of the Stone Age, Dec. 7

I’m now in the third week of my Gracie Jiu Jitsu class. The fundamentals class meets Mondays and Wednesdays from 6:00 to 7:30 p.m., and with one exception I’ve scrambled home in time to get there. The exception was on the day I had my annual physical. The doctor noted some tendinitis in both wrists, especially the left one. She advised letting them rest for a few days, then make sure to ice them down before and after each workout, and also take a pain reliever like Aleve or Ibuprofin. I’ve followed that system and thus far it’s worked out well.

I had supposed I might keep track of specific techniques as I learned them, but beyond generalities like take downs, maintaining and passing the guard, etc., I’m still pretty clueless. The most pronounced thing I’ve noticed is that I still have a lot of trouble keeping in mind the various components of a given move. Luckily the other students have been very patient and supportive. And a number of them report that it took them about eight weeks to really catch on, which makes me feel better.

When I’m not actually practicing jiu jitsu I’ve spent some time learning about its history, and at some point I may write a post on that, especially the explosive emergence of Gracie or Brazilian Jiu Jitsu from relative obscurity to world prominence. For the moment, though, I want to focus on jiu jitsu as metaphor.

Media commentators occasionally use the term jiu jitsu to describe an instance in which one political party deploys a particular strategy and the other party neatly exploits it in such a way that it backfires. Or they will use it to describe how Al Qaeda has used the strengths of an open society against that society — such tactics were fundamental to the success of the 9/11 attacks. But the most common and sophisticated use of the term is in connection with nonviolent resistance.

In his classic study, The Power of Nonviolence (1934), Richard B. Gregg coined the term “moral jiu jitsu” to describe the principles undergirding Gandhi’s satyagraha as he had seen them operate in India. Martin Luther King, Jr. considered Gregg’s book one of five that most profoundly shaped his thought, and wrote the foreword to an edition published in 1960. (An abridged version of that edition is here.) Gregg argued that the use of physical violence by groups that seek to challenge a repressive order legitimizes a violent response by that order, and since that order usually has a far greater capacity for violent force, this is a losing strategy. A refusal to use violence, on the other, causes the repressive order to lose moral balance, in the same way that jiu jitsu causes an attacker to lose physical balance.

(Continued)

Cross-posted from Blog Them Out of the Stone Age

A few weeks ago I visited my friend Bill Odom, a retired Army colonel whom I met during our grad student days together at Ohio State. He was then a captain tapped to become a military history instructor at West Point and one half of a pair we called the “Ranger Twins,” since both he and the other captain (David Gray by name) wore the Ranger tab and Bill had actually commanded a Ranger company.

Bill has been a student of the martial arts since the age of twelve, and is a 6th degree black belt in karate. For as long as I’ve known him, he harbored the ambition to run a martial arts academy once he left the Army. Sure enough, he now owns Norfolk Karate Academy, the largest martial arts facility in Norfolk, Virginia.

In addition to karate, Bill offers instruction in Gracie Jiu Jitsu (aka Brazilian jiu jitsu), and in laying out the itinerary for my visit he said that on Friday we’d go out to dinner and Saturday morning I’d take a lesson in Gracie jiu jitsu. Sure enough, Saturday morning I found myself wearing a gi and lying on my back with a sparring partner mounted over me. If you’ve ever seen a bully atop a weaker kid on a school playground, you’ve basically seen what we looked like. Trust me, I still vividly recall what it felt like to be that weaker kid.

The only significant difference between my position then and now was that now I had my legs clamped around the back of his thighs and my hands hunched up close to my face, partly to protect the face but mostly so that my elbows would block him from improving his mount so that he would be squarely on my chest. I was in the “guard” position, and I was about to learn how to get my sparring partner off of me.

(Continued)