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.

In 1973, political scientist Gene Sharp, termed by one commentator “the Clausewitz of nonviolent warfare,” published The Politics of Nonviolent Action. In it, he dropped “moral jiu jitsu” in favor of “political jiu-jitsu,” a phrase intended to encompass tactics that went beyond Gregg’s emphasis on the psychological effect of nonviolent resistance. The metaphor informs the entire book, and a key chapter is entitled “Political Jiu-Jitsu.” Its first paragraph defines the term:

Political jiu-jitsu is one of the special processes by which nonviolent action deals with violent repression. By combining nonviolent discipline with solidarity and persistence in struggle, the nonviolent actionists cause the violence of the opponent’s repression to be exposed in the worst possible light. This, in turn, may lead to shifts in opinion and then to shifts in power relationships favorable to the nonviolent group. These shifts result from withdrawal of support for the opponent and the grant of support to the nonviolent actionists.

In some respects, jiu jitsu — literally, “the science of softness” — is a somewhat odd martial art to use in connection with nonviolent resistance. Unlike many other martial arts, it has no associated philosophy, or Way. It originated as a technique of last resort for samurai rendered weaponless in combat, was later adopted by bandits and common criminals, and by the nineteenth century was considered little more than a grab bag of cheap tricks. When Jigoro Kano systematized jiu jitsu in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, he rejected the name in favor of judo (the Way of Gentleness), which had a definite philosophy associated with it.

Modern jiu jitsu, however, has no such Way. Indeed, when Helio Gracie developed Brazilian or Gracie Jiu Jitsu circa 1925, he unabashedly maintained that its goal was to prevail in street fights, and that has remained the hallmark of Gracie Jiu Jitsu ever since.

The use of the term “political jiu jitsu,” then, inadvertently raises a crucial question. Is it possible to employ nonviolence simply as a tactic, or must it be combined with a principled refusal to use violence even when violence might be an effective means to achieve the objective. Gandhi and King insisted on the latter. If that is indeed the case — if nonviolent resistance is unworkable apart from the rejection of violence in all circumstances, then a better term would be “political judo.”

Part 1 - Part 2 (coming)