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Fighting Arts: Their Evolution from Secret Societies to Modern Times Rosenbaum Amazon UK ref: 1886969213 | Amazon US ref: 1886969213 In both the popular mind and amongst their practitioners, the concept of 'Martial Arts' is imbued with all sorts of misleading assumptions - that they are exclusively Eastern and unparalleled in the West, that they are 'mystical', and that they display some sort of chivalric preference for unarmed combat. Michael Rosenbaum writes with the authority of having trained in martial arts since the age of five, of being a former member of the elite 82nd Airborne Division of the US Army, and of having an intelligent and well-informed interest in the history of combat, and he demythologises these assumptions - and many more besides - by placing the evolution of martial arts in their historical context. He then goes on to consider their assimilation into modern western societies, and provides a sobering lesson in realism for those modern practitioners who may be carried away by the illusion that their training or even the achievement of a black belt or tournament success puts them on a par with the classic warrior.
Martial arts have always been influenced by the culture and religion of the societies that practised them, but their origin and essential nature are as effective combatative systems. The object of what Rosenbaum calls the 'classic warrior' was to kill, while that of the historical civilian fighter was also to kill or, at least, to provide for his own self-defence. Military and civilian fighting arts have sometimes coincided and often interacted. And all sorts of different systems have evolved (because systemitization facilitates training), and have also converged, because the basis of fighting skill is functionality. While modern styles emphasize different approaches such as striking or grappling, the classic warrior would employ any method to win and, most typically, the use of a weapon.
The Japanese appropriation of Okinawan karate coincided with a semantic shift of its pictogram from 'Chinese Hand' to 'Empty Hand'. Okinawan karate involved unarmed combat, but it also involved the utilisation of peasant tools, proper military weapons having been specifically denied to the Okinawan natives by the Japanese occupiers. The unarmed and primitive arms of karate were not, therefore, a matter of choice but a product of restricted opportunity.
The Mediaval knight undertook a lifetime of rigorous military training, progressing from page through squire to knighthood, and the education of a Samurai followed a parallele course. The life of both was inflected with religious observances and codes of honour, but each was capable of committing attrocities and the fundamental life of each consisted of training to kill. The same aim permeated the warriors of all societies from the citizen soldiers of Ancient Greece to the professional soldiers of Ancient Rome, and they all had to confront the prospect of killing other people close up and personal as well as the immanence of their own death. This is what made somebody a warrior.
The Greeks and Romans had no problem with killing. When Christianity, Budhism and Islam arrived with their theoretical prohibitions on killing, the warrior used these religions both to justify killing and to overcome fear through Zen or a belief in heaven.
The coming of firearms, however, had a profound effect. The classic warrior who devoted a lifetime to martial arts while maintained on a surplus extracted from others, could be shot down by a peasant who had been trained to use a gun in a few weeks. At the point where real warfare became a matter of guns and cannons, the focus of hand-to-hand combat tended to move into the civilian area with accompanying restraints.
In the second part Rosenbaum turns to the history and evolution of the martial arts in North America. The gunpowder age had already dawned when the first European colonization occurred, so it was always an affair of firearms, but the abundant forests differentiated the American way of war from the European one.
On the civilian front, wrestling was popular, and duelling became popular after the War of Independence, especially in the South. Later in the century, the sport of boxing, which evolved in England from bare knuckle fighting, became popular. With technology ruling the battlefield, hand-to-hand methods were largely relegated to civilian fighting in the form of street brawls or boxing matches.
Asian martial arts such as judo began to be introduced around the turn of the century. This was followed after the Second World War by karate, and in the 60s by Shaolin systems. These systems had already undergone evolutionary changes and were subjected to further change in North America, where they were influenced by systems indigenous to American culture, the development of sport-orientated systems that reduced lethality in order to facilitate safe competition, and their pursuit for all sorts of reasons (like fitness and relaxation) other than their original combatative purpose.
Rosenbaum likens modern civilian martial arts to martial arts in Japan during the Tokugawa period when they were not tested in real combat and tended to become ceremonial. Those in the military and law enforcement do confront the prospect of killing and/or being killed and are warriors in the traditional sense, but..."For a large majority of civilian practitioners today, their training is a physical fitness program decorated in martial arts trappings instead of a rite of passage into the warrior's ranks." (76-77). However, Rosenbaum recognises this evolution as something perfectly natural and appropriate to the needs and realities of our modern, relatively secure, way of life.
Rosenbaum proceeds by section and subsection rather in the style of technical manual. His arguments are well referenced to widely respected secondary sources (Amberger, Hanson, Keegan, etc), although I would quibble about his brief description of combat during the American Civil War where I incline to the views of Paddy Griffith. I suspect the subtitle was forced on the author by the publishers in order to make the book seem more sensational, when they should have put their energy into better proof-reading. These qualifications apart, the book is interesting, well argued and easy to read.
© armed-combat.com 13 October 2003
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