I've been wondering for quite a while about why it is that TKD and increasingly Karate emphasize a curriculum built around tournament sparring—the amount of time and training energy devoted to learning spectacular but highly street-risky complex kicks, with emphasis on high targets, for example. My own experience is that most adults, and a fairly high percentage of kids, do not seriously entertain ideas of themselves as tournament competitors, and more than one TKD student has told me that they have no interest in watching competitive TKD or karate—they just don't have any interest in participating in the sport form of these arts.
Recently an explanation for this apparent paradox has begun to suggest itself to me, and I'm trying to think it through carefully. My idea is that MA schools emphasize tournament-based curricula because, in a nutshell, people are fundamentally averse to training for self-defense against real violence, because that kind of training pretty much forces you to accept that you are vulnerable to that kind of violence—something a lot of people seem anxious not to accept. And it's true, the odds for most people of encountering serious street violence are probably well below the odds of getting into a car accident. But if you don't want to train for potentially deadly personal violence, what are you doing MAs for?
A tournament combat-based curriculum is a perfect solution: all of those violent movements you're learning now have a raison d'être, without your having to contemplate fighting for your life. Even though you may not have any interest whatever in competing, you get to use the kihon techs you learn in a way that gives them some applicability—even though everything we know about the history of these arts makes it clear that their intended purpose was something far more destructive than the uses they're put to in a match context (to the extent that they appear at all). I'm not saying that this is why large national organizations—the Korean TKD directorate, for example, or the Chinese government—emphasize competitive or 'spectacle'-based forms of their respective national MAs; for those entities, I don't think there's any doubt that national political and economic ambitions are by far the main driving force behind tournament TKD and modern acrobatic Wushu. What I'm suggesting is that the clientele for these MAs are happy to accept this kind of emphasis because, at some level, they'd rather be training for a kind of sport activity they have no intention of getting seriously involved with than training for violent, dangerous street encounters with their physical survival at stake—because they do not want to think about the possibility of such encounters.
So the bottom line, on this view, is that the increasing sportification of the high-profile MAs is the outcome of a kind of tacit bargain struck between the large national sponsors of these MAs on the one hand and their largely violence-averse customer base on the other. The idea is, we'll teach you some martial-looking moves and techniques and give you a chance to use them, in a context which isn't nearly as dangerous as what could happen to you should you find yourself facing a sadistic bully or drunken defective in a parking lot some evening. And in exchange, you'll gladly accept a sport-based version of the art, even with some largely decorative elementary self defense largely unconnected to the kata/hyungs/xsings of the art, 'glued on' so to speak, and more or less disconnected from the rest of the curriculum. The conclusion you're driven to, if you accept this picture, is that the current arc of MA history is powered by the paradoxical situation that most people learning it do not want to contemplate the necessity for open-ended destructive violence in their own self-defense.
So my question is, does this hypothesis, this hunch, really, have any kind of ring of truth to it? That's the first question. And the second is, if it does have some truth to it, then what are the real motivations for people to study MAs, if they are neither interested in sport competition nor anxious to immerse themselves in practical self-defense methods that require them to consider the real possibility of street violence?
What say you?
Recently an explanation for this apparent paradox has begun to suggest itself to me, and I'm trying to think it through carefully. My idea is that MA schools emphasize tournament-based curricula because, in a nutshell, people are fundamentally averse to training for self-defense against real violence, because that kind of training pretty much forces you to accept that you are vulnerable to that kind of violence—something a lot of people seem anxious not to accept. And it's true, the odds for most people of encountering serious street violence are probably well below the odds of getting into a car accident. But if you don't want to train for potentially deadly personal violence, what are you doing MAs for?
A tournament combat-based curriculum is a perfect solution: all of those violent movements you're learning now have a raison d'être, without your having to contemplate fighting for your life. Even though you may not have any interest whatever in competing, you get to use the kihon techs you learn in a way that gives them some applicability—even though everything we know about the history of these arts makes it clear that their intended purpose was something far more destructive than the uses they're put to in a match context (to the extent that they appear at all). I'm not saying that this is why large national organizations—the Korean TKD directorate, for example, or the Chinese government—emphasize competitive or 'spectacle'-based forms of their respective national MAs; for those entities, I don't think there's any doubt that national political and economic ambitions are by far the main driving force behind tournament TKD and modern acrobatic Wushu. What I'm suggesting is that the clientele for these MAs are happy to accept this kind of emphasis because, at some level, they'd rather be training for a kind of sport activity they have no intention of getting seriously involved with than training for violent, dangerous street encounters with their physical survival at stake—because they do not want to think about the possibility of such encounters.
So the bottom line, on this view, is that the increasing sportification of the high-profile MAs is the outcome of a kind of tacit bargain struck between the large national sponsors of these MAs on the one hand and their largely violence-averse customer base on the other. The idea is, we'll teach you some martial-looking moves and techniques and give you a chance to use them, in a context which isn't nearly as dangerous as what could happen to you should you find yourself facing a sadistic bully or drunken defective in a parking lot some evening. And in exchange, you'll gladly accept a sport-based version of the art, even with some largely decorative elementary self defense largely unconnected to the kata/hyungs/xsings of the art, 'glued on' so to speak, and more or less disconnected from the rest of the curriculum. The conclusion you're driven to, if you accept this picture, is that the current arc of MA history is powered by the paradoxical situation that most people learning it do not want to contemplate the necessity for open-ended destructive violence in their own self-defense.
So my question is, does this hypothesis, this hunch, really, have any kind of ring of truth to it? That's the first question. And the second is, if it does have some truth to it, then what are the real motivations for people to study MAs, if they are neither interested in sport competition nor anxious to immerse themselves in practical self-defense methods that require them to consider the real possibility of street violence?
What say you?
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