So what’s a girl like me doing in a place like this?
If not primarily - or primordially - motivated by testosterone-flushed, beer-soaked bloodlust, what’s to love about MMA?
It’s quite simple, really, at least on the face of it. MMA is, after all, a spectator sport. Like other spectators I am transfixed by the athletic virtuosity of professional fighters. I am stunned by the strength and endurance of the human body, compelled by the strategy, structure, and discipline involved. I am also enamored of the internationalism and eclecticism of this sport: dozens of languages and styles of hand to hand combat - some of them honed over hundreds and even thousands of years - collide in a pugilistic polyglot ballet. It is simultaneously ancient and postmodern, raw and cerebral, competitive and egalitarian. And yes, it’s also sexual, but not just in the obvious ways (more on that another day).
But MMA is not just any spectator sport. It’s one that takes its place in a long genealogy of combat-spectacles that are as old as human social groups. I am not talking here about how humans are hairless primates programmed with violent instincts; this would be inaccurate and unfair to both apes and humans. In the 1950s, Raymond Dart, and later Robert Ardrey and Konrad Lorenz, did much damage to popular and scholarly views of “human nature” with the so-called “killer ape hypothesis.”[1] This influential perspective read the archaeological and ethnographic evidence in ways that supported the idea that humans are even more aggressive than our primate relatives, and that it was precisely this aggression that drove our socio-cultural and biological evolution. Accordingly, aggression is not just inevitably human but necessarily so. Put another way, aggression is not only unavoidable, it’s a requirement for something called human progress.
Such a view of “human nature” resonates loudly in the popular imagination. It’s what leads people like Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) president Dana White to say things like, “Fighting is in our DNA . . . . We get it, and we like it. It doesn’t have to be explained to us.” UFC commentator Joe Rogan adds, “People love conflict, especially when it doesn’t involve them and they get to be the voyeur. A big part of us is chimpanzee, 98 percent or whatever, depending on who you ask. The bottom line is we enjoy violence, especially when it’s in a controlled environment. And that’s just what the U.F.C. gives us.”[2]
Here’s the thing: even though the “killer ape hypothesis” is proven to be based on faulty readings of the evidence, White and Rogan and the billions of other people on the planet who believe that aggression is encoded in “human nature” are not entirely wrong. In fact, they’re a good part right. But the story is a lot more complex, and also a lot more interesting, than this.
Anthropologists, psychologists, and others have long explored how altruism and peacemaking are overwhelmingly more present in human behavior than aggression, and that these are far more necessary for our survival over the long haul. Moreover, aggression for most of human history seems to have been concerned with restoring imbalances between and within groups rather than wiping one another out. As human groups became denser in population and more socially and technologically complex beginning about 10,000 years ago, aggression that was formerly expressed in highly structured, ritualized form – usually involving very small groups of evenly matched combatants who only sometimes killed one another and typically by accident – became more specialized and autonomous. That is, social complexity, stratification, and technology allowed for the formation of militaries and professional soldiers, and with these, large-scale warfare.
Warfare is of course an expression of aggression, but it’s a different animal than the kind of aggression exhibited in one-on-one violence, like homicide, which is again very different from something like a ritualized and highly structured fight in which two evenly paired competitors follow strict rules of engagement. In the popular imagination – which is flabby and undisciplined for the most part; decidedly not the metaphorical equivalent of an Anderson Silva or Urijah Faber – these various forms of human behavior, which correspond with levels of social organization and technology through time, all tend to get lumped together into one thing. As anthropologist Douglas Fry pointed out (among others), the failure to differentiate between the aggression of a ritualized combat match and the aggression involved in modern warfare, has led to the unfortunate view of violence as an inevitable and dominant part of the human condition.[3] If we just can’t help fighting, then it is easier to justify things like war and militarism. And it’s also easy to see MMA as a merely a reflection of this human drive for violence. I think this is why so many people find my love of MMA disturbing. In the popular imagination, to be anti-war and anti-militarist means being anti-aggression, period.
But as I said, things are more complex and more interesting than this. I don’t deny that aggression is part of the human condition, but it exists in balance with other equally important drives, such as the drive for love, for caretaking and nurturing, altruism, conflict avoidance and reconciliation. And none of these exist in some “human nature” vacuum. Every human trait and capacity is expressed, mediated, cultivated, or discouraged by our collective values, norms, and behaviors: in a word, culture. Some cultures eschew all forms of aggression and violence while others elevate and reward these characteristics. Most tend to strike a balance. Moreover, in the contemporary period, human traits and capacities that become expressed through culture are linked to highly complex political economies. War-making, it must be remembered, is big business, whereas peace-making (unless it paradoxically involves more war and more weapons) is perpetually cash-strapped or even bankrupted. This isn’t because aggression and violence are somehow more human, or more authentic, or more powerful in and of themselves but rather because our political-economic organization has cultivated these traits and our social and cultural values now justify them as natural. As it turns out, MMA is also big business (more on that another day, though).
Dana White and Joe Rogan are right: humans have long been fascinated with ritualized displays of aggression, especially when the competitors are evenly matched, and consent, discipline, restraint, and rule-boundedness are observed. If we look at early ethnographic examples of societies with less social complexity and stratification than later ones, this is precisely the form of aggression that was most often exhibited and valorized. It was not just for the sake of people kicking each other’s asses, but rather for how ritual displays of aggression could be used to establish social hierarchy or restore balance and reconcile conflict, or, as Renato Rosaldo famously pointed out, cope with grief over loss of a loved one.[4]
MMA probably sits closer to this side of the aggression spectrum than it does to modern militarism and warfare (though these metaphors often get invoked – another example of the flabby and undisciplined way people mix up various forms of violence analytically. More on that another day). Hence, it is at least partly anachronistic that the opening images of a UFC event feature a Roman gladiator preparing for a fight. While the spectator-combat formula might be reasonably comparable, gladiators were typically slaves fighting against their will and were often very unevenly matched with opponents. While MMA’s political-economic and social context may be, like Rome’s, one of a highly complex, stratified, and technologically developed world, the ritual aggression exhibited is more similar to that of earlier societies and decidedly unlike contemporary warfare (with the exception of how MMA contributes to the cultivation of militaristic values and often caters to both nationalism and the US military-industrial complex. More on that another day). The point is that MMA combines various characteristics we believe are inherent in “human nature,” but are actually shaped by culture, social organization, and political economy; these combinations, moreover, co-exist in unusual and even contradictory ways, creating a bricolage effect that is part of what makes MMA so interesting.
My intention with this blog entry was to begin exploring what it is that I love about MMA. Like all things that hold my interest for any length of time, MMA presents a puzzle of sufficient ambivalence and complexity to keep me engaged. I wonder, for example, to what extent MMA might be used as a tool of peacebuilding and reconciliation rather than one that ostensibly glorifies aggression and martial values. After all, aren’t the martial arts – like ritual forms of aggression exhibited in early and smaller- scale human societies generally – about “fighting without fighting” (in the words of the greatest fighter of all times, Bruce Lee)? Aren’t the contemplative and otherwise peaceable Buddhist Shaolin monks known for their unparalleled skills in hand-to-hand to combat? These juxtapositions and elemental combinations, I think – much more than the banal common denominator of “aggression” everyone gets hung up on – make MMA worth thinking and talking about anthropologically.
And who wouldn’t love to see Obama and Ahmedinejad just take it to the octagon and leave off with the nukes that threaten the entire planet?
[1] Ardrey, Robert (1961). African Genesis: A Personal Investigation Into the Animal Origins and Nature of Man. New York: Atheneum Books. Dart, Raymond Arthur (1953). "The Predatory Transition from Ape to Man". International Anthropological and Linguistic Review 1 (4): 201–217. Lorenz, Konrad (1966). On Aggression. London: Methuen Publishing
[3] Fry, Douglas. 2007. Beyond War: The Human Potential for Peace. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
[4] Rosaldo, Renato. 2004. “ Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage.” In, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Philippe I. Bourgois, eds. Violence in war and peace. Wiley-Blackwell.
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