The Gift of Violence

Masculinity & Aggression

I have done combat sports since around age 10: first wrestling, then about a year of army grappling, about a year of boxing and, for the past four years I have intermittently trained in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.

I struggle to verbalize what these activities mean to me, but I will try.

When my distant ancestors swept across Eurasia the world was a simple and brutal place, full of danger and mystery. My 23 & Me results are clear: I am Northern European, and nothing else. That means my male line going back thousands of years is a vestige of the great Indo-European invasion which dominated the lands from Ireland to India and generated the native tongues of 45% of the world’s population today. My mitochondrial DNA (the maternal line) probably shows the traces of the Western Hunter Gatherers. In those days roving bands of humans constantly threatened one another. They launched raids, they planned campaigns, and they killed alien men and children and old women. They spared the young women. This happened all over the world and continued from the evolutionary origins of our species to the imposition of our current international system, which is a direct result of European colonialism, nationalism, democracy and other Western innovations. If you’re reading this your ancestors were the victors of these engagements, meaning they were probably the aggressors. You come from a line of people ready and able to annihilate some strange tribe and take their women. Slavery came later and was practiced with enthusiasm and without doubt or guilt until the British empire outlawed it and began ending the practice worldwide in the mid-19th century.

Rape and genocide and enslavement are distasteful to modern readers for one simple reason: they are no longer adaptive. Humanity long ago outgrew its Stone Age tribal modes of life and established stronger and more expansive and more abstract modes of cooperation. We have all benefitted so enormously from these recent networks that many people have forgotten our true nature but 1,000 years of civilization doesn’t erase 900,000 of constant adaptive reinforcement and the signs of our heritage are everywhere: every time we judge a group of others (liberals, prisoners, Palestinians, Tutsis) using different standards and a different emotional undercurrent, every time we play sports, every time we send our young men to war, every time we’re driven by envy to hate or wish for the destruction of another, every time we regard the unknown with fear… we are using the deep programming which a million years of simian Darwinism have coded into us-into all of us.

There’s no guarantee that our exquisitely complex and global networks of cooperation will persist. Let the lights go out for a month and 90% of what you now think of as ‘your life’ will disappear with the electricity. Give it a year and you will have a new life, a life of struggle and family and hunger and death… and violence.

I’d be lying if I said I fought to give myself an edge in the event of a dystopian social collapse. I do it not for the future but for the past: I feel a kinship with every man who ever stepped into the gladiatorial arena and every Irish boxer in a Pennsylvania mining town and every Samurai defending the honor of his lord. There is something wonderfully pure about stepping up to direct combat with another, where all you have is your mind (your toughness and confidence and focus and training) and your body (your strength and speed and conditioning). Obviously in BJJ the stakes are not mortal-you might get choked unconscious and you might dislocate your elbow but you will not die and you will not have to kill. Nevertheless, the adrenaline before a match and the euphoria afterwards are unmatched in my experience. I know what it feels like to confront a violent death and BJJ feels like that. If the stakes were my life I would not feel more anxious and exhilarated because I cannot. I would feel more fear but the adrenaline rush I feel before a match is already at my physiological maximum.

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These activities mean so much to me because (I suspect) they touch a deep nerve of masculinity and humanity within me that our society would like to pretend is nonexistent, or innately pathological. I do not enjoy hurting people. I never start fights (although I sometimes did as a younger man). I’m not a convict or a psychopath. I’m just a man who enjoys the sublime exhaustion of testing my body and the androgenic surge of testing it against another. In another context my country used those features in the service of its foreign policy goals. If there’s a school shooting or a dangerous lunatic or an aggressive husband in my vicinity I will not wait for another to act. I will run toward danger, without hesitation, because there’s something in me deeper than belief or logic which tells me that is my role as a man without children. I take pride in it, as every person should in their social roles and responsibilities.

These instincts will always be with us. They will always be conditionally necessary. They CAN be channeled and they can help make stronger, better, kinder (for how can one have true kindness without confidence and self-assurance?) men and women. Denying them or suppressing them will pathologize them and stigmatize them. (Aggression and competition and masculine fitness apparently do not fall under our society’s protection when it comes to stigma). A nation full of weak men will be a nation full of frightened and frustrated women because it is in the feeling of weakness that most of the evils of our species (envy, betrayal, genocide) originate. It will be a nation full of hate and resentment and random violence and fear.

Regardless of who you are I recommend that you listen to my words because it is the gentlest way to instruct someone about this reality. There are millions of men out there just like me-denying us or trying to shame us is the worst thing you could do.

If you’re a young person feeling aimless or a man feeling weak or a woman feeling frightened and uncertain I recommend a 6-week trial period of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. You will find the community absurdly relaxed and actually inclusive. It turns out that fighters are some of the most cheerful and laid-back people you’ll ever meet. Most warriors could have told you that… but warriors are a hidden (shameful) and endangered species in our civilization. We’re still out there though.

I’ll see you on the mat.

A related book (which I have not yet read!) is ‘The Gift of Violence’ by Matt Thornton.

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