Self-Protection and the Problem of Fetishizing ‘Techniques’Mastery begins not with a tool, but with the self.
By Jack Kerwick
April 15, 2022
Whenever politically oriented publications feature articles on the question of self-defense, invariably one can expect to find a Second Amendment article discussing firearms.
The more fundamental principle of self-protection embodied by the Second Amendment, however, is seldom addressed. Yet it should be.
It needs to be.
A reading that frames the Second Amendment exclusively in terms of guns fetishizes the proverbial cart without paying any attention whatsoever to the horse that pulls it. The gun is anything but the magic wand that popular culture and, unfortunately, far too many gun aficionados, make it out to be.
The gun is only as effective as the person wielding it.
The same goes for any “unarmed” techniques and combinations of techniques upon which many martial and combative arts systems are based.
An analogy makes the point: One can have the most enviable of tool boxes, yet regardless of how many state-of-the-art hammers, wrenches, pliers, and screwdrivers a person possesses, neither the possession of these tools nor the knowledge of how they work at the most rudimentary level suffice to make a person a carpenter.
As more than one commentator has noted, the era of modern philosophy differs from its ancient and medieval predecessors insofar as its representatives tended to be obsessed with discovering a “technique,” as Michael Oakeshott referred to it, a rule or principle, framed as infallible, by which absolute certainty could be achieved. Rene Descartes, widely recognized as the father of modern philosophy, is the exemplar par excellence of this orientation. Descartes, equating, as he did, knowledge (as opposed to mere opinion or belief) with absolute certainty, embarked upon a quest to land upon a technique that would guarantee knowledge. He was confident that he did just this by way of his “cogito ergo sum” (“I think, therefore I am”), for this indubitable truth embodied the criteria of “clarity and distinctness” that he would employ to differentiate ideas that are immune to doubt from those that were not.
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Influential critics of traditional Western philosophy such as Karl Marx and the socialist theorists that he inspired also contracted this modern obsession with finding short-cuts to absolute certainty. While Marx’s theory, unlike that of many others, centered in “history,” his philosophy of history was nevertheless unmistakably modern in that he replaced the infallible principles or rules of the philosophers he critiqued with allegedly infallible historical laws that were no less designed to achieve absolute certainty.
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This excursion into the history of philosophy provides the context within which both the present state of the Second Amendment debate and the world of martial arts is to be understood. The singularity of focus upon guns reflects the tendency of those who are generally on the correct side to view this one particular weapon as if it is the infallible technique that all but guarantees the safety of its owner. The larger context, the types of physical and mental training that render the gun-wielder a force to be reckoned with—and that make him or her a force to be reckoned with irrespective of whether a gun is involved—have been neglected.
To repeat the point above, it’s not that techniques in the martial arts are somehow bad or undesirable. Far from it! A martial art system can’t exist without techniques. They’re both necessary and quite desirable. The problem, rather, is the manner in which technique is taught which, in turn, arises from the more fundamental problem of how technique is conceived.
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Source:
https://amgreatness.com/2022/04/15/self-protection-and-the-problem-of-fetishizing-techniques/
