The Way of The Warrior, The Hunter & The Outlaw by Mark Hatmaker

 

“We are rough men used to rough ways.”—Outlaw Bob Younger of the Cole-Younger Gang.

The above quote was Younger’s simple explanation for the “why” of he and his compadres’ life choices.

The explanation does not excuse evil or crime, but we can use it as a jumping off point regarding immersion as shaping the animal via environmental response.

Younger refers to hardscrabble frontier upbringing and delving in guerrilla warfare in the Bloody Border States of the Civil War period [both pre and during.]

These organized, live-off-the-land, shoot-with both hands with reins-in-the-teeth tactics continued on into the bad choices of post-war crime.

The “rough ways” did not and do not justify the bad moral choice. Plenty of “rough raised” men and women chose the bright and true.

The “rough ways” merely points to the fact that often there is more to shaping the animal than the specific assumed tactic.

What do I mean by that?

“Rough Ways” vs. Compartmentalization Training vs. Abstraction

There are three choices the Warrior can make, be it the Warrior of the past, or the present-day warrior, particularly those who embrace the Old School Path.

Let us approach them in reverse order of absolute utility.

Abstraction

Abstraction or Theorizing, or in the specific parlance of learning theory—Platonizing is the least valuable, and likely harmful mode to approach combat arts, hell, any endeavor.

Platonicity assumes that theories, general categories, ideals are the “same as” facts, that is, tangible expressions of knowledge.

Platonicity treats the gorgeously expressed strategy in a text as equivalent to any actual execution.

Platonicity regards the time spent dog-earing a copy of Grossman’s On Killing as valuable as active range time.

Platonicity views the flowchart/PowerPoint/etymological breakdown of the myriad k’ung fu systems as a bestowing of wisdom on par with the man-on-mat hours missed in the kwoon studying such esoterica.

Epistemology studies [how we learn] demonstrates again and again that the text, the classroom, the erudite theory IS NOT the battlefield.

Warriors avoid abstraction.

Compartmentalized Training

Far better than abstraction is compartmentalization, that is, actual physical expressions of the endeavor to be studied.

We add the designation “compartmentalized” here as, often, this refers to training that is extracted and removed from original or likely environments.

The easy example here is sportive combat.

Boxing is not a street-fight.

Jiu-jitsu is not a knife-mugging.

The local range is not Fallujah.

Any claims for boxing, jiu-jitsu or range-firing beyond the confines of their domain are dubious.

No matter how effective, and likely helpful the sportive endeavor may be, they are not guarantees of anything beyond their domain.

Yes, we must extract perilous bits from training to make it accessible and available for long-term practice but…the more the remove, the more the compartmentalization, the less and less it is reflective of realities.

But…in learning theory, compartmentalization is not merely “sporting” up the reality we wish to portray.

It is the extraction of the single desired bit of information and practicing that in isolation assuming that that entity existed in isolation in the original instance.

Usually that is never the case.

What do I mean by that?

Combat Examples

Battleaxe/Tomahawk

·        Many modern expressions of these two weapons use patterns taken from sword, stick or blade “systems.”

·        That is, systems and weapons with entirely different characteristics.

·        Often the tomahawk/axe is wielded only as a weapon in mock-battle scenarios never as it was originally embedded.

·        Originally the axe or tomahawk would be used often, likely every day, for everything from splitting kindling, shaving shingles, making shelter etc.

·        Those with everyday hands-on utility understand tool [weapon] characteristics far more than any gym-only, mock combat dilettante.

·        The Warrior who wielded an axe or tomahawk everyday for mundane matters suffered from no theory-blinders when it came to combat usage of the same implement.

Grappling/Wrestling: Leg-Riding Example

·        The best grapplers, be they jiu-jitsu or catch can leg ride like hell.

·        Good leg-riders drill multiple entries and the staggering variety of follow ups.

·        Even these good grapplers do so only in the gym, only on a mat.

·        Whereas, formerly, wrestling and horsemanship co-evolved.

·        Even non-wrestling women and children could ride—and understood leg control, balance, and adductor use that we mere “pony trail riders” maybe once every vacation or two can never understand.

·        The best leg-riders of yore were Warriors, men who rode horses in battle.

·        Men and women who were familiar with the active nature of riding a horse. [Let us not forget that even as the horse was losing sway in urban areas, Gentleman Jim Corbett still found horseback riding a valuable conditioner for his boxing.]

·        Warriors who worked sans saddle built astonishing leg control that also informed their wrestling game.

·        Comanche Warrior culture was a horse culture, their exploits atop a bareback equine are legendary.

·        Comanche and other Plains Tribes iterations of “leg-wrestling” games are likewise steeped in unusual entries and executions that can only be unlocked by sampling aspects of “rough living” that existed outside the compartmentalization of the “leg riding” itself.

Boxing/Striking Example

·        Fine punches are more about cohesive snap than they are about brute power.

·        Excellent striking is the symphonic harmony of coordination from balls of the feet, precise extension of the knees, snap and torque of the hip, sine wave of the torso and resultant whip crack of the fist upon surface.

·        Anyone who has coached rookies thru “How to hit” know that this toe-to-hand esoterica is the toughest portion to get across—to be honest, some never seem to get it.

·        Let us recall that many fine strikers came from the occupations of lumberjacking, railroad building, mucking, and like endeavors where day-in-day-out enduring snapping force with axe, sledge, mattock, etc. were the norm.

·        In a day pre-jackhammer, pre-chainsaw, pre-easy to rent bobcat, men built roads, railways, dug canals, foundations by dint of human horsepower. Effort that spawned familiarity with snap and power.

·        These professions made easy transfers to early pugilism and boxing and a significant number of our pound-for-pound punchers came from these lumberjack, blacksmith, gandy-dancer worlds of coordinated expressions of power.

·        Today’s power tool using construction crew, no matter how grueling that job can be, is not the same crew that built homes 100+ years ago.

·        The snap was embedded before the punch was educated.

 

Historian par excellence Jacques Barzun reminds us that we never really understand a work of art, piece of literature, a political movement unless we also understand the overall environment in which it was birthed.

Art/Historical appreciation in isolation is compartmentalization.

Context is key—be it physical intellectual or physical endeavors.

“Rough Ways” the Deep Historical-Biological Perspective

This is scholar Paul Shepard on the world into which our forebears were born into “pre-civilization.” This is a world that persisted far longer with many an indigenous culture.

“Children in primal societies have access to the scenes of life—such as butchering, copulation, birth and death—especially within the family and within nature. They live in a rich, nonhuman plant and animal environment at the time of language acquisition and are given the opportunity to name animals with a coplayer [that is, the actual animal and not a digital flashcard “This is a cow, it goes “Moo.”] Taxonomy is fundamental to cognition as well as grounding in a real world. From birth the lives of children are keyed to the daily, monthly and seasonal round. These cycles are the true pulse to which their blood resonates, as distinct from the clock, electronic calendar, and historical regulators of our own lives.”—Paul Shepard, Coming Home to the Pleistocene.

The long view of human life sees this species emerging and growing in an immersive environment where abstraction and compartmentalization weighs little on the scale.

As we 21st-century denizens “advance” we may be able to access a Stargazing app at will but simply have zero idea at what point or time the moon will rise over our very own home this evening. That is abstraction and assumption of knowledge over embedded knowing.

We know the date when the new Marvel film will debut but see not the almost clockwork opening of the dandelions in our own yard every spring and summer day.

We have elevated the abstract over the embedded knowing.

Shepard goes on to say…

“Toys in modern society may be a burden to children in ways we do yet understand…They objectify the world as passive and subordinate to ourselves and, despite childhood pretending, are nonliving. Toys maybe symptomatic of social deprivation, solitude, and isolation.”

To be clear, I do not take as jaundiced a view as Mr. Shepard but…

It is informative to note he penned this before the advent of endless online absorption, and before grown-adults lost themselves in videogames and fantasy worlds or perpetual tiny-screen abstraction.

For our purposes it is enough to say that for millennia this species was far more immersed in the immediate and the present and all of what they did be it combat arts or culinary arts, life was overlapped and shaded by other unsuspecting aspects of that lived life.

By using a scalpel and piecemeal excising the aspects of interest and assuming they existed as compartmentalized wholes is tantamount to assuming that the unused app in your pocket imbues you with the ability to sail an uncharted sea.

Use, doing, action over Platonicity.

Immersion over Dissected Cadavers.

Rough men who live rough ways know more than soft men who read about, guess at, and play at rough ways.

The Black Box Brotherhood is steeped in the living experiment of Old School combat and physical training resurrection, and that involves immersing in as many auxiliary Old Ways as a man can manage to better inform the whole.

Resources for The Black Box Brotherhood

The Black Box Combat & Conditioning Training Warehouse

The Rough ‘n’ Tumble Raconteur Podcast