Next year, President Donald Trump will celebrate the nation’s 250th birthday by hosting a mixed martial arts (MMA) fight on the White House lawn. Connections with government, politics, and national pride are not new for some sports, such as baseball, but they are for MMA. Even those who dislike Donald Trump should celebrate this development. MMA cultivates virtues in the individuals who participate that stand to benefit the nation as a whole.
MMA is primarily distinguished from other combat sports by the breadth of techniques allowed. The martial arts in MMA are “mixed” in the sense that a single bout often includes techniques from boxing, wrestling, judo, jiu-jitsu, karate, Muay Thai, and anything else that isn’t a groin strike, eye gouge, headbutt, or bite.
Critics have long seen MMA as a brutal blood sport without rules. Sen. John McCain tried to have the sport banned. He did not like that strikes were thrown on the ground instead of in a standing position only, declaring: “I’ve seen people repeatedly get smashed in the face with the guy sitting on top of him. That’s not a sport. That’s a throwback to the Roman Colosseum.”
McCain was wrong. MMA isn’t a throwback to the Roman Colosseum—it’s a revival of the ancient Olympic Games.
Pankration, one of the most popular events of the ancient Olympics, combined wrestling, boxing, and most else that worked. Kicking and hitting a downed opponent were allowed. Only biting and eye gouging were forbidden. The sport was open to all free Greek citizens, but the fighters were mostly drawn from the elite.
Pankration died out after the ancient Olympics were discontinued. But countless martial arts styles continued to develop around the world. Of those styles that focused on competition, nearly all constrained the range of techniques. In boxing, one may only strike with the fist. In Kyokushin karate, one may not strike the head with a fist, but may kick the head. In folkstyle wrestling, one may not strike at all. Constrained rule sets produced many great sports, and isolated schools produced signature regional styles. But in the 20th century, worldwide telecommunications and film broke the isolation. People were confronted with wildly different ways to fight, and this naturally raised some questions.
What’s the best way to fight, and who’s the best at actually fighting? People in Japan, Brazil, and the United States began to seek answers by organizing competitions with minimal constraints, such as the US-based Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC). Founded in 1993, the organization has since become the leading promoter of MMA events, and is seen as the highest level of competition globally. MMA’s US fan base has grown rapidly, surpassing those of professional soccer and hockey.
The rapid growth of MMA suggests a previously unmet demand, implying that MMA offers something that other popular sports did not. Is there something about the unique appeal of MMA that’s worth celebrating at the White House? We can look to the same source that the White House’s first resident, John Adams would have consulted: Plato weighed the virtues and benefits a nation could gain from practicing and revering various sports. He reasoned that combat sports would be best because they have an element of danger; “so that opportunity may be given for distinction, and the brave man and the coward may receive their meed of honour or disgrace.” Courage is a virtue worth cultivating. And in the cultivation and promotion of courage, there is no substitute for facing actual danger.
Of course, there’s no shortage of danger in the world. Crime, disaster, war, and accidents never stop. So what’s the point in manufacturing additional danger for sport? Danger is overwhelming to those who have not learned by experience to face it. Combat sports allow us to build capacity for courage in what psychologists call the zone of proximal development, where the level of difficulty is calibrated such that with some coaching, the student is just capable of success. This enables people to iteratively grow their fortitude over time instead of being protected from every real and imagined danger, and then becoming overwhelmed when the protection inevitably fails.
“Sanctioned aggressive behavior can reduce unsanctioned aggressive behavior.”
MMA doesn’t just build courage; it properly channels excess courage. Plato knew that there’s a subset of any society that needs an outlet for its natural tendency toward action. He described what happens when society is only oriented toward gaining material riches and comforts, neglecting to honor courage through combat sports: “It converts the temperate and orderly into shopkeepers or servants, and the brave into burglars or pirates. Many of these latter are men of ability, and are greatly to be pitied, because their souls are hungering and thirsting all their lives long.”
Some people are made for adventure. Street races, bar fights, feuds, duels, vandalism, shootings, burglaries, and hooliganism are all destructive venues for adventure. But the desire for it can’t be wished away. Instead, those with the “hunger and thirst” should have a proper arena to carry out their drive to lock horns: a literal arena, as wisely recommended by Plato. Sanctioned aggressive behavior can reduce unsanctioned aggressive behavior. Psychologists have been confused about this, as they were led astray by ecologically irrelevant studies about anger and “catharsis.” But behavioral science is finally beginning to catch up with ancient wisdom. A randomized controlled experiment and a meta-analysis have found that students randomly assigned to practice jiu-jitsu had fewer conduct problems (fights with other students) and less hyperactivity and inattention than students who were randomly assigned to traditional physical education. So Plato seems to have been right. The hunger for combat can be satiated in sports.
More than other sports, MMA strips away illusions and forces combatants and viewers to confront reality. From the beginning, it has aimed at discovering a basic truth: Which martial arts, done in what way, by which practitioners actually work? In the 1990s, there were highly developed combat sports such as boxing and wrestling, but they stayed in their insular lanes of competition. There were all sorts of variations of karate, kung fu, and others that had their own forms of competition, and passed down theoretical approaches to fighting. Each art was full of dogmatic disciples who had endless justifications for their belief that their art was the best. The first UFC fight put those claims to the test.
“MMA strips away illusions.”
Of course, each sport produces the truth of what works in that sport. But the truth produced by MMA is a little different. MMA is a sport with minimal artificiality and abstraction. A punch is a punch. It’s the same punch that could work in any fight anywhere in the world, at any point in history. In contrast, consider American football. There are truths about effective strategies for scoring two-point conversions. But it’s all nonsense without a very specific set of abstractions in the background. It only becomes possible after a touchdown, which itself doesn’t mean anything outside of the social construct of the game. Imagine running across a line with a football in ancient China. It would be completely meaningless. A punch is more real than a two-point conversion, although the two-point conversion does have a reality within a certain social context. MMA puts participants in regular direct contact with reality.
MMA also has another baked-in element of truth: coherence. Other sports such as soccer and basketball have an inherent element of dissonance. There is much bluster and bravado amongst athletes. In their trash talk and celebrations, they’re raging tough guys. But the same tough guy will become a helpless victim in need of rescue by the referee when an opposing player makes slight contact. So-called flopping or diving, though discouraged by fans, is incentivized by the structure of the game. In MMA, there is no such incentive to lie. On the contrary, it punishes dishonesty. The competitor must not only act tough, he must be tough. To talk tough without being tough is to lie, and primarily to lie to one’s self. With no direct contact with reality, it can easily become a habit to lie to oneself about oneself. MMA interrupts this cycle like few other activities could.
You would think that a sport that promotes courage and honesty would be celebrated. But all too predictably, there’s a movement against it. Plato can help us understand why. He specifically described why those in power would discourage combat sports: “Rulers are afraid of their subjects, and therefore do not like them to become rich, or noble, or valiant.” This is true of our governing class, which seeks to regulate life through “expert” top-down management. This class of rulers has an incentive to make government more complex and less efficient, because that means more expert managers must be installed to administer it. Eventually it is the impersonal mass of managers, not the nominal leadership, that controls the organization.
The fortitude and integrity promoted by combat sports are not compatible with social control. This helps to explain why, during Biden’s presidency, when MSNBC, Time, and The Guardian were assuring us of Biden’s mental acuity, they were also publishing articles about the moral dangers of physical fitness.
Indeed, Biden was the perfect figurehead for this managerial form of government not despite his dementia, but because of it (at least so long as it could be shielded from scrutiny). In The Present Age, Kierkegaard described how society can come to be controlled by a “monstrous abstraction” that levels individuals into interchangeable vessels. It is essential that this leveling process has no single leader: “One man can be at the head of a rebellion, but no one can be at the head of the levelling process alone, for in that case he would be the leader and would thus escape being levelled.” The closer to “no one” a leader can become, the better he is as a figurehead for the monstrous abstraction.
Individual authenticity and valor are not compatible with a ruling system that requires individuality to be dissolved into itself. The people must be leveled down to feed the monstrous abstraction. Such a system will prize mental and physical infirmity not only in its figureheads, but in its subjects. And it will fear fitness and spiritedness in the people it seeks to rule. The upcoming MMA fight at the White House is a direct challenge to the leveling impulse. It proposes that physical and moral courage is essential to self-rule. It is hard to imagine a more fitting way to celebrate and reinvigorate American democracy.
These virtues will propagate if MMA is solidified as a quintessentially American sport. But this raises the question of what the average American’s participation in MMA would look like. It’s ill-advised to compete as a casual hobbyist in MMA. Competition and hard sparring can entail significant head trauma. To protect the brain, we can take a page out of Theodore Roosevelt’s book: “In one bout a young captain of artillery cross-countered me on the eye, and the blow smashed the little blood vessels … Accordingly I thought it better to acknowledge that I had become an elderly man and would have to stop boxing. I then took up jiu-jitsu for a few years.”
Much like the aging Roosevelt, the average American can participate in jiu-jitsu, gaining a portion of the mental, physical, and virtue benefits of MMA, without the associated head trauma. Striking can also be practiced by hitting pads and light sparring. With casual yet strenuous training in practical martial arts, Americans can gain an elevated appreciation for the beauty on display when the best in the world compete. An MMA fight on the nation’s 250th birthday is an opportunity to be inspired to live up to the best American ideals.