Mixed Martial Arts as Interdisciplinary Street Fighting?
Introduction by Howard Gardner
For the last few years, I have been blogging regularly—and most of my blogs have fallen into one of two categories: 1. the ways in which humans synthesize information (link to series here) and 2. updates on the theory of multiple intelligences (MI theory), link here.
Thanks to the extraordinary work by my colleague Anthea Roberts, I now have the opportunity to tie together these strands of my work. As described in Anthea’s recent contribution (link here) to my blog on synthesizing, over the last two years, she and I have begun to explore our complementary perspectives on this hitherto underappreciated cognitive capacity. Most of my work has entailed an effort to describe the cognitive processes involved in synthesizing and/or to analyze examples of synthesizing in different spheres and sectors. In complementary fashion, Anthea conceptualizes synthesizing as akin to the multiplicity of perspectives that the synthesizer brings to an assignment, and she invokes the vivid metaphor of a dragonfly’s eyes. Drawing on the work of psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen, Anthea proposes that broadband synthesizing can be instructively contrasted with the kind of systematic, but narrow thinking that characterizes individuals on the autism spectrum.
Now, applying an unexpected and surprisingly apt lens, Anthea introduces the kind of synthesizing that is carried out by her brother, Denis Roberts. At one time an expert in traditional martial arts, Denis has devoted years of study and practice to the creation of a pluralistic variety of martial arts—one that draws on capacities and processes that were once restricted to only a single form of bodily expression.
Anthea’s blog speaks for itself, vividly! But perhaps unexpectedly, it also draws in illuminating fashion on the cognitive processes that characterize what I’ve termed “bodily-kinesthetic intelligence”—one of the eight cognitive capacities that comprise my theory of multiple intelligences. And so, in equal measure, her essay constitutes a contribution to my second series of blogs—the resource associated with MI theory.
By Anthea Roberts*
© Copyright 2023 Anthea Roberts
Although it might come as a surprise to some given my general nerdy pedigree, my brother (Denis Roberts) is a no rules cage fighter. (For those with a strong stomach, you can see his first fight here.) Despite superficial differences, however, Denis and I have a lot in common. We both developed an interest in dispute resolution, though we invested time in perfecting very different techniques. He trained as a fighter, I went to law school. We both have a desire to traverse boundaries and break free from disciplinary constraints, though the restrictions we react against are different. He ended up fighting across disciplines, I joined an interdisciplinary school. To use a characterization appropriate for this posting, we are both synthesizers or dragonfly thinkers by nature, but these tendencies manifest in different ways.
In the United States, “no rules fighting” goes under the name Mixed Martial Arts (MMA); it is often done through competitions like the Ultimate Fighting Contest (UFC). As opposed to drawing on the techniques of one fighting discipline, and being bound by the rules of that discipline, MMA permits fighters to draw on techniques from any fighting style to beat their opponents. No rules fighting is a bit of a misnomer, it turns out. MMA provides a few basic ground rules – e.g., no strikes to the back of the head or spine and no eye gouging – but, other than that, fighters simply bring whatever skills they have to the fight to try to gain the upper hand. MMA is probably the closest one can get in a formal competition to a street fight though, importantly, no weapons are allowed.
As apparently characterizes many MMA fighters, my brother has done training in numerous fight disciplines. He is internationally competitive in some (demonstrating excellence) and capable in others (demonstrating sufficiency). When Denis began his training in the early 2000s, he was doing kickboxing with a kickboxing coach, jujitsu with a jujitsu coach, wrestling with a wrestling coach, and boxing with a boxing coach, etc. He was struck by this fact: in each discipline, the coaches and participants revered particular approaches but seemed ignorant about others. They often had very little knowledge of other fighting disciplines and typically looked down on other approaches as inferior—at least according to key measures on which their discipline excelled. Each discipline had its own strengths, but was also beset by blind spots and biases, he thought.
Although my brother enjoyed training in each discipline, his natural tendency was always to try to take it up a level. He instinctively wanted to transcend disciplinary boundaries, seeing himself as a fighter, not as a kickboxer, jujitsu specialist, wrestler, or boxer. He was struck by how a given discipline might teach you one thing, such as punching, while leaving you vulnerable to another, such as having your legs taken out from under you. He was also drawn to thinking of ways to creatively integrate insights from different disciplines. What if you combined this move from kickboxing with that move from wrestling? What if you started a move with a jujitsu technique and then moved seamlessly into a boxing move?
In many ways, my brother’s journey has paralleled the journey of MMA fighting. MMA was introduced in North America and Japan in the 1990s as a way of allowing different fighting disciplines to face off against each other. Before that, there had always been a question about which fighting discipline was the best and which would win out in a street fight. But this sort of conjecture remained just that – conjecture – because there was no way of putting the issue to the test. Indeed, when fighters from different disciplines came to meet each other in the early UFC cages, many hallowed theories about which disciplines and techniques were the most effective proved to be wrong, while other little known approaches proved highly effective.
At first, the Brazilian jujitsu artists dominated the UFC due to the power of their little known submission holds (excellence). Then the wrestlers learned enough jujitsu to avoid these submission holds (sufficiency) so that they could remain in the game long enough to take full advantage of their wrestling takedowns; the wrestlers could then use their size, strength and athleticism to take the fight to the ground and pound their opponent from on top (excellence). In time, kickboxers came to learn enough about jujitsu and wrestling to be able to defend against takedowns and submissions (sufficiency); accordingly, they could keep the fight in their preferred standing position for longer from where they had an advantage (excellence). People debated which discipline was the best fighting discipline, with the mantle moving from jujitsu to wrestling to kickboxing in waves (Mastering Jujitsu, 41-46).
But then something interesting happened.
Instead of MMA becoming a place where people from different disciplines came to fight each other to see which discipline was best, the best MMA fighters started to do cross-training to develop and integrate skills and techniques from a range of different disciplines. The question was no longer which disciplines was the best. It was now which martial artists who employed which particular combination of skills and talents was best. MMA transcended the individual fighting discipline from which it arose and became a testing ground for integrative approaches that traversed disciplinary boundaries. It became a place where we started to see synthesis occurring in real time … and sometimes with real consequences.
My brother’s favorite coach is John Danaher and, after watching, listening to and reading many of Danaher’s words, I can see why. Famous in the jujitsu and MMA world, Danaher left his PhD in Philosophy at Columbia University to train jujitsu fighters and some of the early MMA champions, including Georges St-Pierre. Coming from a strong academic family, Danaher has a piercing intellect and a gift for teaching, and has done a lot to transform jujitsu training and the sport of MMA. In a profile published in Vice, John Serra, a former UFC welterweight said: “I would 100 percent call John Danaher the Einstein of Brazilian jiu-jitsu.” A New Yorker profile on Danaher described him as MMA’s equivalent of Hannibal Lecter: “scary smart, superbly calculated and logical.”
John Danaher: image from Ju Jitsu Times
With this unusual combination of brains and brawn, Danaher was quick to realize that something special and different was happening in MMA. He has compared the early days of the UFC to the discovery of the New World in terms of its impact on Brazilian jiu-jitsu and MMA. Before the UFC, he explained, “[t]here was no open competition, no place to test theories—it was just people’s opinions floating around.” But the UFC gave a “rock solid mechanism to test the various theories of the martial arts. To test the mettle of the various athletes, so we could form solid conclusions about what could work and what doesn’t work.” And, importantly, what worked were integrative approaches. Victory did not belong to a particular style of fighting; it belonged to the athletes who could best exhibit the art of synthesis.
As Danaher recalled in a podcast:
“During the early years of UFC there were debates about which martial art was king, with different martial arts coming to the fore at different times, but: all that was leading towards this idea that the real truth wasn’t that any one martial art was king, but rather that the skills of all the martial arts synthesized would be king. And that there would be a day in the future where we really could stop talking about style versus style and started talking about athlete versus athlete. And I remember looking at this VHS of George St. Pierre and saying, that’s exactly what this kid is, this kid’s the future. Like he’s not a jujitsu player, he’s not a wrestler, he’s not a kickboxer. He’s the average of those three things. And I remember just [thinking] this kid’s doing something really, really interesting. He’s the face of a new kind of martial art, like mixed martial arts is different from its components. And something revolutionary is happening here.”
As Danaher explained in a podcast with Joe Rogan, a UFC commentator,
“99% of people who look at mixed martial arts see mixed martial arts as an eclectic sport, in other words it’s a conglomeration of different martial arts kind of banded together and then you got mixed martial arts.”
But to Danaher the key wasn’t multi-disciplinarity, it was interdisciplinarity where different skills were integrated into new skill sets that transcended the martial arts that traditionally made up MMA. What turned Georges St-Pierre into a world champion wasn’t that he was the best in any individual discipline, Rather, he was able to seamlessly integrate and synthesize them. Inspired by his approach, Danaher proposed a schema of four distinct skills (shoot boxing, clinch boxing, fence boxing, and grapple boxing) where the whole is more than the sum of its parts: each
“skill area transcends the various martial arts that make it up and create something bigger and different from the core components that originally built it.”
I am struck by my brother’s story and Danaher’s description. It feels eerily like my interests in interdisciplinary research, dragonfly thinking and the synthesizing mind. Like my brother in his early days of fight training, I spent my early days at university observing different disciplines that seemed to have their own rules, hierarchies and measurements of skill and achievement. I enjoyed training in different disciplines (originally law, philosophy and mathematics), before eventually picking international law as my focus. After a while, however, I felt constrained by that field and approach and became more interdisciplinary, drawing on economics, sociology, political science and psychology to think about global and governance issues more generally. I was drawn to thinking about problems in a broad and integrative way, and to developing schemas or frames through which to understand complex and contested fields.
When I think about the early days of UFC, I sometimes have the following thought: what would have happened if you had put economists, epidemiologists, sociologists and political scientists into a ring at the start of a complex problem like COVID-19 and told them to “fight it out”? You could have the top economists and epidemiologists in the world, I think, but they’d soon have found that the best answers lay in integrating insights from across different disciplines rather than in one discipline consistently offering what they deemed to be the knockout blow. That is because each of the disciplines offers important insights, but also tends to be subject to its own blind spots and biases. To be sure, it is important to have world leaders in each discipline and we learn a lot from their deep, if narrow, expertise. But something highly original as well as useful can come from integrating and synthesizing insights from across disciplines to deal with complex real world problems.
In MMA, the different fighting disciplines realized that they had something to learn from each other and, in the process, created something new that transcended the original approaches. As an interdisciplinary researcher interested in synthesis and integrative approaches, I suspect I have something to learn from MMA. As universities try to make sense of what interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary research means, and how it differs from and goes beyond multidisciplinarity, MMA provides a useful case study in another field for thinking through these issues. And as we are try to engage in complex real world problems that resemble interdisciplinary street fights, I try to remember that the trick is not to be world class in every aspect of that problem, but to find the best ways to combine excellence in some areas and sufficiency in others to find creative combinations and connections while avoiding blind spots and biases. It seems to me that that is an approach that is worth fighting for in today’s academy.
For previous discussions on these ideas and/or for comments on earlier drafts, I am much indebted to Christian Barry, Jarrett Blaustein, Miranda Forsyth, Howard Gardner, Ryan Gillett, Denis Roberts, Meredith Rossner, Jensen Sass, and Jon Schwartz.
Bibliography
Armstrong, Shiro. “Denis at XFC 6.” Vimeo. May 9, 2010. https://vimeo.com/11591808
BJJ Hacks. “John Danaher: High Performance Jiu-Jitsu | BJJ Hacks in NYC.” YouTube. June 3, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpLKrhwGavU
Frank, Sam. “The Jujitsu Master Turning an Ancient Art into a Modern Science.” The New Yorker. July 10, 2017. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/the-jujitsu-master-turning-an-ancient-art-into-a-modern-science.
Gracie, Renzo, and John Danaher. Mastering Jujitsu. Human Kinetics, 2003.
London Real. “John Danaher - The Philosophy Of Martial Arts: The Man Who Inspired Me To Learn Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.” May 31, 2022. https://londonreal.tv/john-danaher-the-philosophy-of-martial-arts-the-man-who-inspired-me-to-learn-brazilian-jiu-jitsu/
Stanley, Ben, and Kristopher McDuff. “The Life and Influence of Real-Life Martial Arts Monk, Kiwi John Danaher.” Vice. October 22, 2018. https://www.vice.com/en/article/evwwpe/the-life-and-influence-of-real-life-martial-arts-monk-kiwi-john-danaher.
The Joe Rogan Experience. “JRE MMA Show #11 with John Danaher.” OGJRE. January 15, 2018. https://ogjre.com/episode/jre-mma-show-11-with-john-danaher
*Professor at the School of Regulation and Global Governance (RegNet) and Director of the Centre for International Governance and Justice, Australian National University. Email: Anthea.Roberts@anu.edu.au.