Philosophical Fight Log: Day 19- The Strength of the Pack
Rudyard Kipling once wrote, ‘for the strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack.’
The same holds true for human beings just as it does for wolves. Perhaps even more so.
I’ve said it once, and I will say it again, Aristotle more or less had it right; we are irreducibly social creatures, creatures with an essential nature. We are not Lockean blank slates, radically atomized individuals, absent any nature, shorn of any historical, cultural, regional, or familial roots or contexts, cast into the universe like some random die with no bonds, duties, or ties to any group or cause greater than ourselves whatsoever. This conception of the human person can’t possibly be correct. Rather, we are social animals. And people need other people.
Seldom though, in this modern day and age, do we encounter, in our frantic day-to-day lives, anything that even approaches the sense of truly or authentically belonging to a ‘pack’, a ‘tribe’, a ‘band of brother’ or to some whole greater than ourselves. Thick relationships and enduring bonds are old news so they tell us, as every interaction these days seems more and more thin, more and more transactional, more and more superficial, and more and more unreal. People online can now have enough ‘friends’ on social media to populate a small country and yet reports of radical alienation, depression, suicide, and loneliness keep increasing. Clearly, something is amiss.
Indeed, way back in 2000, political scientist, Robert Putnam, famously wrote the book, “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival or American Community,” charting the radical decline of ‘social capital’ and the withering of the social fabric in America as evidenced by the drastic decline in membership of local civic organizations like Bowling Clubs, The Knights of Columbus, Women’s Clubs, the Elks Club, etc. Twenty some years later, with the breakneck ramp up of the internet, social media, smartphones, Tik Tok, Tinder, Venmo, and Amazon same-day-delivery, the withering social fabric that Putnam describes and woefully laments looks damn near quaint and old-fashioned. All for the sake of ‘technological progress,’ so they say, but I’m increasingly skeptical that what we are progressing towards is all that good after all.
Echoing similar sentiments, in his book, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, writer and war journalist, Sebastian Junger writes,
“Humans don’t mind hardship, in fact they thrive on it; what they mind is not feeling necessary. Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary.”
Junger’s thesis, of why so many recently returning war veterans report feeling so depressed, alienated, unmoored, and listless after returning home from war, has less so to do with PTSD incurred from actual life-or-death combat moments and more so to do with the felt sense of actually having belonged to a small tribe and band of brothers under harsh and serious conditions during war only to have that sense of belonging, connectedness, meaning, purpose, and identity suddenly ripped away from them upon re-entering into modern, domesticated, and otherwise purposeless civilian life. What is making these returning veterans feel so alienated, according to Junger, is that they have experienced first-hand what it means to actually be part of a pack and a tribe, an experience, identity, and way of being that would have been commonplace and the norm for countless generations of human beings in the world and throughout history and yet, an experience fewer and fewer modern-day human beings ever get the chance to now experience at all.
But Junger’s analysis is correct.
What the human heart truly craves is not comfort, or the absence from hardship, or meaningless hedonic stimulation and titillation of the appetites on end. Man is more than just some amoeba merely swimming from the cold side of the petri dish to the warm side. Man’s nature is greater than that of a thermostat. What man truly craves is meaning and purpose and belonging. Yet so very few contexts these days provide for the real opportunity for the cultivation of such virtues and necessary goods. The MMA gym, as odd as it might sound, I believe, stands as one of the last remaining oases and contexts within modern society for the cultivation of such meaning, purpose, and belonging through shared hardship. Indeed, as one of my coaches once astutely noted, ‘the MMA gym is one of the very few contexts in modern society where you can still see men, of multiple generations, from elders, to fathers, to adolescent boys, to young boys all interacting, cooperating, and competing in the same place, and knowing and learning what it feels like to be part of and to fit into a larger, intergenerational, male social hierarchy that is greater than just themselves.’
Many anthropologists, sociologists, women’s studies professors, and effete academic types of one sort or another would likely categorize such a sentiment as another instance of ‘toxic masculinity.’ Like virgins theorizing about sex or speculative cartographers who have never once set foot on actual terrain, their commentary and clever theories mean very little to me now, for they know not what they speak of.
To such folks I say, ‘look through the telescope yourself, first-hand, before jumping to such hasty conclusions.’
That said, I recently moved back to the town I originally grew up in after years of being away, but I hardly know any of my neighbors anymore. I went back to my old church, but I still hardly know anyone’s name after being there for almost a year. I have thousands of online fans, readers, and followers whom I’ve never met and likely never will in real life, all as the world keeps getting thinner and thinner and thinner with each passing day.
I do know one thing though. After training, competing, sweating, bleeding, and fighting with one another for months on end, I can at least say that I do know my friends and teammates at my MMA gym, much more so than in these other contexts. For when you bleed, train, and fight with someone, and mutual respect, trust, and belonging is established, then that counts for something. Not everything. But something. And as the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts, each individual within the group rises together. For as the old saying goes, ‘iron sharpens iron.’
That said, this Saturday night, when the cage door locks behind me, my opponent will not be fighting the strength of a singular wolf.
He will be fighting the strength of an entire pack.