Recent events in Minnesota regarding ICE have provided the latest occasion for commentators to renew their predictions of an impending civil war.
Whether a civil war is genuinely on the horizon, and whether it would be a good or bad thing, are topics that we can put to one side for the moment. There is a more fundamental question that all Americans from across the political spectrum need to ask themselves: If war comes, do I have the ability and the resolve to successfully master the lethal violence that all war entails?
Your average citizen, if honest, would have to reply to this question with a resounding no. This is especially so with respect to the chatterers and scribblers in the media who tirelessly talk about a new civil war, a war in the streets of the United States. There are reasons for this.
Long ago, Aristotle distinguished “hexis” from “techne.” The latter refers to techniques or skills necessary for the production of the goods of a craft (like, say, carpentry). Technical knowledge can be expressed propositionally and, in theory, discerned intellectually by anyone.
Hexis, however, is something else entirely. It is a capacity, a settled disposition, a habit that a person must cultivate over time through practice. Hexis transforms the agent by way of constituting, or reconstituting, his character. It is second nature: Unlike techne, hexis pertains to a person’s identity, not to his actions, to who he is, not to what he does.
Crucially, hexis is embodied intelligence. A person with a formed capacity knows, subconsciously, not just what to do but how to do whatever it is he needs to do and in whatever the circumstances. His actions appear spontaneous and effortless, for they are a function of the human being that the agent has become. The many nuances and subtleties that comprise hexis defy explicit excogitation, for they are incarnated in the agent’s whole being.
Now, all of this being said, a civil war will necessarily require a scope and intensity of engagement on the part of civilians that’s never been expected of them with respect to foreign wars. It will demand of them that they cultivate a hexis for war-making, that they make themselves into…warriors.
Yet the time to make all of this happen is not after the war has commenced. Anyone who genuinely suspects that a civil war could be in our near future, and those specifically who make a living assuring their audiences that this is so, should be training their bodies regularly, daily, to prepare for this event. If these media figures care a lick about the well-being of their fellow Americans over whom they exert influence, and they sincerely think that a civil war is imminent, they should offer tips as to how their audience members can physically and psychologically prepare themselves for mortal combat.
Few (if any) of these influencers have given any indication that, aside, perhaps, from being gun owners, they’ve taken any steps toward developing the hexis for mortal combat on the streets and in their homes entailed by the coming civil war that they repeatedly prophesy.
Assuming that I’m correct, it’s only fair to add that none of this necessarily means that these influencers are dishonest or manipulative. Precisely because they haven’t made themselves into warriors, into embodiments of the martial virtues, they can’t be expected to think and feel as warriors do. They don’t know what they don’t—and, as of now, can’t—know.
No one can know what a civil war today would look like. But this is the point: Precisely because it’s simply not possible to know in advance all of the circumstances that would comprise something as unprecedented to our generation as a hot civil war, Americans should be training now to transform themselves into peerless combatants. More specifically, they should implement a training methodology designed to forge new neural networks, to reorganize their nervous systems, in short, to cultivate, within their bodies, a hexis, a capacity, for mastering the use of violence.
There is much that goes into the art of war. I am referring here only to the adeptness of an individual to both evade succumbing to lethal violence as well as to unleash it upon the enemy.
In order to achieve this, a person should train in a martial art, yes, but not one that supplies instruction on techniques to be applied under specific hypothetical conditions. In preparing for a civil war (as in preparing for all and any real-world violent encounters), one needs to prepare oneself to prevail under whatever the actual conditions of conflict happen to be. This, in turn, means that a martial training methodology must be centered upon developing body mastery, the embodied intelligence necessary for knowing how to move one’s body with maximal smoothness, with subtlety, refinement, and efficiency under duress and in the midst of the dynamic, adrenaline-charged conditions of deadly conflict. The more pliable the body, the greater one’s embodied cognition.
The more intelligence that resides within one’s body, the more creative in combat one will be: The combatant will know, subconsciously, in his body, how to adapt to unforeseen circumstances within microseconds, before they become unmanageable. This level of skill and will cannot be taught via instruction in techniques (specific strikes and combinations of strikes), for techniques, like guns or any other artificial weaponry, are only as effective as the person who deploys them, and if a person lacks the proper body development, the embodied intelligence, to move properly under stress and in response to scenarios for which his instruction in techniques has not and cannot prepare him, his training will be for naught.
It is not the technique or the weapon that determines victory in battle. It is the agent.
As the 17th-century samurai warrior Miyamoto Musashi memorably remarked: “It is said the warrior’s is the twofold Way of pen and sword, and he should have a taste for both Ways.”
Public intellectuals and other influencers who talk of civil war would do themselves and everyone else a good turn if they heeded these words.