On Ph.D.s Who Can Win a Bar Fight

And why this combination is crucial

The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. John Martin. 1852.

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My sense is the worship of stability and safety at the expense of uncertainty and autonomy is as anti-human as arsenic. We were crafted for a world of ice, claw, knife, and fire, and this world demanded of us two traits—knowledge and a will to action.

Let us look at these dual traits.

Captain Knox and two Allied soldiers jumped out a plane above France in 1944. He carried a .45 pistol, .30 caliber carbine, bullets, grenades, a combat knife, survival gear, and enough morphine to commit suicide if he was mortally wounded and left behind. His mission was simple: organize, train, arm, and lead local French resistance fighters called maquis (pronounced mah-kee) for one purpose: sabotage.

He spoke English, French, Italian, Spanish, Latin, and Greek. He studied Classics at Cambridge. He was trained in knife fighting, demolition, “Australian barroom fighting,” assassination pistol shooting, obstacle courses, mines, booby traps, and by one of the greatest burglars on earth, a convict actively serving a life sentence and who was “… only doin’ my bit, like all o’ you…”.¹

The crucial point is that his small, elite unit—called Jedburghs—were highly intelligent, well-educated, and, in Knox’s words, “Incapable of remaining quiet—troublemakers, in fact; people who could be relied on to upset applecarts.”²

At dawn on August 2^nd, 1944, Captain Knox and hundreds of his maquis set up an L-shaped ambush. They waited for the hardcore German 2^nd Parachute Division to walk by, a unit hardened from fighting on the Russian Front. The Germans smoked, laughed, and walked into the L. Suddenly, dark hills were shattered by yellow muzzle flashes and thundered with explosions as Knox hammered the Germans with mines, bazookas, machine guns, and grenades. His guerrilla unit killed and wounded dozens of Germans. Those who fled were hunted down by maquis killing squads. The rest fought their way out.

What then? The fire fight is interesting; the fact that Knox won the fire fight with only two soldiers and a chaotic crew of civilians, both men and women, a few war-hardened and many who had never touched a rifle, is remarkable. He won with zero reinforcements. He won risking everything. He won by breaking conventional modes of thought.

The significant point is that he won because he was a “Ph.D. who can win a bar fight.”

This is what the founder of the OSS and the Jedburghs, General “Wild Bill” Donovan, was looking for. He led from the front like a true war leader: Wild Bill “was the sort of guy who thought nothing about parachuting into France, blowing up a bridge, pissing into Luftwaffe gas tanks, then dancing with a German spy on the roof of the St. Regis Hotel.”³

My sense is that this ideal of a Ph.D. who can win a bar fight is worth striving for today. But why?

What, then, is a Ph.D. in this context? It was not meant literally. It means we are well read, eloquent, conscientious, and socially adept with those who may think callouses are a form of skin disease. And what is a bar fighter? It means we are assertive and carry a certain aura of violence; we might take a visceral pleasure in breaking rules, making quick decisions, acting without orders, holding our own counsel, and flowing, when needed, with the more lawless elements of society.

It is a crucial combination.

Why? Well, what if we are a Ph.D.s who cannot win a bar fight? Let us place ourselves in Knox’s shoes. We would have taken out our archaic radio to ask for guidance prior to the ambush. But what if we cannot find a signal? What if, O God, I cannot get ahold of the General? Who am I to make the decision? What if it goes wrong? What if I go wrong? This was not in my training! This was not in my field book! No. If this were us, it is probably true we would never have jumped out of that plane into France—we would have stayed in a classroom.

What if we are a bar fighter without a Ph.D.? We might slaughter Nazis and die on a mountain of grenade pins amid a hail of fire and glory worthy of Homer. On the other hand, we might plunder wine barrels and drunkenly pillage the French countryside. Who knows? My point is we would be a liability.

What if we are neither a bar fighter nor a Ph.D.? It almost hurts to think about it. Who would want this? And what for? Alas, we will learn the answers to these questions soon enough.

Now what if we are a Ph.D. who can win a bar fight? Who can write our own orders? Who come alive when hunted by barking Nazi soldiers and growling German shepherds? Who can slay SS by night and riff on Socrates’ Apology by day? Then we are a Jedburgh. We can fight World Wars. We can think for ourselves. We are, in a word, autonomous.

Let us sum up. States needed to win a World War, so it let the Ph.D.s who can win bar fights out of their cages and gave them perhaps the only order they ever happily obeyed: in the words of Winston Churchill, “Set Europe ablaze.”

But it is here we unearth a dour truth of the State.

The Jedburghs had their fingerprints and photographs taken and were warned with a wink and a nod, “just in case you gentlemen should think of putting what you have learned here to use after the close of hostilities.” The warning was clear: you are only to be autonomous when the State allows you to be.

The State despises enemies outside its borders, but my hunch is that it despises Jedburgh souls within its borders even more. The State is plagued by a paradox: if it allows us to be PhDs who can win barfights, it fears it will lose its grip on power from within. If it does not allow us, it fears it will lose World Wars from without. It does not want Jedburghs but it needs them. Autonomy backed up by a beautiful mind is, I think, what earns the Hard No from the State.

Autonomy means “self-directing freedom and especially moral independence.” What, then, is it about such a noble concept that scares the State? One, the autonomous are willing to question everything. Two, the autonomous are willing to break rules, laws, conventions, and orders to do the right thing. Three, the autonomous defeated a more experienced, numerically superior, and diabolically evil enemy force with zero moral scruples. The significant point is that the autonomous are willing and able to threaten a tyrant, an oppressor, and the State—and win. Can there be anything more terrifying to those in a position of power than men and women of intelligence with a cue ball in their hands and who know how to use it? I do not think so.

So much for the State.

Why, then, is it worth becoming a Ph.D. who can win a bar fight? Because it makes us “unhindered” as Epictetus would say. Free. We can be killed, yes. Broken, no.

So why not read Homer and roll Jiu Jitsu, study Epictetus and say No? Why not bear a ballroom etiquette with limbs primed for back alley brawling? Why not calmly absorb a nuanced argument with a mind rearing to rip it to shreds? Why not understand the chain of command and yet follow the right course of action? Why not test intellectual beliefs with anthropological truths? Why not mix a bit of sober sanity with bright-eyed madness? Why not plan for the future while living in the moment? Why not pledge devotion to a cause while willing to crawl and roll and rage in the mud for all that is green and good on earth?

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What then? is a passion project.

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1. Knox, Bernard. Essays Ancient and Modern. W.W. Norton & Company, 1990. For this and all references to Bernard Knox’s stories unless otherwise noted.

2. Irwin, Will. The Jedburghs: The Secret History of the Allied Special Forces, France 1944. St. Martin's Press, 2019.

3. Excellent article from the OSS Society. https://osssociety.org/pdfs/YISO2010.pdf