Martial Education is at an All Time Low

In many ways, this video, this topic, is what compelled me to start my YouTube channel to begin with. I think you watching would be within your rights to challenge the title of this video, though. In fact, I think my position is kind of contrarian. In many ways, I've seen more rhetoric around online that we're living through a golden age of martial arts than anything else. From certain angles, I might even agree with that sentiment. Health science seems like it is constantly finding new peaks. Martial arts as a sport are now more successful than ever before, and information, thanks to the internet, is now more accessible. Despite these seeming wins, there is plenty of evidence to the contrary, however. For example, even though our understanding of health science is at an all-time high, our application of it, at least in America, seems to be at an all-time low. Indeed, martial arts competition seems to be booming, but how many athletes actually get to make a career out of it while risking their quality of life in their later years? Very, very few. And, more anecdotally, I've seen and even had posts on my own channel from people who very authoritatively try to write about history or philosophy or techniques within a given system that they presumably practice, yet still manage so demonstrably to get things incorrect. Increased access to information is useless to a population that has an inability to organize and parse through it critically. Now, some of what I just mentioned has very little to do with martial arts directly. For the woes of physical education, I would direct you to this video, which I'll link below, by the Physical Culture Historians channel. The video, and the channel more as a whole, make some fairly convincing arguments as to why 19th century physical education was better for societies as a whole. I could also very easily go on a related tangent about how much of modern education isn't really about teaching trades or the fine art of thought, but about instilling obedience in students. It really is no mystery to me why so many martial artists believe their teachers without any doubt or critical thought on their own. It is what they've been conditioned to do, and despite how harsh I'm probably going to be in this video, I don't blame people for that. Again, that's what they've been taught. Meanwhile, I've seen plenty of credible voices online and in person that express dismay that modern martial arts are now watered-down shadows of themselves. Nor is this in reference strictly to stagnant traditional martial arts that refuse to change, but even fairly modern systems like Muay Thai and BJJ. A note about Muay Thai, natively, there is a period called the Golden Age in Thailand, and we are not living in it anymore. I cannot recommend enough Sylvie Van Douglas Ito's Muay Thai channel for more on that. I am not in the Muay Thai sphere, nor do I want to put words in her mouth here, but she has a comically enormous fight record and speaks semi-regularly about how the art of Muay Thai has changed. Perhaps not for the better. Obviously, I am just scratching the surface, though. We could talk about the effects of point sparring in karate, or judo's questionable marriage to top-down bureaucracy, and so, so many more martial arts on a more global scale. In short, it seems like the summit of martial arts is doing alright at the moment, but outside of that space, which is enjoyed by a very small minority of people, most everywhere else is kind of on hard times. The question I struggled with for a very long time was why. This degradation seems to have been apparent to people in these spaces for a very long while, yet, even equipped with the knowledge that these things were getting bad, it seems like little has been done to reverse the tide. How is such a failure possible? How has it come to this? There are two related dimensions to this answer, I think. First, people have just been trying to train harder in response to the problem of degradation. While training hard is all well and good, I do believe it misses the point. What I'm about to say is probably going to come across as a bit harsh, but I mean it constructively. The popular martial arts community is remarkably undereducated. And I don't mean dumb, that's something different, I mean the community broadly wastes its time and is concerned with vapid, stupid, tired, useless ----. For example, and this is a true pet peeve of mine, style versus style debates. Keep in mind, I think style versus style contests, and even friendly exchanges and interactions, are good and healthy. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about the never-ending arguments about what is best, or which style has ownership over a given technique. I have seen an almost offensive amount of stupidity in this particular area of broader martial arts discussion. First of all, I've never really actually witnessed one of these interactions resolve in a way where all parties involved have been amicably and wholly convinced that one style was actually better. Second, the sheer scope of mental gymnastics at play in these debates makes my faith in humanity wane a little bit. A classic example is that karate doesn't have hook punches, that's boxing. I could probably make a whole video untangling that garbage. Which karate style are you referring to? Does that mean the straight shots in boxing are karate then? What gives boxing ownership over a hook and not some other art? And I could go on and on. The people making these kinds of statements clearly haven't actually fired off a single synapse to construct their views. This is, of course, just the tip of the iceberg. I could probably make yet another whole video about people moving goalposts for certain martial arts too. If it's an unpopular style, people will be bending over backwards forever to make sure that style never gets any W's in the public discourse. Just as an example, people like to talk about the importance of martial functionality, but will absolutely start complaining about how something doesn't aesthetically look like a certain art when it conveniences their argument. Aesthetics should not matter in discussions where functionality has been given precedence. To do otherwise is to be hypocritical, yet people seem either conveniently or stupidly ignorant of this. Some of these kinds of people know exactly what they're doing, to be clear. These are people who care less about rational, constructive interactions and much more about how their preferred style, their tribe, is publicly perceived. More on that in a second. But I feel that many of these people just don't even realize. They've never been taught to realize. And this is what I mean by martial arts education. People need to understand what makes a style a first place. How do styles grow, change, and die? People need to understand that, actually, aesthetics do matter. Again, more on that in a minute. They need to learn that change in martial arts is slow and tragically political. They need to understand the history of a style because it is only through the context afforded us by history that we can ask why a technique is the way it is. Why a style is the way it is. Yet these things are rarely taught. People need to understand, on a socio-historical and cultural level, where and when the concept of self-defense and martial arts even came to be so closely linked. Trust me, it didn't happen overnight, nor was it accidental. I've been to very few gyms and dojos with a collection of books, or which have a dedicated class for these kinds of things. I've met very few martial artists who ask these kinds of questions. My sense is that modern martial arts are scrubbed clean of all of this. In previous videos, I have noted that I conceptualize my own training as a form of physical culture, and I have been very critical of the popular notion that martial arts are somehow solely for fighting. Yet I see more and more gyms disjointing culture from their practice. Sometimes it is completely sidelined. Other times, it's replaced with a kind of cultish, fan-fictional culture and history. I find both to be incredibly unhealthy. Whether you're in a philosophy class or a carpentry course, you will learn about where those crafts have been and why. In martial arts, you rarely get any of that vital context. Which smoothly brings us to the second dimension I mentioned earlier. Martial arts are a product. To be clear, they've always been a product to a certain extent. I've posted about it before but I cannot recommend enough Kung Fu T's article, Fighting Styles or Martial Brands, which succinctly covers the commercialization of martial arts through the lens of Chinese styles. Again, link in the description. The difference is that now, I've noticed, martial arts aren't just a product. They are principally a product. It isn't enough to make even or a humble living off them. They are now designed, first and foremost, to be marketed, sold, and profited upon, even if teachers aren't completely consciously aware of it. The results of this product-oriented approach are innumerable. Curriculums get more basic but stretched out. There is an emphasis on seminars and competitions and traveling and rashguard fashion and membership plans. Aesthetics are, now, more important than ever before because the way a style looks is important. Being recognizable is advertising. We're going to cut out all that tradition and history and context because we're going to condition people into believing that the sole purpose of martial arts is fighting and then we're going to sell them those skills, or at least make them believe that's what they're being sold. There is no time for nerd ---- in this formula. We need to simplify our business model so it can be mass-produced. And then, best of all, we are going to get people to believe that our style is the best style, so they'll go online and debate on our behalf. Free advertising. No pay included. Of course, this can be used to explain an awful lot. Judo's constant courting of the Olympic Committee and the many controversial rule changes it has made as a result have nothing to do, I'm sure, with money. And, sure, McDojos fall into this whole formulation as well. They've simply identified that people want a community or the perception that they are gaining martial prowess quickly, and so they sell them exactly that. Now, to begin to wrap this up, I want to say that I have always firmly believed that people should be able to make a living in the martial arts space. What we do is a skill, and just like any other complex skill, it takes years and years of investment to get any good at. What I am criticizing in this video is chasing martial arts as a product in excess. My genuine feeling is that it keeps people very uneducated about their training, and frankly, I think it means that while there are more martial artists running around today than 200 years ago, I suspect the average martial artist is actually a lot worse at their chosen discipline today than our predecessors. Consider that mass training students and standardization of curriculums was not a thing until about 100 years ago, give or take. There is a reason the best martial artists in the world today have personal coaches. It's because martial arts training is best delivered on a very personal, very individual level. Standardization is fine when people truly know nothing, but the second they become intermediate, I genuinely believe they need more attention from an instructor. This is nigh impossible to do if you have a gazillion people on the mats. Even competition, though, is somewhat a victim of all this. It's all pyrotechnics and beefing on social media between competitors to sell a product to an audience that largely doesn't understand what they're looking at. They only think they do. Across all levels, from physical to intellectual to cultural, I am not happy with the modern paradigm in martial arts today. To me, the degradation is actually clear as day. People, no less, are growing slower and chasing fleeting dopamine highs in a market that conditions them to do these things in the interest of money. And again, I stress, martial arts need to have some money in them to keep the space healthy. Gyms do not run for free. The electricity and water and mats have to come from somewhere. But a balance must be struck because there are a lot of people out there today who don't know the first thing about what they are training, why it's trained the way it is, or how it might grow or fall apart, or the best way for them to personally grow and learn. We need to try and get back to a time when physical fitness and cultural education in these systems took precedence over sales. Few things depress me quite as much as the state of popular internet conversation on martial arts. Yes, sure, it's the internet. But I'm in other communities on the internet, too, and I cannot think of another one that is as consistently incorrect and at its own throat as this one is. I don't have any grand solutions, but I think asking better questions of our training and our teachers, and having a bias towards constructive outcomes is a fantastic start. Styles are not teams or tribes. We can share, exchange, uplift, and just generally play nice in the sandbox even if we aren't always going to agree. Because when we divide ourselves and fight over petty things that really don't matter, it's just kind of making money for the people quietly sitting in the back, who really profit off of all of the interactions that we negatively contribute to. These kinds of encounters really don't enhance our martial practice or our study. We need less bureaucracy, less politics, less marketing, and less petty tribalism. We will never eliminate those things completely. They are, in some degree, a necessary evil. But we can certainly aim to strike a healthier balance. Anyway, that is all from me for today. Thank you all so much for watching and listening, and I will catch you all in the next one. Peace.