State of the Martial Arts

State of the Martial Arts

Transforming Martial Arts for Tomorrow’s Challenges

 

Changing Training

In dojos and training halls across the globe, Martial Arts practitioners perfect techniques honed over many centuries. Yet beyond these walls, the world races forward at a dizzying pace, presenting challenges our Ancestors could never have imagined. As a lifelong student and career Martial Arts teacher, I’ve observed a growing disconnect between what we practice and what we must prepare for. This gap isn’t just a challenge to our Arts’ relevance – it’s an opportune opportunity to reshape them into something more completely comprehensive, more critical, & ultimately more valuable to the whole of humanity.

My starting belief is that the Martial Arts can improve the world. The world is changing. Must Marital Arts change? I expect so. And in any case, it IS changing. The question then, is “will we change it consciously and conscientiously or simply try to ride a wave of change and hope it leads to something beneficial? I say we apply ourselves to the task. I say, we see the hard thing on the frontier, and we do the hard thing. We steer our fate rather than fear our fate.
We must devote ourselves to the necessary and difficult task of designing, building, testing, and deploying newly developed methodologies, and curricula to address identified needs of the World.

In short, the world has changed. We need to change our Arts to conform to and effectively address today’s risks and challenges and threats. This is at the risk of our long history of arts development becoming stale, ineffective, perhaps deleterious to mankind, and ultimately lost. And that is simply the risk to our beloved Martial Arts. The risk to the world, if we believe these arts to be doubtlessly and deeply helpful to humankind, is far, far greater.

As a Teacher, I am accustomed to looking for work. I ask myself, “What can be improved?” Where can I help?” As such, I don’t tend to look to offer congratulations or praise; although it certainly exists. As such, my state of the Martial Arts is going to strike many as rather pessimistic. This isn’t to say that there aren’t things that are praiseworthy. It is to say, however, that I am simply not the Praiser in Chief.

This essay does not represent my intention to provide a map for the Martial Arts going forward. This essay intends simply to outline what elements are vital to any map of the Martial Arts for a healthy, mature, productive, and evolved future. A map a plan a strategy that is vital for humanity, vital for individual Martial Artist, and vital for the Martial Arts as a whole.

A Balance of Talents

In the contemporary Martial Arts landscape, I see a concerning lack of balance between cooperative, competitive, and combative training methods.
We need to work to develop practices, exercises, & tests for ensuring that a balanced offering of these varied and necessary (and necessary to vary) methods of skill development is made.
This endeavor must be conducted with unwavering commitment to the safety and well-being of our student population and the broader community.

 

Critical Thinking

Critical thinking is severely lacking. The typical thinking of our day is not critical thinking. Our edge as a species has always been our minds.
More and more, we seem content to (if not actually addicted to) sludgifying our minds. Thus, we abdicate our intellectual perch.
An example I see is the role of the magical, mystical, and fantasy-think dominating martial culture. See below.
We need to use critical thinking to examine older paradigms, practices, traditions, and measures of a Martial Art’s function and effectiveness.
This will equip us for the present and set us on a course to meet the new demands and challenges of a chaotic and complex future.
Actual critical thinking will reveal that critical thinking itself will be insufficient to the task. The will to act and will to persevere and will to re-think must exist. Willpower is powerful but perishable.

 

Fantasy Role-Playing Shame

A root error I observe in most every Martial Arts teaching environment is the pursuit of fantasy functions of the Art being studied. Fantasy has a role to play – inspiration, engagement, familiarity, fun. That’s all well and good. However, and I’m sorry to be the wet towel here, what constitutes inspiration to pursue an Art rarely maps well to real-life risks and threats.
What is “Research informed” is not prioritized in our training. What we want to believe (or come to the mat already believing) is prioritized and goes unchallenged in our training halls and in our minds.
The trouble is this: we want so much to believe and to feel and to belong that we accept flimsy arguments made by those promoting arts unable to support, with evidence, their purported effects/benefits.
This is Magical and Mythical thinking. This is wasteful at best and dangerous at worst.The

 

Martial Arts have remained Partial Arts

For far too long the study of Martial Arts has been built, for far too many, upon the idea that one man will confront me one day in one dark alley and throw one punch at my face. Then I do super-cool stuff to them. One might have expected, or wished, that by now (Martial Arts have a looooong history in the human society.) every Martial Arts curriculum would include far, far, far, far more than simply: “Here is how we deal with a roundhouse kick. Here is how we swing a sword.” A few topics I’ve plucked randomly from my list of over 50 areas of study: firearms, Stop the Bleed, recovery positions, trauma healing, bias, wildlife, less-than-lethal weapons, surveillance systems, crisis communication, emotional resilience, legal, etc…

See my Modern Polymath, Martial Artist, and the Renaissance teaching in a related article coming up on my Substack: ShhDragon.Substack.com

 

May the Ego a Wéi

Social media strengthens the ego which deteriorates Wúwéi. The Dàoist ideal of Wúwéi urges us to keep in mind the flow of things outside of ourselves and our wishes before embarking on a journey toward satisfying our wants. The want is registered and examined in balance with the wants of a wider world. This before actions are taken…actions intended to result in little friction, suffering, and loss.

 

A Local Currency Emergency

Less walls between styles and stylists due to internet and global connectivity.
Both people and Information are easier to access…without travel and often without cost.
You can find, befriend as well as compare notes and study with folks from different Arts.
More online availability leads to online tribes and marketplaces.
These marketplaces have a simple currency:
Ego.
One result of this Ego Currency is that the online worlds tend to showcase cool results/effects.
Rather than emphasize hard work, patience, time, and the ever necessary-to-our growth and mastery – experiences of failure.
This Ego Currency and Fruit Focus feeds/fuels a desire to value and enjoy the goal rather than devote oneself to marrying the process. The roots and shoots need nurturing and valuing, not the fruits. Fruits follow roots and shoots.

Thus, the ego tends to argue for (and get) hacks, shortcuts, and not-at-all long-lasting or particularly deep ties with a base Art/Teacher/Style/School.

 

Generalists are Special

I see fewer and fewer generalists, and more and more specialists. And many of the generalists I see are unhappy with their choice, seeing the generalist as less-than rather than necessary and entirely sufficient.
Over the years, I’ve noted far more students becoming or driven to become a specialist…before becoming a quality generalist. Being a specialist is fine and necessary. We all benefit form specialists at one point or another, perhaps even regularly.
However, I do see this urge to be a specialist as an outgrowth of the ego.
In a world in which we can readily project an image of ourselves (an image that may not be quite authentic – see: social media) and where the consumption of illusory images of individuals is worryingly prevalent, the competent generalist goes undervalued. An excellent specialist is built upon the foundation of a generalist. In academia, we learn math, art, science, language, and physical fitness long before we specialize and pursue a doctorate.

 

Without Valuing we Shall Lose

We need to develop methods for students in coming generations to develop healthy values. What gets valued today is often at odds with what is worthwhile and worthy.

 

I haven’t cracked this code. Sorry. I see more clearly than ever that we Martial Arts Teachers can pass on our Art, our stories, our histories. However, without value being attached by students, what we pass on gets passed over. How do we (or even can we) instill values in others? So far, all I have come up with is mentioning and modeling values. Is this enough? I do not know. I do know that a value given to a lesson is the life-giving oxygen, sunlight, and water that a lesson needs to live and live on into perpetuity.

 

The Future hasn't Passed

The Martial Arts world and the wider world stand at a crossroads. As our world undergoes unprecedented transformation, we Martial Artists face a crucial choice: consciously evolve our ancient practices or watch them slowly fade into irrelevance. The familiar narrative of the lone attacker in a dark alley no longer serves us in our era of complex threats, digital warfare, & shifting social dynamics. The time has come to ask ourselves not whether Martial Arts can improve the world – they can! – but whether we have the courage and can muster the commitment to transform these Arts into what the world truly needs.

The path forward promises to be neither especially easy nor comfortable, but then again, Martial Arts have never been about comfort. They’ve always been about competently and confidently facing the world’s myriad challenges with clarity, purpose, & unwavering spirit. Today, our challenge isn’t just to preserve our Arts, but to transform them thoughtfully and deliberately into something even more valuable for every future generation to follow. This challenge requires us to embrace critical thinking while honoring tradition, to relentlessly balance ego with humility, and to expand our sense and definition of what Martial Arts can and should be. The world needs what Martial Arts can offer – not just as they were, but as they might yet become. The choice lies before us: we can have the coming wave of change crash over us, we can try to surf it as long as it or we can last, or we can work to shape and direct it. As Martial Artists, we’ve always been taught to meet challenges head-on. Let’s apply that same courage and determination to the crucial expansion and evolution of our beloved Arts. The work begins now, with each of us, in every dojo, every country, every class, and every practice session. Our legacy will be measured not by how well we preserved the past, but by how wisely we built for the future.

 

Bio

The author, Stephen Watson, will be offering many introductory sessions this year through his studio, Someday Farm. Most will be available via Zoom and archived on Patreon.com/SomedayFarm. Introductions to Stretching, Breathing, & Meditation are in the works. Find out more and enroll by following the links here: https://linktr.ee/SomedayFarm

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