Martial Arts are for Fighting, Right?

Probably one of the most common pieces of criticism I get on this channel is something like this one, and if this is you, I'm really sorry. I'm not picking on you, I swear. It just really encapsulates all the variations of this sort of commentary that I get very well. If you're only listening to this video, the argument goes something like this. Martial arts were originally for fighting. Martial means warlike, after all, and it's right there in the name. All the spiritual and self-development stuff came later, predominantly from Asia. Thereby, the notion that I frequently express on this channel, that martial arts are multifaceted, is flawed, or even possibly outright wrong. Martial arts are for fighting, period. In this video, I'm going to go through, in painfully autistic detail, why this is a pretty simplistic take. But just to be clear, I want to point out that my position has never been that martial arts are not for fighting. My position has been that fighting is just one of a plethora of long-standing, equally legitimate reasons to engage with martial arts. In fact, it's probably worth reminding my audience that, if preferences in martial arts are on a spectrum, I definitely lean towards martial viability being important. I just recently opted not to join a dojo that was well-priced and within walking distance of my home, mostly because I felt it was martially inadequate for my goals. Before going any further into this, though, I want to tackle two common themes in this type of commentary that I get. One is actually right here in our earlier example. That is an appeal to tradition, which is a logical fallacy that occurs when someone claims that, because something is traditional, because it came first, it is therefore good and or true. Now, ironically, this is often the same logical trap that traditional martial artists fall into with the whole it-came-from-the-battlefield argument, which I'll address probably for the fifth or sixth time on this channel in a minute here. The major problem with this fallacy, though, is that the age of an idea does not dictate its value. The earth being flat or round are both remarkably old concepts, and one of them is significantly more useful than the other. And in case you're worried, I do mean round earth. Likewise, our understanding of things like DNA sequences are very, very new and are obviously pretty useful, too. So, in the context of martial arts, saying these systems were supposedly used for fighting before they were recontextualized in, say, Japan, for example, to be about personal development is an idea that doesn't really have any bearing. The premise that martial arts as a fighting systems predates martial arts as tools for self-improvement does not delegitimize the latter just on the basis of the former's age. The second argument that I frequently get, although it is not being employed in our example, is basically a might-makes-right position. I often hear things like, well, MMA could beat up those wushu dancer guys, or judo is bad because it's reliant on the gi, and they'd get their butt kicked by a wrestler or MMA guy. I'm pulling these examples out of thin air, but this is an example of a fallacy called false equivalency, or more commonly known as comparing apples to oranges. Something a lot of martial artists, or martial arts enthusiasts, online seem to believe is that everything is on this slippery slope pipeline to MMA or something, and it originates right back to this idea that martial arts are for fighting, supposedly. As someone who practices judo myself, I assure you that I could not care less about MMA or the limitations of the gi. When people use this kind of rhetoric, they just talk right past people who literally do not care about their subjective stance on fighting, or realism, or whatever else. Could they beat me up, or someone else up? Very possibly, but that has very little to do with my training goals. I'm not an MMA competitor. I don't know why I'm hypothetically facing one down. I do judo. My opponent will be wearing a gi, and I know self-defense and all that, but we will get to that. Just relax, be patient, sip on some tea or something. For me, though, what matters is that a martial art is functional within its specific context, and I am going to come back to that idea, too, towards the end of the video. Nor do I want to get into this philosophical quagmire that is debating the premise of might makes right. I would never deny that power, violence, and threats are very real tools in both interpersonal and even something as grand as geopolitical relationships. But, and I'll just leave it at this, the early Americans won the various conflicts over the Native Americans. Those ancestors of mine were indeed mighty, but were they right? Were they righteous? Were they even logistically correct or had the wisdom of foresight? I won't browbeat you with this, but I think you get my point. All right, with our groundwork laid, let's hop into the meat and potatoes here. Let's start with the idea that martial arts first existed for fighting. Before even tackling this, though, I want to go way, way back. In many scientific articles, just like the one I'm showing on the screen, it has been established that chimps wrestle, grapple, and spar their young as a form of socialization. Now, this isn't to say that martial prowess isn't used for violence among chimps. You can see the very infamous Gombe Wars as documented by Jane Goodall for that special kind of horror. The point I'm making here is that, as chimps are such close relatives of humans, we can infer that, right out of the gate, martial behavior was multifaceted in its applications. Yes, it could be used to defend the group or establish oneself on the hierarchy, but mock fights were also principally used to socialize the young, or even as play between individuals of similar status. Already, the premise that martial prowess is for fighting is getting a little fuzzy here, and this is before even they've been formalized into arts. The ability was indeed tapped for use in violence, don't get me wrong, but it was also a form of playful, useful communication. Moving into actual human history, though, I now have to turn my attention to something that I would consider to be a kind of arch-rival of this channel, and that is the notion that martial arts came from the battlefield. Yes, I am doing this again for my long-term subscribers. I'm sure you're exhausted. I'm doing this because our original example brings up war, but also because the martial arts community is painfully addicted to this idea. Before diving into sources, I need to set a few parameters. First, I'm primarily talking about unarmed combat here, i.e. grappling and pugilism. Weapons obviously had their place in war, and while I think there is a clear delineation between weapons training for dueling and weapons training for battlefield tactics, I won't be going too deep into that in this video. I will leave that for people whose main focus is weapons. I will, however, briefly mention some weapons martial arts as they pertain to duels, just to illustrate a point later. Second, I'm not saying martial arts on the battlefield never, ever, ever happened. I'm saying it was and is exceedingly rare. So rare that we struggle to find sources, as I'll soon be going over. Third, I'm going on a bit of a whiplash tour here through global history. It is possible that there are niche outliers where grappling on the battlefield was more of a thing, for example. But the evidence, overwhelmingly, points in the opposite direction. Alright, on to sources. First, let's look at Celsus's De Medicina. Apologies for pronunciation. This is not my area. Written around 47 AD. In this work, Celsus has a section which is basically a treatise on how to deal with battlefield wounds. Overwhelmingly, he writes about projectiles, blade punctures, and lacerations. There is zero evidence here that soldiers were being injured by falls, or punches, or getting choked out. Not a word is so much as brought up about such concerns. While drawing a correlation between text amount and commonness of injuries is a bit of a dubious practice, I personally feel like Celsus was mostly concerned with missile injuries. Oh, by the way, you can go read this for yourself online. I'm going to be posting as many of these sources in this video that are freely available in the description for you to browse. When they aren't available, I will post a link when possible, but I'll at least be name-dropping them in my script. Anyway, back on topic. The reason I'm bringing this up is because if projectiles were the main concern here, the idea of grappling or striking with your fist seems ludicrous. Moving over to Japan now, I'd suggest finding a copy of Dr. Carl Friday's Off the Warpath, Military Science and Budo in the Evolution of Ryuha Buge. I've brought this piece up before on the channel, and it's also in my reading list video. The basic summary is that scholars looked through a bunch of casualty reports from the 1180 to 1185 Gimpe Wars and found that 72% to 87% of all injuries were from arrows. The sword was never a key battlefield tool in all of Japanese history well into the Sengoku period. Some three centuries later, after the Gimpe War, in which projectiles and pikes were the principal weapons. Moreover, the classical martial arts schools beginning to pop up between these eras never accounted for more than a minute percentage of warriors on the battlefield. Especially towards the end of the Sengoku period, when battles sometimes consisted of thousands of soldiers, there is simply no way for martial arts schools to be producing men at such a scale. Nor were soldiers coming off the battlefield to give their skills to these schools. We don't see such grand population booms in them. What we find is that martial arts training was a relatively specialized activity. Dr. Friday equates it to Olympic shooting in comparison to battlefield marksmanship. Perhaps there is some overlap, but their existences are clearly separate. Meanwhile, in Europe, there was a curious case of tactical convergent evolution happening alongside the Japanese. From the late 1500s to the mid 1600s, Europe's favorite tactic was the pike and shot formation. The formation was based around the premise of tightly organized pikemen supported by looser formations of firearm units. I'm bringing this up because, again, we see an obstacle to using unarmed combat. These formations were reliant upon actually staying in formation. That was their strength. There was simply no room for imprudent heroics. While I wouldn't disaccount the possibility of close quarters combat in the event of a rout, for example, soldiers would typically still have better options than to just grapple with their bare hands. If we hop on over to China now, we can take a look at the essentials of the fist. In this primary document, the author, Qi Jigong, is writing in 1560 and notes the following, quote, Boxing arts do not seem to be useful skills for the battlefield, but they exercise the hands and feet and accustom the limbs and body to hard work. Thus, they serve as basic training. In what is basically the very first line of this chapter, he very forthrightly points out the disconnect between the martial arts and battlefield pragmatism. Like Qi, we can mostly ascertain that grappling and pugilism were probably used this way across cultures when it comes to military application. Roman and Greek soldiers, too, for example, would wrestle for physical fitness and possibly to train discipline under duress. But we shouldn't mistake this to mean that they were hitting the battlefield ready to throw their enemies. Before we leave China behind, I do want to point out that the Shang era in China, which took place in 1600 BC to 1046 BC, also favored spears and archers as their principal weaponry, even at this very, very early era. So just in case if you were wondering how far back this goes, very, very far back. I think you're getting the gist here, but I do want to give just two more slightly more modern examples. In the Civil War, the American Civil War, that is, the overwhelming majority of injuries were caused by missile weaponry. In fact, we have accounts of soldiers complaining about fixing their bayonets before battle because they were so certain they would not be using them. Occasionally, close quarters conflicts happened, but we are still talking like sub 1% of the time. And even then, grappling or striking would be a distant second to just impaling someone. Finally, I want to give a little nod to modern military combative programs. While modern militaries around the world do have training in unarmed martial arts, the reality is that they rarely use them on the battlefield. I have far fewer sources for this, but I am lucky to have access to many veterans in my life, and all of them universally told me that if it came down to that, if it came down to unarmed combat, something has gone horrifically wrong. As supporting evidence, just a cursory stroll around the internet reveals that combatives are, at best, an annual thing, if even that. If it were really such a big deal, if it really were such a common occurrence, more training time would be devoted to it. Now, I know that someone is probably going to put in the comments, because they always do, that their teacher says this, or that there's this document that says this, and I can't go through and disprove all of these things, obviously. I'm giving you sources here, I'm giving you the scholarly work. If you do have a source that you are very confident in, feel free to put it down there, but the ones I have looked at from recommendations on this channel thus far have been mostly unreliable. And what I mean by that is the people writing them are biased, or they're writing about something that happened 400 years ago. These are not great sources, and I shouldn't need to say it, but as much respect as I have for my teachers, teachers in martial arts are typically not historians. But wait, you may say, what about single combat? That time-honored tradition where grappling might have come into play. Well, from the Japanese perspective, the idea of single combat has been debunked for a very long time in academia. The premise mostly arose out of pre-World War II scholarship, and the regime at the time really didn't want scholars questioning glorious Japanese heritage. Therefore, a lot of epics, like the Tale of Heike, were taken as literal histories. The problem, of course, is that the Tale of Heike is a retelling of a historical event compiled to be delivered orally with the goal of entertaining an audience. In short, single combat in Japanese history, at least on the battlefield, exists mostly because it sounds pretty cool. Duels did definitely happen later on, but more on them later. Outside of Japan, you run into a similar phenomenon though. The single combat in Homer's works, for example, are almost certainly historical fiction. I'm not saying that single combat never ever happened, but just at a glance, a lot of reports of it happening are passed down in mythology or by unreliable narrators. If single combat was happening on the battlefields, it wasn't happening enough to justify the institution of martial arts specifically to prepare for it. Look, I'm sure this won't be the last time I hear the whole martial arts came from the battlefield argument, but this is definitely the deepest I've cut at it when it comes to refuting the idea. Unfortunately, this is like one of the Internet's favorite playthings when it comes to martial arts. No matter how many sources you throw at people, it just doesn't die. I know my selections here were a bit eclectic, but I don't think it is difficult to take the principles from them and apply them elsewhere. I don't feel, for example, that I need to dig up sources on why the Mongol hordes weren't grappling their enemies because a lot of the same challenges to that thesis exist in my examples and definitely apply to the Mongols just as much. I do want to finish this section with a little caveat that if new scholarship comes out, if we get new sources, there's new forensic archaeology, I will gladly walk this back and we can reinstate this piece of mythology as martial arts canon, but I haven't seen that research. And again, there might be outlier cultures and instances like that where there was grappling and things of that nature on the battlefield, but I am not aware of those instances as of writing this script. Feel free to let me know down in the comments. I'm sure you will. Anyway, because this always fires people up. I'm just saying that this is not dogmatic for me. This is just the scholarship that I've read. I will happily walk all this back if it gets refuted in some scholarship. But for now, I really don't think unarmed martial arts came from the battlefield. But let's refocus on the bigger picture here. So far we have established that martial prowess in prehistory was likely as much about in-group communication and socialization of the young as it was violence. We've also now established that martial arts, particularly unarmed martial arts, do not come from the battlefield and have very little to do with war. Their existence was perhaps battlefield adjacent in some respects, specifically in terms of training troops to be tough and strong, but on the battlefield itself, it was a really distant fourth or fifth concern, martially speaking. Let's take a quick detour away from violence for a second, though. Another theme with martial arts in civilizations is that as soon as it appears, it almost immediately is ritualized. The act of warfare itself was, for the Aztecs, a matter of religion. For the Japanese, sumo might have been a harvest ritual, or at least a component of one. For the Greeks, the Olympics were a grand ritual put on for Zeus. For the ancient Chinese, martial dances were a core piece of culture. You can read more about those in Possible Origins, A Cultural History of Chinese Martial Arts, Theater, and Religion by Scott Park Phillips. I don't want to go too far into the weeds here, but I hope you're starting to see the different dimensions at play. The original comment I showed in this video depicted spirituality in martial arts as something that came much later, predominantly out of Asia, but this isn't really the case. Spirituality and martial arts have always been a thing, pretty much right out of the gate. Also on this detour, I want to give a brief nod to theater, which, again, you can read about in the volume by Phillips. Martial theater was a huge part of Chinese culture, and other cultures too, but I'm gonna focus on China. And that old seed there eventually produced people like Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan. While these men are actors, we still call them martial artists, which also hints at three other components to martial arts. Culture, which I'll touch on later, entertainment, and economics. People might compete to entertain others, or people might engage with martial arts to be entertained. Likewise, martial arts have been an industry for a very, very long time, irrespective of geography, and seen as a trade for people to make a living off of and support their families. All right. Well, what about philosophy, though? Although the intermingling of things like Taoism and martial arts is mostly attributed to China, the reality is that philosophy had a role in Western martial traditions, too. Aristotle, for example, taught that there must be a balance between intellectual, spiritual, and physical practices to live a fulfilling life. And, in fact, many philosophers saw wrestling as related to their own profession, being the physical manifestation of struggle, whereas philosophy was an intellectual struggle. None of this would be all that foreign to later Japanese martial artists in the Meiji period, who were beginning to see martial arts as a vehicle to self-perfection. Very similarly, placing huge emphasis on intellectual and physical education. Well, let's slow down just a little bit so I can give another summary, because we've actually covered a whole lot in a very short period of time. I pointed out some common fallacies in the arguments people make at the beginning of this video. Then, we clarified that martial arts really never came from the battlefield or had all that much to do with war directly, at least not consistently. But we have established that martial arts, pretty much right from their inception, have been social, spiritual, communicative, philosophical, economic, entertaining, and related to fitness. And, again, I want to stress that these were not late developments, nor were they solely Asian developments. These are pretty much human universals, many of which manifested before Christ. At this point, I feel like I've thoroughly debunked the whole martial arts are for fighting and all the other stuff came later part of the argument, but I'm not done yet. The next funny little thing about martial arts that very few people want to acknowledge, seemingly, is that as soon as they arrive on the scene, they are sport. In the epic of Gilgamesh, the titular main character wrestles Enkidu, and while this kind of is a street fight, it is clear that there are rules that would have been understood by contemporary listeners. Namely, the lack of strikes and a throw that decided the match. Sumo, another example, had organized tournaments and sponsors right from its very beginnings. I shouldn't even need to qualify the ancient Olympics here. At this point, I want to look at some of the tricky language at play in this whole thing. I think people use the word fight and fighting a little bit too liberally these days. I've heard BJJ and Judo people call what they do a fight, for example, and again, as a Judo guy myself, I think this is a little silly. I've gotten into debates with people about this before, and the reaction is typically something along the lines of, well, he's trying to rip my ankle off in a BJJ tournament, so it's a fight. Except, he's not really doing that, is he? His goal is to get you to submit, not to rip your ankle off. The thing with most grappling arts that differentiates them from striking arts is that the goal isn't actually to hurt the other person. It's to immobilize them or get them to quit. Injuries are just an unfortunate, unintended side effect. Sure, they could hurt you if they wanted, but I could hurt people by driving my car, too, if I were a sociopath. That doesn't make going 70 in a school zone a martial art. Similarly, injuries happen in sports like soccer and basketball, but we don't call those fights. Meanwhile, in striking arts like boxing or MMA, the point is to knock the person out in many ways. When the goal is violence itself, that is a fight, at least to me. So, from a definitional point of view, I've never particularly viewed modern grappling martial arts as being about fighting. They're just a sport. They're a game. Although, don't get me wrong, MMA, Muay Thai, and boxing are all scored and have refs and have rules. While I think these are much more deserving of the moniker of fight, it is important to keep in mind that these are also still games, even if the stakes are higher. I only bring this up because martial sport has an ugly cousin known as blood sport. I'd categorize things like gladiatorial combat, Old West pistol duels, early sumo, and maybe some samurai duels under this banner. Maybe some Chinese leitai duels, too. These are, without a doubt, fights. The goal here is often to maim the other guy, except when it isn't. Again, these are pretty tricky because gladiators were investments and often didn't die or get maimed except in outlier events. To circle back around to something I said earlier, gladiator martial practice was entertainment first and real combat second. Samurai duels are also a bit tricky because, again, not nearly as many of these were as lethal as popularly imagined. Most duels were actually about making a name for oneself and perfecting one's craft, the early seed that would eventually foment into the idea of martial arts' self-improvement in Japan. Outside of personal vendettas, duels were more often than not just about proving oneself, increasing prestige, and maybe picking up some students. That is, they might have been economically incentivized. Chinese leitai duels weren't much the same. Although the accounts we get of those were often gruesome, they fall victim to the unreliable narrator effect. In leitai conflicts, you could also lose by just falling off or being thrown off a raised platform. Certainly not fun, but probably not a death sentence either. My point here is that these were fights, but they still had understood rules, even if they were informal or just culturally understood. These kinds of combat were probably what martial arts were actually preparing practitioners for, but we can't forget that while the stakes were still very high, there was very much a sport component to these engagements. What I'm getting at here is that while there is definitely a spectrum in terms of stakes and risk in martial arts, they are all gamified to some degree. Even the ones where death is a potential outcome. Another thing that would have definitely been on the minds of some historical practitioners would have been self-defense, of course. In Japan, for example, after the Warring States period wrapped, there were suddenly a lot of masterless samurai with a pretty limited skill set, but they quickly found that violence designed for a street setting was a marketable commodity. In 1615, the government produced a piece of legislation known as the Bukkei Shohato. Within, it outlined six state-recognized martial traditions. Swordsmanship, gunnery, jiu-jitsu, spearmanship, horse riding, and archery. Furthermore, expected samurai houses to be versed in these skills both in case of war and to just kind of keep them preoccupied and not revolting, basically. Either way, a whole lot of martial arts teaching positions were opened up this way. Suddenly, prolific martial artists could get noblemen's sponsorship while running schools on the side. This was the basic model for making money at the time, and for those samurai who failed to find a legitimate work, banditry was a very tempting option number two. I want to take a minute here to describe the general environment in this period because I think it's difficult for modern people to truly conceptualize. This is a period before light pollution, before electronic messaging, before social welfare, before modern medical science, before pervasive policing. The point being that crime rates were much higher and crime itself was a much more sustainable and profitable enterprise. And I know that we have organized crime today, but imagine organized crime with way less policing. Roadside robberies, murder, and bandit gangs were pretty common, all things considered. And while the new government was much better about enforcing law and order, it was still night and day compared to our modern environment. The hard truth was that if you were attacked, you were kind of on your own. We talked today about self-defense as a sort of hypothetical worst-case scenario, but self-defense in the Edo period was a much more daily concern. This is why martial arts were in such demand to begin with. And keep in mind, we know there was plenty of crime in this period simply by the vast number of executions happening. Punishment and Power in the Making of Modern Japan by Daniel Botsman is a good book on this, but I'd also suggest the video recently put out by the YouTube channel Aniki, who does a very digestible overview of crime during this period. Keep in mind that these conditions weren't unique to Japan either. Bodyguard entourages, guards, and everything in between would have been in high demand in times like these across the globe. Maybe I've gotten ahead of myself a bit here. Is self-defense fighting particularly in the modern era? It seems like a lot of people certainly imagine it to be so. I've had a handful of comments on the channel discussing how they go out to bars or parties and sea fights pretty regularly, or they'll say that I'm too dismissive of self-defense situations. I think these kinds of comments start from a point where they assume an attack or mugging has already happened, or that it's inevitable. But the thing with self-defense is that it really is 95% about how you live your life, not about how you react to the uncertainty of violence. In other words, very, very, very little of self-defense is actually about fighting at all. Don't take my word for it though. Let's look at some numbers. Usually I kind of just vaguely point people to research, but I've been articulate in this video so far, so let's keep that up. I'm going to primarily use the United States as my model example here because it's widely seen as a pretty unsafe place, and maybe comparatively, at least it is. But again, let's look at the numbers. Since 1993, robbery has fallen 73%, aggravated assault has fallen 39%, and murder has fallen 34%. We live in the safest time in American history. And this is a trend that has, on average, continued across all categories except robbery, even in 2022, which saw a national decrease ranging from 1% to 6%. Robbery only went up by 1.6% that year, and we can make some estimated guesses that it was probably correlated with the economic strain of the pandemic. The raw odds of you being the victim of an aggravated assault is a whopping 0.0027%. We have seen a spike in gun violence, this much is true, but this has been found to be heavily correlated with concentrated poverty, densely crowded housing, and vacant buildings with higher rates of violent crime. This all demonstrates that crime is trending down with no signs of letting up, that your odds of being a victim are freakishly small, and that the best way to achieve safety appears to be achieving middle income and not living in densely populated places with a high poverty rate, because those are the places where most violent crime disproportionately occurs. On that last point, I want to be clear that I'm not one of these pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps-type guys. I got a master's in a field where five years ago that might have meant something, and now it really doesn't, and I've been working warehouse jobs. I'm not exactly preaching at you from an ivory tower over here. What I'm saying is that if you have to choose between investing your time and resources into grinding two jobs to raise your income or grinding a martial art, it is the former that is going to be far, far more meaningful in terms of self-defense. You can either make a bunch of money, which has utility across your entire life, by the way, or train for years and years so you can react to, and maybe, walk away from an assault that has a 0.0027% chance of happening. Because keep in mind, just because you know martial arts, even if you're good at them, it doesn't necessarily mean you walk away from a street fight. Doesn't mean you win. It doesn't mean you don't still get mugged. Now, there are definitely ways that you can raise your odds of violent encounters, of course. I've had some comments saying that they like to go out and get drunk and party and all this stuff, which is fine. You do you, but if self-defense is such a priority that you're going to spend years and thousands of dollars on a martial art to feel secure, isn't it easier to just not be in places where violence is more likely to occur? Again, most of self-defense is not fighting. It's prevention. It's lifestyle choices. While I'm not trying to pass judgment on people here, these kinds of statements don't really do much to prove the validity of martial arts as self-defense. They just describe a behavior that isn't necessarily conducive to personal safety. Of course, I'm not saying never go to a party or something, but I am saying that if you encounter a crapload of violence on the regular, that says more about you than it does martial arts' role in self-defense. Keep in mind that I am not dismissing martial arts as self-defense, though, as some have accused me of. My position is that if you want to train for self-defense, be aware of things like crime statistics. Make sure your instructor knows the local laws, criminal behaviors, and teaches more strategic responses as opposed to super niche theory-crafting type scenarios. If you haven't caught on, the theme of this video is that training martial arts can be done for a huge variety of reasons that are all equally legitimate. I am not telling you to give up training for self-defense. If you're passionate about it, then go for it. I am telling you to be educated on the realities of self-defense and how those realities ought to be reflected in your training and your understanding. One of those realities is that a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of self-defense is actually fighting. It just is that way. This isn't me telling you. It's just the statistics. This is not me being opinionated. It's there in the numbers. With self-defense out of the way, I do want to give one little final note on culture because many martial arts are really about preservation or perhaps conservation is a more precise term of intangible culture. In many places across the world, martial traditions are very much about engaging with one's heritage first and foremost. There are plenty of systems all over the globe where practitioners would readily tell you that what they do has nothing to do with quote-unquote real fighting. It has everything to do with engaging in their culture. So, are martial arts for fighting? Yes, but they are also for about a dozen other things that are all equally legitimate and sometimes they happen at the same time as fighting unconsciously. Sometimes they happen deliberately at the practitioner's whims, but they're all legitimate. All right. Were martial arts originally for fighting though? This is kind of debatable. It really seems like it's martial, religious, social, and cultural functions all burst onto the scene at the same time. But we can be pretty confident that martial arts had very little to do with war, except maybe for improving a soldier's fitness and martial mentality. When martial arts are about fighting, they are almost always sportified games. To address the last part of the comment I showed way back at the beginning of the video, should we separate all these things into different pieces of terminology? And honestly, with all due respect, I think that's a little juvenile. I don't think it's necessary. It has always struck me as a bit bewildering how uncomfortable people get when things don't fit neatly into their preconceived categories. I think the martial arts having so many expressions is what makes them complex and interesting, frankly. At least in part. Now, sure, if someone is selling you theater arts as a combat sport, then yeah, that's a big problem. Sincerity and education in martial arts are important, but just because something is labeled a martial art does not necessarily mean you should go into it thinking that you are going to learn how to fight. You should ask, you should research, you should double and triple check. I think this hardline martial arts are for fighting period is a very myopic view of things. People get really hung up on that word martial, but totally forget about the word art. They hyper fixate on the word combat and then just seem to ignore the word sport. Finally, this incredibly long video response to a very simple question would not be complete if I did not address why people are so attached to the hardline position that martial arts are strictly for fighting. Personally, I think this comes from a handful of places. The biggest one is that the number one thing people seem to seek out in martial arts is authenticity. People seem to think about this as referring to a kind of objective truth. But the funny thing is that the meaning of authenticity is very subjective, much like art. For some people, yes, that means the techniques that work in sport. That is what is authentic to them. But for others, it might mean being able to draw a line between themselves all the way back to the arts founder. Or an authentic experience might be something as simple as finding a nice community to join. I think the reason fight effectiveness is kind of the standout popular metric, though, is that because it's, well, simple, basically. I'm not trying to insult the martial arts community here, but out of all the hobby groups I'm a part of, I think the martial arts community is probably the most allergic to nuance on average, present company notwithstanding, of course. I think the humble success of our little channel here just demonstrates that there is a hunger for these kinds of nuanced discussions in the niche. I just don't think that demand is really being fulfilled all that frequently. I've lamented it before, but the modern martial arts consumer, on average at least, seems to want to join up at a place, get promoted, be a local champion, and do it all in like six months. To achieve that, they want simple answers. When one fighter wins and one loses, it's simple. Whatever the winner is doing must be better, right? Obviously, no. It's way more complex than that. So many variables factor into why winners win and why losers lose. The martial art, or even techniques, some competitor does in some kind of abstract, isolated vacuum really don't mean a whole lot, which is a fancy way of saying that I really don't think style versus style arguments are all that useful. I think they're kind of overrated, in fact. The other reason, which is easy to forget, is that MMA has been around for 30 years plus now, with marketing in full swing. Most martial artists only train for a couple of years and skew younger in age. The reality is that many martial artists think being an ultimate fighter, in quotes, means an inevitable progression into MMA, and that is by design. The UFC is named that for a reason, and its marketing power was evident right from UFC 1. Something I do want to briefly talk about is how we should judge martial arts, if not by unfettered fighting power. How do we know what is good? How can we identify what is authentic to us, at least outside of asking the people at the place for training? The popular answer is, of course, to compete, test, etc. Which is all fine and good, and I'm very supportive of that. But I usually put my martial practice, at least, through two filters even before all that. First, what do I, or in this case, if you're using my system, you, value most? For me, it's longevity, mobility, martial functionality, and an intellectual challenge. Roughly in that order. Second, and this is important, I only judge an art against its own internal logic and claims. I could not care less that sumo isn't a fighting art because sumo exists to make people good at sumo. I couldn't care less that judo uses the gi and MMA doesn't. I do care when an art says it is martial and then it very clearly is not. I do care when a martial art randomly cuts out a valuable slice of its curriculum for political reasons, looking at you, judo-leg-grab-ban. These are either dishonest or a rejection of the art's own inherent characteristics. It's not a good look. This doesn't mean that arts can't change, of course. I'm a big believer to never write off an art because so many have the long-term potential to evolve. But when I'm choosing a place to train, I judge it against my goals and against itself. I would not go into a martial art and immediately start thinking, Yeah, but how would I defeat a wrestler with this? Unless that art is wrestling because I don't care about fighting wrestlers unless I'm in wrestling. Every art isn't under some obligation to counter every other art. I think that is a very goofy way to frame training. I think that is a very goofy way to approach martial arts. Now, you're welcome to, but I really don't understand it and I don't think there's much of a good argument for doing so. I put this video together to really outline my position and disprove the notion that martial arts are for fighting or that they were first for fighting or whatever else. The reality though is that this is the internet and people are gonna believe whatever the hell they want to. Nor am I saying that if you're interested in being a fighter that you're wrong or something. Of course not. Wanting to fight or compete is totally legitimate and a very good reason to train. But so is training just because you think an art looks cool, completely irrespective of its martial functionality in any number of hypothetical fighting situations. I have a sense that a lot of people will walk away from all of my sources here, all of my points, and hit me with the bulletproof counter-argument that is, Nuh-uh, you're wrong. Which again is fine. This is the internet. I've very much grown to expect that kind of thing. People like their simple answers and their clean categories. Even more so in a niche like martial arts where there is so much tribalism, ego, and a near insatiable hunger to prove one's time investment supposedly as correct, especially as more correct than other people on the internet for some reason. But I will leave you with this piece of hard-gotten wisdom that took me like 20 plus years to finally come around to. If you take nothing away from this video, take this. This ---- that we do, this martial arts thing, is way more fun when you just accept it for what it is. Yes, there are many dumb things in martial arts. Bad rule changes, scam artists, the one dude who smells like he's never washed his gi even once in his life. But at the end of the day, we play games. This is a sentiment I've expressed before on the channel, and it's poignant here, too. Yeah, they are violent games, but they are games nonetheless. We don't make anything. We don't cure anything. We largely do nothing productive for society. You might even say fighting each other is kind of anti-social. Maybe we get a chance, against all odds, to help a person or save ourselves, but most of the time we are going to be competing in games, often for someone else's entertainment. And I'm not saying that that's a bad thing. It just is. I have my impassioned criticisms of all the arts that I practice, but generally I do them because I enjoy them, and that's it. I'm not doing them for anything other than for me. But if you want to do them for fighting, or for culture, or community, or fitness, or fun, or whatever else, you can, and you'd be right to do so. But trying to dictate the legitimacy of someone else's reasons against your own is just silly. I've seen my channel demographics. I know y'all are grown adult men. Train the way that you find fulfilling. You don't owe me, or anyone else, some anonymous crowd on the internet, an explanation, or a justification, for loving the martial art that you love. Be safe, be healthy, be smart, but for the love of all that's good, have fun. Life's too short not to. Alright, that is all I have on this topic. Martial arts can be pretty much about whatever you want them to be about. That's what is so cool about art. It's subjective. Go out, train, and find your own meaning for doing what you do. Martial arts are for a lot of things, but above all else, they are for people doing them and keeping them alive. Now go train, and have a good time, and watch my other videos if you have time in between all that. Thanks for listening, and that is all from me for now. Peace.