Are we fighting the future, or fighting for it?

The father of MMA in China, Xu Xiao Dong, recently took down a Tai Chi master in under ten seconds.

It was a fun watch, and I would have totally moved along, except that I learned it had turned into a bit of a controversy.

In promoting the sport, Dong had actually called out traditional martial arts teachers in China to prove MMA was an improvement. And they countered this is with the “tradition argument” — the this-is-ancient-and-therefore-good.

Like yoga, or reiki, or paleo, or organic… we seem to have hit peak modernisation and turned right around toward the past. What feels like understandable nostalgia has morphed into a source for pragmatic wisdom. Except why should people of the past be any better, or more intelligent than people today? Shouldn’t we be working to make quite the opposite true?

Every generation makes bold strides forward by questioning past wisdom and putting it to the test. That is literally how we got those very traditions — they’re passed down through the ages, and people use what works and adapt what doesn’t.

I have this problem with constitutions — we build a country based on a set of principles, but if we don’t update them over time, we stagnate. People who weren’t involved in its creation, find less meaning in it, and begin to ignore it. It could instead be a living document, for, of, and BY the people.

Constitutions, and traditions, could learn a thing of two from dictionaries. Dictionaries are meant to be descriptive, a documentation of the language of a time, rather than prescriptive, unchanged and static, the source of truth. It would be less than helpful if dictionaries still listed “terrific” as meaning ‘causing terror’. We simple don’t use that meaning any longer.

Maybe what should then measure when something needs improvement is whether or not it remains effective.

And this is why this MMA story feels so perfect. Fighting is such a direct result, it’s cathartic in its simplicity. You win a fight by knowing your opponent better than they know themselves — seeing what they see and preempting their next move. MMA beats Tai Chi because it absorbed it, learnt from it, and uses it.

We should improve on wisdom, test it against the past and let it adapt and grow — it’s a beautiful ode to tradition to have it live on in a progressing avatar.

Originally published at anopenlettertomybrother.tumblr.com.