Back to Nature

Why do so many body-builders and strength athletes die relatively young?  In response to this question, whose empirical validity I am not concerned to question right now (but witness this), I offer the following meditation. 

Keith Norris has written eloquently somewhere about the empirical reality that survival and performance become increasingly separate and even opposite goals as you reach the limits of human capacity for exertion. At some point, exerting more now means trading in longevity. I cannot go full-blast all the time, or most of the time, without burning my chronological candle down faster than I would otherwise.  

Part of the problem, I suspect, is that civilization teaches us to avoid "down time" in the name of achieving more. The elite athlete aims not to live long and happy, as an athlete, but to achieve something extraordinary with his (or her) body. There is no such thing as "resting on one's laurels" (as always happens in foraging societies: a big kill or brush with death is followed by a lot of napping and doing nothing, except maybe eating). The result of civilization's lack of contentment with survival is that we approach athleticism (especially the elite kind) as work, as a job. We seek short-term profits (big achievements) at the expense of longevity. When we go, we go full-bore (and burn really bright before going out early). When we stop (retiring with some career-ending injury or accumulation of injuries), we quit entirely. The forager works hard, yes, but he also rests hard. He cannot stop, unless he wants to die, and his life-rhythm is very different from the "all or nothing, win or lose" pace set by elite athletes. 

Civilization seems to represent a kind of ongoing fragmentation in humanity whereby accidental strengths--and their concomitant weaknesses--are allowed an exaggerated expression. If I am predisposed to be very quick and strong, then civilization offers me the leisure to become an extreme phenotype. If I am predisposed to be mentally agile, then civilization offers me the leisure to become an extreme phenotype. The viability of extreme phenotypes is always less in nature than in civilization, and even in the latter we observe that extremity is often associated with early mortality (and other material handicaps: I am thinking in particular of purebred dogs here, as well as humans; one could also think of domestic sheep and cattle, which offer their human masters more milk, flesh, and wool at the expense of being too stupid and fat to survive without supervision). 

'Uncivilisation' as a corrective to the extremities that civilization increasingly pushes requires some 'return to the mean' where physical and mental activity is concerned. If humans want to avoid dying early and prematurely crippled in some facet of their phenotype, they need to return to a life more like that of their ancestors--a life that offers them unstructured time for recuperation from strenuous labor. We need strenuous labor. But we also need rest. And we need both, the labor and the rest, to take place in environments less structured than the boxes constructed by civilization (the job site, the gym, the university). We need to return to nature, to learn again how to work and rest under the sun, moon, and stars. We need to learn the rhythms of nature outside in addition to the rhythms of our own internal humanity.

Reflections on Violence

In light of recent events, specifically the murderous rampage of a young male college-student from Southern California who explained his attack as the fruit of being rejected sexually and hating American women (for wounding his self-esteem by rejecting him "unfairly" for other men who struck him as inferior), I offer the following thoughts.  I refer to this particular individual as R in my comments.  

Personally, I feel that there is a profound benefit to be had from breaking the illusion that my importance somehow trumps yours, that my integrity (or esteem or in a word, life) matters more than yours. How do we break that illusion? How do we provide space for young fools like R to realize the limits of their importance or worth without destroying themselves or others? I don't think there is any way to build a society utterly proof against accidents (that will on occasion give us criminals like R who must be put down), but I do believe there are things we can do to mitigate these accidents.

I have heard some folks say that boys are socialized to be violent, and that this is responsible for the creation of monsters like R. I disagree with this idea, though I might agree with some of the practical approaches to dealing with violence that come along with it.  (It is not always clear to me how we are supposed to stop "socializing boys to be violent." With therapy? Religion? I am uncomfortable with these options, for reasons which appear in articles like this one).

Why do I disagree? My disagreement comes from a lifetime (more than 20 years now: I am getting old) spent around boys--my peers growing up, and now my two sons, who are 4 and 6 years old. As a kid, I was drawn to martial arts. This is not unusual in itself, but other things about my life were undoubtedly strange. Unlike many kids, I grew up without access to much TV or movies. My parents put an end to our TV-watching when I was about 7 or 8 years old; the last shows I watched "live" as a kid were Mr. Rogers and Sesame Street. Once a week, on Fridays, our family would gather around the VCR (remember those?) and watch one or two movies from my parents' collection. The Internet did not exist as a public utility until I was a teenager. What does this mean? Well, I was drawn to martial arts without knowing who Bruce Lee was (in the '80s), what boxing was, what video games were (we didn't have any), what violent movies looked like (my parents were not into that), etc. I just wanted to move, and to fight. There was no "because"--no social pressure from my folks, no social pressure from my friends, no cogent aspiration on my part to be tough or manly or whatever.  Later on I discovered words and rituals aiming to express the values I already felt as a 9- and 10-year-old kid: martial values, fighting values, values built around violence. The point is that I was not a blank slate upon which society wrote violence. As a little kid, I already contained something people call violence, something my martial arts' instructors recognized and taught me to control with respect. For that I am still grateful to them.

Fast forward to the present. My wife and I have two kids, boys whom we aspire to raise right. I suppose you might say that with my background in martial arts (which I still practice), I accidentally provide some kind of subliminal message to them that violence is golden, that they must fight one another. But my wife certainly doesn't convey that message, and I spend more time breaking fights up than starting them. My observation of their experience (as good little kids, who are learning to be responsible and respectful: I hope they don't grow up to be like R) is that it mirrors my own. They fight naturally with each other or with me (not with strangers, and they are learning not to fight with kids at school, not even their friends). I did not teach this, any more than I taught my dog to bark and bite my heels when we bought him as a tiny puppy. The violence is already there in animal nature, masculine nature especially (perhaps). The question is what to do with it.

I think it is very dangerous to let people spend their lives unchallenged, to accumulate experience winning that does not involve loss. My martial arts background was very useful to me in that it taught me to respect not just myself but also my opponent, who might not look like much but could now and again whip my ass (in ways that I would have to respect: getting caught with a stiff kick to the liver teaches you not to gloat too much when you are the kicker). The values my martial arts instructors had were explicitly geared toward minimizing physical damage: you don't want everyone leaving the art prematurely aged and broken, even if you are a selfish bastard as my teachers weren't.  As a result, I came away from my years of training physically developed (enhanced rather than broken) and mentally balanced.  I was not going to go out and hurt other people because "Life is unfair!" I knew in my gut, from years' experience, that you don't complain to the ref when the other guy takes you down and wins the match. You smile, shake his hand, and give your best effort the next time. Defeat is simply the other side of victory, a price that we must pay to win responsibly. The contest need not be fair--your opponent is different from you, with physical attributes that you don't have, and vice versa--and the best way of handling that asymmetry is with respect and deference (particularly when you win: you must show the loser that you respect his effort, that you are not the kind of asshole that R would call "alpha male"). 

For those who wisely require more than just my personal observations and experience to back these ideas up, I offer this National Geographic article on elephants.  Consider these two paragraphs in particular:

Bradshaw speculates that this early trauma [seeing older elephants killed or carried off by poachers], combined with the breakdown in social structure [no older elephants left to guide the tribe in the bush], may account for some instances of aberrant elephant behavior that have been reported by field biologists. Between 1992 and 1997, for example, young male elephants in Pilanesberg Game Reserve in South Africa killed more than 40 rhinoceroses—an unusual level of aggression—and in some cases had attempted to mount them. The young elephants were adolescent males that had witnessed their families being shot in cullings at Kruger National Park—sanctioned killings to keep elephant populations under control. At that time it was common practice for such orphaned elephant babies to be tethered to the bodies of their dead relatives until they could be rounded up for translocation to new territories. Once moved to Pilanesberg, the orphans matured without the support of any adult males. "Young males often follow older, sexually active males around," says Joyce Poole, "appearing to study what they do. These youngsters had no such role models."

One effort to repair the torn fabric of an elephant group lends further support to the idea that early trauma and a lack of role models can lead to aggression: After Joyce Poole suggested that park rangers in South Africa introduce six older bull elephants into Pilanesberg's population of about 85 elephants, the aberrant behavior of the marauding adolescent males—and their premature hormonal changes—abruptly stopped.

My observation of R and his kind tells me not that we socialize violence too much, but the opposite: we socialize it too little. Too few violent kids like R grow up without the kind of socialization into violence that I experienced (with peers and older men, mostly, who served me as role models for respectful, socially constructive ways to channel violence). Instead of watching older men court older women respectfully, R was watching college freshmen. Instead of watching older men fight in the arena, R was watching reality TV (or some other garbage remote from real life, until he mistook himself for the hero in an action film and charged out to die stupidly). I am profoundly grateful that I do not live R's life, that when I graduated with a BA as a virgin (no sex for me until I married at age 26), I was not homicidal. I knew that "real men" (the men I grew up with) don't kill women who don't want to go out with them. I knew that "real men" don't jump from "Life is unfair!" to "Kill everyone!" These are really valuable lessons, lessons that I hope to pass on to my sons as they grow up and come to terms with the violence they embody.

ΔΗΜΙΟΥΡΓΟΣ

Ingenium misera quia fortunatius arte / credit et excludit sanos Helicone poetas / Democritus, bona pars non unguis ponere curat, / non barbam, secreta petit loca, balnea vitat.

Poetam bonum neminem (id quod a Democrito et Platone in scriptis relictum esse dicunt) sine inflammatione animorum existere posse et sine quodam adflatu quasi furoris.

Some people in the knowledge business talk about "making a career" in terms of (1) picking out a problem to solve, (2) solving it (immediately), and (3) publishing about it continually.  In my experience, this is not what happens.  I don't pick problems.  They pick me.  Try as I may, I cannot get rid of them.  I write not for publications, but because I must: even if I were to get a job elsewhere, I would still be thinking about all the same questions that currently engage me (and I would come to places like this to write "articles" only a few people would glance at).

I also don't really do deadlines.  When I have to, of course, I am as good as the next guy at penning a rhetorical conclusion and signing off.  But that is not always (or usually) the end.  It is just a convenient pause for the people who like such things (whose interests I don't mind serving, particularly while they pay my bills).  The solving process goes on until it finishes in its own time: usually, this takes longer than it is supposed to (years in many cases--I am only now "solving" in provisionally valid ways ethical dilemmas I started wrestling with as a prepubescent kid).  The best problems in the fields I frequent (ethics, literature, philosophy, history) are in some sense insoluble: they require constant provisional solution that can never become too definitive or universal without losing most of its power.  I did not know how to say this as an undergraduate ("I am interested in insoluble problems, professor, not the kind that I can comment upon definitively in a five-page response paper with a handful of well-placed references").

At some point in the future, it may become incumbent upon me to work outside my obsession with ethical problems.  That is OK.  But I will always be thinking about them, not because I must be a professor, but because I am obsessed with these problems.  They were interesting to me as a kid.  Sometimes they disgust me.  Sometimes they attract me.  Sometimes I love working on them.  Sometimes I hate it.  But I have to do it.  There is no alternative.  No shutting off my brain (or telling it that we are simply not going to worry about the nature of justice). 

I imagine other people experience this with other things (e.g. mathematics or music or some other kind of art).  Being an artist is being possessed by something larger than yourself, something more vast than your power to control or understand.  The artist is not absolute master of his domain.  Unlike most people, he doesn't pretend to be.  He doesn't feel the need to dominate or "express himself" (what does that even mean?).  He sees the marble, the equation, the justice or lack of justice in the world, and he cannot help reaching for it, shaping it, playing with it, seeing how it responds to his inquiries (whose outcome he does not know: all he knows is that it will be beautiful).  To be a really great artist, one must first surrender the self (the career, the fixed desires for this or that outcome, the conscious preening that goes on among poseurs who think criticism is not itself a kind of art--not always a very good one).  One must give that self up to the art and then see what art makes of it.  The result, no matter what it is, will always be more beautiful and more satisfying to the true artist than any accolades or career (which if they happen are merely a sideshow, an accident, an aberration--sometimes pleasant, sometimes not, especially when they get in the way of the art).

Living with Relative Truth

Renzo Gracie.  Legacy.  Satchel Films, 2008.

This essay is a bit off-beat, with a documentary film heading it up instead of a book, but it contains a lot of good stuff that has been rattling my mental cage of late.

My faith crisis left me with a large intellectual and "spiritual" void.  For many years, I lived with a definite purpose as the player in a fixed divine plan: this plan provided a stable reference point from which to evaluate every decision I made and give it meaning.  When I realized that this plan was founded on empty speculation, free floating mythology as likely to be false as true, I felt rather like the pre-modern explorers who ventured to the edge of the world with inaccurate maps.  Like them, I quickly found myself in uncharted territory, with nothing solid to rely on in grappling with reality but my own intuition and reasoning ability.  How was I to shape my daily behavior, my "morality" (from the Latin mores, i.e. "habits, character"), without the fixed reference point of the Mormon gospel?  My first reaction was to look to other religious traditions, chiefly alternative brands of Christianity and the completely unrelated Tibetan Buddhism.  I have already written about some of the insights these new paradigms provided me.  But like Mormonism, my new would-be worldviews proved frustrating in some ways: Christianity in general seemed to suffer from a lot of the same biases and weaknesses that led me out of Mormonism, and Buddhism, while initially less off-putting to someone who has overdosed on Christianity, has its own set of weaknesses, its own special blindness to reality.  (I am not ready to take vows committing me irrevocably to a single community; nor do I find the call to become a vegetarian--or admire excessively those who do--particularly compelling).

When absolute truth becomes impossible, what is one to do with what is left?  How do we judge among the relative truths that remain?  I have a historical analogy that helps me make sense of my efforts to reconstruct a world of meaning from the shattered pieces of my Mormon faith.  Before the arrival of the Gracie family and the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) in the early 1990's, the student of martial arts in the United States had a variety of distinct, largely insular options available to him: he could practice taekwondo, karate, judo, boxing, or wrestling; combining karate/taekwondo and boxing to make kickboxing was about as integrative as elite clubs got.  Many masters preached the superlative value of their respective arts, each touting his own as the most pure, most complete answer to the problem posed by human self-defense and physical development.  "Dialogues" between the arts were inconclusive, since they never met on neutral ground: challenge matches took place in private or in arenas that favored one art over the other (by disallowing certain techniques).  The Gracies and the UFC changed all of this by creating a well-known public venue where martial artists of any style could compete openly against one another with no holds barred (originally, the only techniques disallowed were biting and eye-gouging).  Overnight, the invincibility of "pure" fighting arts proved a myth, as fighter after fighter went down before the Gracies' jiu-jitsu, a unique form of submission wrestling developed by the family from the Japanese jiu-jitsu of Mitsuyo Maeda.

The Gracies proved that many arts had neglected to develop the kind of ground-fighting skill required to do well in a weaponless no-holds-barred match.  For a while, they beat anyone and everyone they encountered, making Gracie jiu-jitsu look an awful lot like the "one true martial art" that so many then claimed to be.  Then, something funny happened.  People started integrating jiu-jitsu (and other well-rounded ground-fighting systems) into their martial arts, practicing it alongside their native discipline and inoculating themselves against its tricks.  The result?  The Gracies were mortal again: a good fighter with ground defense could defeat them.  Today, the modern UFC features contests between individual athletes who train multiple arts to come up with their own, individual styles.  There is no "one true martial art," no absolute truth in the ring, and yet the martial arts have not died or ceased to be relevant.  Instead, each really well-developed art offers something that the fighter will find useful.  Striking arts (boxing, Thai boxing, karate, taekwondo) complement grappling arts (jiu-jitsu, wrestling, judo).  My own martial arts instructor recognized this fact early on, before it became really obvious to everyone, and was among the first non-grappling Americans to train with the Gracies and have his senior students learn from them.

Bottom line: complex activity (like fighting no-holds-barred or living a rewarding life) requires a large and evolving toolkit.  I needed some kind of arena to test my ideas (which like everything, were infantile and unformed to start with) against one another and prove which were the most effective at turning me into the kind of moral being that I want to be.  Like everyone, I have an instinct for moral behavior: some things just seem right to me.  But this instinct does not cover everything, nor does it always tell me precisely what I must do in every situation.  So far, the strongest evaluative pressure I have been able to bring to bear on moral problems, apart from my instinct, is rational understanding.  If an idea makes sense, and I apply it to acquire something useful (as well as instinctively pleasing), then it works (for me) and is accepted into the ethical and ideological toolkit I am building (my own personal "religion" --  the martial art of "living well").  The entries that follow this one will detail which ideas have faired best so far in the ring of my rational thought (with my instinct as matchmaker, and my reason as referee/judge).  It is certain now that my legacy, like the Gracies', will be something other than the ultimate superiority of my way over all others (that illusion died forever for me with the collapse of Mormonism and the soul-searching that followed); but maybe, like the Gracies, I can inspire others and give them (and myself) some useful ideas to work with in creating a wonderful life.  In the end, my legacy, like that of the Gracies, is an individual one -- an expression of my character, not an articulation of the one true model for any and every character.  Some very good people will not look much like me.  That does not make my character (or the tools I use to shaped it) less valuable.  Take them (or leave them) as they are useful (or not) to you, personally, as an individual building your own, unique brand of moral excellence.  (P. S. If you like martial arts at all, you will like Renzo's film about the unique way of life developed by his family; I highly recommend it.)