We Should Live - Ben Bateman

Judo is a Japanese sport similar to American wrestling. Those not familiar with it might call it a martial art, but I don’t think that phrase fits. In its most literal sense, a martial art is something that you practice and study to be proficient in war. The most literal martial arts would include only kendo (way of the sword) and other weapon-based arts. If you were a Japanese peasant a thousand years ago, those were the types of arts that in wartime might win you some armor, a decent weapon, and a unit assignment away from the unarmored and minimally trained peasants wielding sharp sticks.

So it’s a mild stretch to put the label “martial arts” on punch-and-kick disciplines like Karate or Tae Kwon Do. No doubt many soldiers have survived battle due to their unarmed combat skills—but I bet that it’s rare. If your goal is surviving combat in a modern war, then your time is probably better spent elsewhere.
So if the point of unarmed martial arts isn’t martial, then what is the point? On that question, there is a shocking lack of unanimity.

Street Fights

One purpose is to be able to win a street fight. If you’re walking down a dark alley at night, or if someone is menacing you in a bar, then martial arts will help you kick the bad guy’s butt. Few men made it through boyhood without some fantasy along those lines.

But street fights are dangerous, because they don’t have rules. In the boyish fantasy, the hero faces the bad guys one at a time in unarmed combat, and each slinks off in shame as he’s defeated. But most real-life bad guys don’t do that. They use guns, knives, or broken beer bottles. They get some friends to achieve overwhelming numbers, or they strike with surprise. And even if the bad guys fight and lose honorably, as the boyhood fantasy demands, the hero has no assurance that he won’t spend the next several hours in an interrogation room, explaining his actions to a skeptical policeman.

The fact is that true street fights are horribly dangerous for all involved regardless of their skill, and anyone with the sense to train in a martial art to win one should also have the sense not to spend time in places where they’re likely to encounter trouble. There are exceptions, such as policemen, bouncers, or bodyguards. But for the rest of us, training in a martial art to be able to win barroom brawls is an appealing but ultimately silly fantasy. It’s potentially dangerous, too: If you’re dim enough to think that any martial art can reliably protect you in a free-for-all fight, then you might also be dim enough to fail to avoid those fights.

Sport

So for most, the point of a martial art is definitely not to beat up random bad guys. For a large number of martial arts practitioners—probably most—a martial art is a sport much like any other. You train in a martial art to compete in tournaments. The sport has rules enforced by referees. Participants use protective gear to avoid injuries. There are occasionally injuries, of course, but that’s true in many sports.
Judo was created just over 100 years ago by Jigoro Kano. He founded the here with those here. The first shows what throws look like in a well-run classroom; the second is what they look like in competition.

In the classroom, the throws have a precision of movement. They are attempts to reach an ideal of movement. The student shouldn’t worry about whether his version of the throw will actually defeat an opponent; his job is simply to learn the form. If the student tries to become ‘effective’ too early, then he’ll likely lock himself into bad habits. In the classroom, the question isn’t what works; it’s what’s right.
Competition is the opposite. While the rules forbid various techniques, they do not require strict adherence to the traditional throws or holds. If it works and doesn’t violate a specific rule, then the logic of competition says that you should do it.

This article by Steve Scott presents the pure-sport perspective. The author argues that it’s nonsense to even try to distinguish the ideal from what works, because what works is by (his) definition ideal. And that’s true if you accept his premise that the point of Judo is to win tournaments.

But suppose that you don’t want to win tournaments, but you still want to learn Judo. This article presents the alternative to Judo as a sport: Judo is a way of life. It promotes physical fitness, grace of movement, and serenity of mind. This was Kano’s real aim, and most of today’s Judo misses it.

If you want to win a physical competition, then your best strategy is typically to specialize. Consider the first part of this article by Masahiko Kimura, a Judo champion from the thirties, forties, and fifties. The author’s favorite move is Osoto Gari, with which he becomes so powerful that he can reliably give other Judo experts concussions. His opponents also had favorite moves, and much of the strategy he describes involves finding out what each opponent’s favorite move is, and countering it.

While that was obviously an effective way to win Judo tournaments, it is also obviously not what Kano intended—and not ideal in terms of overall physical health and balance. A limited set of moves develops a limited set of muscles. It narrows you, and limits you.

This narrowing through competition isn’t unique to Judo. It applies in most competitions. There are few games in which intense competition does not yield a tiny set of viable strategies. (Those few games are the eternal classics, such as Go and Chess.)

Even with a very good game, take the competition too seriously and you’ll suck the fun out of it. You’ll reduce it to a ritual, a contest of talents. And you’ll come to enjoy only the winning, not the game itself.
Why do we play games at all? The objective answer is probably instinct. Men especially have a primal itch to scratch; we are born expecting to kill or be killed to establish dominance in mating. Civilization put an end to most of that, and I hope we can all agree that it was for the best. But the urge remains, and men satisfy it with games.

Now try a completely different question: Why should we play games? Scratching the instinctual competitive itch is fun, but we know that it’s pointless fun. In a larger sense, winning a game means nothing.

So is there any point, in a larger sense, to playing games? Yes. Games make us stronger. With more strength, we are more likely to accomplish objectively useful goals. And if you approach competition with this goal in mind, then you will always emerge victorious.

So why learn Judo? Don’t learn it to beat up the bad guys. And don’t learn it to win tournaments. Learn it because it’s good for you. It’ll make you strong. It’ll give you better balance. It’ll broaden your range of motion. It’ll improve your flexibility. It can teach you to deal with real-life problems more subtly and effectively. And it might even bring you closer to enlightenment.

Japan is shrinking. According to this story, Japan’s population of about 127 million will shrink this year by about 10,000 people.

To those who haven’t been following world demographics, this hardly seems cause for alarm. It’s a small drop in a large population. There will still be plenty of people in Japan, won’t there?

The problem isn’t with this year’s drop in population, but in what it signifies: Japan is in a death spiral, and no one knows how it might escape.

This may seem alarmist if you aren’t familiar with the problem. Let me explain: Demographic trends move very slowly, but with great weight. It’s fairly easy to predict what a country’s population will be in the next ten or fifteen years: Old people will continue to die at predictable rates. Young people will continue to produce babies, at slightly less predictable rates. The balance of immigration and emigration will stay reasonably constant.

But small demographic effects in the short term produce large effects in the long term, especially with the birth rate. For a population to stay stable in size, each woman needs to produce 2.1 children on average. (The two is for replacement, and the 0.1 accounts for premature mortality.) Suppose that a generation of young women falls below this rate by a mere ten percent. The next generation of young women is therefore ten percent smaller. Even if the second generation and all subsequent generations precisely replace themselves, the overall population will still eventually drop by ten percent.

And that only happens if the fertility drop occurs in only one generation. If the second generation also fails to replace itself by ten percent, then the effect compounds. The third generation is only 81% as large as the first one was. If that third generation under-reproduces, then the fourth generation is 73% of the first, and so on. It doesn’t look like much of a problem in the first generation, but it builds. And this problem has been building in Japan and Western Europe for a long time.

It may seem strange to focus on the young women. Don’t the men count? Why not consider the old women? But in the study of demographics we cannot avoid the basic fact of biology that only young women make babies. And if we’re asking where a country’s next generation will come from, there can be only one answer: from the young women.

As with this news story, most people intuitively think in terms of a country’s overall population. And in those terms, the problem doesn’t seem so bad. But overall population is also nearly irrelevant to long-term analyses. If you’re trying to guess how many people will inhabit Japan forty or fifty years from now, you should examine the size and behavior of only one group of people: pre-menopausal women. Both figures are discouraging.

You will often see stories about how the average ages of various countries are rising. But those stories rarely if ever explain why the age breakdown within a country is significant, except in terms of pension systems or health care needs. The much larger significance, in my view, is how the presence of a large elderly population blinds us to severe but slow-developing fertility problems.

An Example

To see why, try this exercise: Construct a sample population on paper. Assume that everyone dies at age eighty, and divide them up into twenty-year generations. Assume that each generation has been precisely replacing itself, so start with a hundred people in each of the four generations. For reference, let’s say that we start in 1940, when the overall population is four hundred:
Year: 1940
0-20: 100
20-40: 100
40-60: 100
60-80: 100

Now assume that a generation of fertile women (the 20-40 group) decides that they aren’t interested in producing babies. It doesn’t matter why. All that matters is that these women produce only one baby per woman, so the size of the youngest generation is half of replacement:
Year: 1960
0-20: 50
20-40: 100
40-60: 100
60-80: 100

This is a drastic drop in fertility, but note that the overall population has only dropped from 400 to 350. The country’s capacity to perpetuate itself has dropped by half, but its population has only dropped by an eighth.

Now let’s make it worse: The first generation of low-breeding women moves into the 40-60 bracket, and the young women in the half-sized generation also decide to produce only about one baby per woman on average. So the next demographic snapshot is:
Year: 1980
0-20: 25
20-40: 50
40-60: 100
60-80: 100

The population is now 275. That’s a noticeable drop, but it still doesn’t come close to reflecting the real fertility crisis, which is that the country’s capacity to produce new citizens is now a quarter of what it was only two generations ago.

Now let’s appreciate how powerful these trends are once set in motion. Let’s assume that the next generation of women decides that babies are a good idea after all. They decide to have twice as many children as their mothers, which is to say two, or replacement. Will a doubling in birth rate save our little country? Let’s see:
Year: 2000
0-20: 25
20-40: 25
40-60: 50
60-80: 100

The population is now down to 225, down from our starting point of four hundred. Also note that over half of the population is in the non-productive 0-20 and 60-80 categories. They need lots of care, and don’t generate any tax dollars. For many demographers, this is the crisis point. This is the point at which pension systems and socialized medicine fall apart, because there simply aren’t enough workers to support the retirees.

But it gets worse. Much worse. Once you’re in a demographic hole, it’s incredibly difficult to climb out. Let’s see why: Imagine that the next generation of young women have totally different attitudes about reproduction than even their self-replacing grandmothers. Imagine that the new crop of young women are crazy about babies. Each young woman decides to produce an average of four babies.
Before we run the numbers, stop and think for a moment about how very strange that would be to our modern sensibilities. When four is the average, you can expect to see plenty of women with six or seven babies, balancing out those who only have one or two. We’re talking about a baby-crazy generation of young women. And yet that self-doubling generation hardly makes a dent in the country’s overall population problem:
Year 2020
0-20: 50
20-40: 25
40-60: 25
60-80: 50

Even though the hospital nurseries are packed with screaming infants, the country’s population is now 150, or 37.5% of what it was it was eighty years ago. And the age balance situation is worse than a generation ago: Only one third of the population works and pays taxes. The rest are too young or too old to be of much help.

This example is an extreme simplification for the sake of illustration, though a birth rate at half of replacement isn’t much of a stretch. Some countries is Western Europe already have birth rates at half of replacement. But the point is to understand how powerful these trends are, and why an overall population figure is misleading. By the time your population has already dropped noticeably, you’re already deep in the hole.

What to do?

Now for the worst part: Nobody knows how to fix this. Nobody really understands why young women are choosing to have so few babies, and nobody knows how to persuade them to do otherwise. A few governments have tried various types of bribes, with little success. The countries with the biggest problems are heavily socialist, so bribes are all they know. So they have no solutions, and most probably hope to simply die before the problems become too severe.

Lots of very smart people have devoted their lives to studying these types of problems, so I hesitate to offer the suggestion of an uninformed amateur like myself. But this is a blog, so here goes:

If you read the people who really study this stuff, you’ll find a shocking lack of agreement on exactly what the problem is. Most focus on the implications for socialism: You can’t pay for cradle-to-grave care when so many are so near the grave, and so few are doing the productive work that funds the system. Others worry about the effect on the medical system, which are profound.

But I worry about the futures of whole countries. These days it’s common for people to imagine that we’ve transcended the creation or destruction of whole countries. Ask someone how long they think America will survive, and they’ll think you a lunatic. Unconsciously, they think: America will last forever, won’t it?

You can try to correct their error, but I don’t recommend it. You can speak in gentle tones about how many mighty countries have risen and fallen throughout history. Rome is perhaps the greatest success story, but it fell. Even within this century, we’ve seen huge changes. The great Western European empires of 100 years ago have been shorn of their colonies. The USSR threatened to dominate the world—and then it shattered. Yet somehow few Americans ever seriously consider that their own country, or today’s other powerhouse countries, might not exist 100 years from now. And I hear that the Western Europeans hold an even more militant head-in-the-sand attitude.

That attitude is the problem. People want to believe that their countries are doing just fine, because that belief frees them from any worries larger than themselves. If the country is doing just fine, then I can focus on making myself happy. It’s a very seductive idea.

And this attitude isn’t limited to countries. You can take the same approach to any group membership: religions, languages, families, regions. If people believe that the purpose of their lives is to make themselves happy, then childrearing becomes a difficult proposition. Children provide tremendous joy, but also lots of work, frustration, and expense. If you live only for your own happiness, then you’re unlikely to have more than one or two. Those who will create and raise lots of children usually see themselves as part of some larger group that will go on existing beyond their personal lifetimes.

So few should be surprised at how fertility breaks down across religious belief, for example. If you’re a devout Mormon or Catholic, then each new baby is not merely a way to scratch that instinctual itch. Each baby is not just a potential source of happiness that might outweigh the associated costs. Instead, each baby is a soldier for God. Each baby will grow up to spread the truth, expand the Church, and produce more believers. Laugh if you like, but those groups are out-breeding all the others.

So my analysis comes down to a question of group identity: Right now, millions upon millions of Americans live only for their own happiness. A hundred years from now, few will care that they existed, because they had few children and propagated few beliefs.

But the rest believe in something larger than themselves—or claim to. And the topic of children puts those claims to the test. It’s easy to say that you support your country, your religion, or your culture. But do you support it enough to actually do something about it? Not so long ago, this kind of question was aimed at men: Do you support your country enough to take up arms and risk death on a battlefield? But today countries should be asking their young women: Do you support your country enough to bear its children, even if doing so will deny you some of modern life’s delights?

I don’t ask that question lightly. I know firsthand the amount of time and effort it takes to raise a child well. I sympathize with the young woman’s natural response: Why the hell should I give over my body and future to support some abstract entity? Why should I give up some current happiness out of concern for what might happen decades are my bones are dust?

I can’t answer those questions. No one can. The subject makes me uncomfortable, much it likely does you, dear reader. But I won’t apologize for raising it, because it isn’t mine. It’s nature’s.

However we might feel about it, the fact remains that a hundred years from now, some array of people will inhabit the Earth. Do you want representation in that future Earth? Do you want those future people to speak the way that you speak, believe what you believe, and perpetuate the country to which you claim allegiance? Do you want them to read the same stories that you’ve read, listen to the same music, or watch the same movies? Do you want them to look like you, share your genes, even bear your last name? Do you want to be a thumb-sized photograph in some child’s grade-school genealogy project, or an old-fashioned picture on someone’s wall?

No one can force you to want those things. Oblivion is freely available to those who choose it. But if you want the future to remember you, then its requirements are not negotiable, and they are not in the eye of the beholder. Love it or hate it, the rule is simple and inflexible: The future belongs to those who have babies.

Edit after getting some sleep:

This is a big topic, with enough twists and turns to fill a book. So I apologize if I didn’t happen to pick up the particular thread that interests you. But there’s one big point that this post is missing.
I started this post with a story about Japan, and in one respect Japan makes a poor starting point: They don’t accept immigrants. Despite their defeat in WWII, Japan remains insular and shockingly racist. A foreigner can live in Japan for generations, and still be considered a foreigner.

This is not unusual on a global scale, though it may seem so to Americans. In virtually every place and every time, citizenship in a country was tied to genetics. The country was the race, and vice versa.
America is one of only a few exceptions. It has historically welcomed and assimilated large numbers of immigrants. And that provides an partial solution to the need to produce enough babies: In addition to producing new citizens from the citizenry, you can convert immigrants.

Whether this satisfies depends on your particular notions of group membership. If your propagation goals are specifically genetic or racial, then immigration certainly won’t help. But if your goals are political or cultural, then you can accomplish them perhaps even more effectively through conversion rather than production.

Here the practical problems of demographics run into the modern religion of multiculturalism, which actively discourages assimilation. For a country like America that has long relied on assimilation as a self-perpetuation strategy, multiculturalism amounts to suicide.

So for those who want to support their country and culture, but don’t want to spend their lives raising children, there is another way: Fight multiculturalism. Help bring back the concept of Americanization. Help to popularize the idea that our culture is a good one, and it’s perfectly normal to want to share it with those from other cultures.

These cultural survival strategies are not mutually exclusive. They work together. There’s no point producing lots of babies if you don’t raise them to value their own culture in contravention of multiculturalism. And assimilation can’t handle the future on its own. It can provide a boost to growth, but the extant population must still at least come close to replacing itself, which is where we are today.

So breathe easy, ladies. We don’t really need an average of three or four children per woman. An average of just over two will do just fine—if we can slap down the cult of muliculturalism and return to assimilating our immigrants.

The fastest way to advertise your ignorance of the English language (or your fatigue) is to misuse a homonym. The second fastest is to use a mass-noun adjective on a count noun. And unlike the homonyms, you can make this error in speech as well as writing.

Ninety-nine percent of the problem comes down to two adjectives: Less and Amount. Those adjectives only apply to mass nouns, which are nouns that don’t come in discrete units. Count nouns, which do come in discrete units, use two often-neglected adjectives: Fewer and Number.

So install a little warning light in your head that flashes when you’re about to speak or write those two danger words: Less and Amount. Stop and ask if the noun you’re about to describe presents itself as separate items or an undifferentiated mass. If it does, then stop and find the right word.

Whether something is a mass or count noun isn’t a physical property, but instead a feature of how a particular noun conceives of its subject. Often you can describe the same physical stuff as separate units or an undifferentiated mass, depending on the noun you pick:
A number of dollars; an amount of money.
Less time; fewer minutes.

Define the following word: “he’s”.

It’s ambiguous. Most of the time it means “he is,” but sometimes it means “he has.” Twice today I’ve seen the latter in political columns. One was by Mark Steyn, one of our best conservative columnists right now. I hesitate to criticize such an excellent writer, but on this one point I must: An ambiguous contraction burdens the reader.

Recall that the point of writing is to benefit the reader. Not too long ago, contractions were considered too casual for formal writing. Today the popular style favors it on the theory that a contraction more closely imitates speech, and it presents the reader with fewer letters and denser prose.

But that’s only true if the contraction is unambiguous, like “can’t” or “we’ll”. At least two contraction endings present the reader with ambiguity: An apostrophe-ess, as in “he’s”, could mean “is” or “has”:
Q: He’s going?
A: He’s already gone.

An apostrophe-dee presents a similar problem, as in “he’d”, which can be “had” or “would”:
1: He’d have left years ago, if he could’ve.
2: He’d been writing for an hour when he heard a knock at the door.

The fact that these words are ambiguous doesn’t necessarily mean that you shouldn’t use them. The un-contracted form may sound too unnatural in some situations. You have to balance compactness and fidelity to speech against the possibility of stopping the reader’s eye and losing the flow.

My personal rule is to generally avoid these ambiguous contractions. But if I feel folksy, then I’ll only use the contraction for the more common meaning, and write out the other. So, “he’s” always means “he is”, and “he has” is never contracted. Similarly, “he’d” is always “he had”, never “he would”. It’s a small thing, but good writing consists of many such small things.

PS: I apologize if the periods and commas outside the quotation marks offend your inner grammar teacher. Call me a rebel if you like, but I have reasons for it. More on that later.

Those who don’t write well usually fail to understand that prose is art. Or at least, that’s my theory. If you were educated like I was, in an American public school, then you were probably taught to think of writing—and language generally—as a technical field, like math or science.

It starts with grammar: A given sentence is either right or wrong, based on whether it conforms with rigid rules. Students learn how to generate setences that fit the rules. Master those rules, and you get a good grade. And you think you’re done.

It’s not fair to fault the teachers. I don’t know how else one would teach writing to sullen schoolchildren. But perhaps you mastered those rules, and now you want more from your prose. If so, then the first step is to move beyond the framework that you learned as a child. Transcend the binary distinction between a “good” sentence that follows all the rules and a “bad” sentence that doesn’t. In writing, the goal is not to follow rules; it is to create art.

Consider art in its broadest sense: painting, dance, music, sculpture, poetry, theater, etc. The full range. The many forms of art vary so widely that it’s hard to generalize about them. Some have rigid, traditional rules, like ballet or certain types of poetry. Other forms are much looser. What ties them all together is the purpose: Art is designed to affect people. It can inspire hope or despair, serenity or fear, reverence or horror. It can transmit information. It can convey abstract ideas that alter how the audience perceives the past or present.

But regardless of the intended effect, the first question to ask about any work of art is whether it achieves that effect. I personally don’t like horror movies, but I can still respect and admire the people who make good ones. The audience may or may not enjoy the feelings and thoughts that the artist conveys, but if the work of art conveys what the artist intended, then it is at least a partial success.

All this is also true of prose. Your goal is not to satisfy the rules of some childhood English teacher. Your goal is to produce a specific response in your reader. Every sentence that you write should be designed to produce that response.

The rules help, of course. They steer novices away from basic mistakes. Misspelled words or unintentional grammar mistakes will immediately sour your prose with most readers. But once you know those rules, then you’re in a position to see beyond them: You’ll see that some sentences can violate those rules and still have a dramatic impact on readers. More importantly, you’ll see that many sentences can follow those rules and still convey virtually nothing. Or worse, they may convey something very different from what the author intended.

So learning to write well, in the broadest sense, is the study of how different configurations of words affect people. Painters study the emotions that particular colors convey, and the ideas that particular symbols convey. Actors study how to use posture, gait, and gesture to convey emotion. Dancers and musicians have their own vocabularies to convey nuances of motion or sound.

And good writers study words, sentences, and paragraphs. They study the nuances of syntanx and punctuation, etymology and rhythm. They learn the difference between the not-quite-right sentence, and the just-right sentence.

It takes a lot of work to really learn it, and there’s no guarantee that you’ll be satisfied with the result. If you study writing for a few years, then people will read your prose more willingly, and your ideas will make more of an impression on them. But it’s a subtle effect. Few readers will consciously notice it, let alone praise you for it. Producing good prose takes extra time and work, too, no matter how much you study it. In fact, studying how to write well can permanently lower your overall writing speed, because it burdens your mind with so many complex considerations.

So if you plan to study the art of prose to impress people, you should look elsewhere. As with any art form, the time and effort required to learn about and then produce elegant prose greatly outweighs its practical benefits’unless you take pleasure in it for its own sake.

But if you feel that pleasure, if you feel a quiet satisfaction on producing a well-turned phrase, or if you feel a rush of excitement at creating a powerful metaphor, then join me in exploring the demanding discipline that is the art of prose.

Every day, millions of people spend countless hours writing in their blogs. The overwhelming majority are unpaid and largely unread. And they must pay for the privilege.

Blogging is risky, too. The blogger bares his soul to God-knows-whom. Any random idiot can mock your most cherished beliefs, scare off the few readers you attract, or hijack your site with spam. And you’re lucky if it’s a stranger.

An ill-advised blog post can hurt even more if read by a friend, family member, or employer. There are already many stories of people losing their jobs over blogs. It seems a safe bet that there are many more stories of employment applications refused, friendships ended, and even divorce—all over blogs.
So why would anyone do this? It’s no plusses and all minuses. Heaps of risk and no reward. What kind of person would take that deal?

That’s not a rhetorical question. I really don’t know the answer. Probably many are exhibitionists, looking for parental love they should have received but didn’t. Perhaps the possibility for fame, prestige, or even money lures others. For others, maybe it’s just trendy, or an easy way to communicate with family and friends.

Self-psychoanalysis is notoriously unreliable, but here are some reasons I’m starting this blog:
Writing Volume: I’m a student of the art of prose. As with any art, you must practice to maintain your skill. So here’s my practice.

Writing Accumulation: I’ve been posting on others’ blogs for nearly two years now. It has been like renting an apartment: It’s convenient, as you can flit here and there without too much trouble. But you have nothing long-term to show for it. So now I’m buying my own house, as it were, instead of sleeping on the sofas of others.

Emotional Satisfaction. People write on blogs because they want to be heard. We’re social primates, after all. Not so long ago we lived in extended families: hugging, kissing, singing, dancing. We bound ourselves up in communities with social rituals, and at some level I think we miss it. Blogs let us push back against the twentieth century’s social atomization. They let us form new communities. That so many would put so much effort into blogs, despite the risks, shows the depth and power of our instinctual social needs.

I could list out the topics I plan to write about, but there’s no point. By the time you read this, you’ll already have read a half-dozen later posts that show what I’m actually going to write about, instead of what I think I’m going to write about.

So welcome to my little corner of the new universe. Comments are welcome. Let’s chat.