Sometimes more information is less knowledge.
I knew a Kung Fu instructor–an ex-mathematician (if there is such a thing)–who used to say that Push Hands was a game about information. Not only the information you wanted to give the opponent–like, “You fall down” –but the willingness to go to what lengths to transfer that information, such as “Oops, I fall down”.
WordPress looks like another great advance in the arena of easy information flow. And we’re happy to use it. But we wonder sometimes, as we see the facility with which information transfer methods proliferate, that we aren’t also losing ageless information at precisely the same rate of our gain. You see, in the Chinese Martial Arts, there have been more books written in the last 50 years than in the history of the world. At the same time, the true, core, deeply nuanced art itself is decaying, unable to sustain mindless YouTube comments, dummied down martial activities, Western xenophobia, optimistic scientism, and every other shade represented by an endlessly chattering, wired, tricked out, 14 year old girl, who thinks she is connected to everything and can’t smell the flowers in front of her.
Of course youth, in a person or an age, is a time to NOT pay attention to such things. But we should remember that what seems like the adolescence of the information culture ignores other types of information cultures informed with experience. To make it simple, the new info age will be great for talking about all the wonderful things in the martial arts. And if we’re lucky, neutral about the actual practice.
