Yesterday our friend Ori sent me a link to an article (which unfortunately appears to have disappeared from cyberspace) on the custom of dueling, a tradition which (as you know) is of some interest to me.
The author’s thesis (making some use of game theory) was that the duel of honor was more than a ritualized method for obtaining personal revenge. It served a legitimate economic function in cultures where modern banking was unavailable, or where private borrowing remained a recourse for gentlemen in desperate circumstances.
In other words, imagine you’re a gentleman who sometimes needs a short-term loan, and your only source of credit is to borrow from another gentleman.
Now, imagine that someone publicly calls you a liar.
He is attacking your trustworthiness, the only collateral you possess. If word gets around that you’re not a man of your word, who will lend you ten pounds, when you need to buy seed in the spring?
We still use the saying, “His word is his bond.” In this situation, that’s more than a metaphor. It’s quite literally true.
Take away a man’s reputation—his “honor”—and you’ve essentially driven him out of his social class. He’ll lose his property. He may go to debtor’s prison. He’ll be forever reduced to the level of common laborer, or shabby genteel parasite on the fringes of his old circles.
I once watched the movie “The Duelists,” starring Keith Carradine and Harvey Keitel, with two friends. I found it rather interesting, but to my friends it was incomprehensible. They couldn’t understand why Carradine’s character just refused to fight his enemy. So somebody called him a coward. So what?
I tried to explain that Carradine’s standing in his social class depended entirely on his reputation, his honor. Without that, his whole life would collapse. He’d become nobody to everyone in his life.
I don’t think they got it, but this essay indicates that I had the right idea.
For a Christian, of course, honor is not an important concept, and I don’t recommend it as such. To a very large extent, it’s contrary to Christ’s most basic moral teachings.
But it’s worth understanding, if we want to understand our history.
And our enemies’ present.
Picture copyright 2010 by Newscom. All rights reserved.
There’s a long ‘Duel’ page at Wikipedia. I’ll give two examples.
On 30 May 1832, French mathematician Évariste Galois was mortally wounded in a duel at the age of twenty, the day after he had written his seminal mathematical results.
In 1808, two Frenchmen are said to have fought in balloons over Paris, each attempting to shoot and puncture the other’s balloon; one duelist is said to have been shot down and killed with his second.
There was a good article on dueling on Art of Manliness a little bit ago.
BTW, the article is back online.
What would be the Christian thing to do if one is in a culture where dueling is the custom? Not take out loans?
Well, it’s not as if Christian countries haven’t accommodated the custom, on many occasions.
The Christian is supposed to impress people with his honesty in other ways than by challenging them. He is supposed to live so honestly that such accusations do not stick. Loving your enemies is probably a big part of it, that’s one of the things that Christ said would really make you stand out from everyone else (Matthew 5:43-48), and loving our fellow Christians, too, I imagine, since that was supposed to be a sign that we were Christ’s disciples (John 13:34-35).
I think it isn’t the honor that’s the problem…it’s the way one goes about getting the honor. I understand why dueling developed as a custom (sin and a distorted view of masculinity plus the importance of honor), but it (dueling) is the problem, not the importance of honor.
Dueling doesn’t make common sense…how does killing a guy prove that you are good for the 10 pounds I loan you? If you’re too good at dueling you may not pay the loan, then duel me when I call you out on it. Stupid system.
Honor is important. In a dueling society, show that you have honor without dueling…by having biblical honor.
Proverbs 15:33 and 18:12 teaches that humility comes before honor. If humility comes before honor, this flies in the face of dueling. Using the wisdom literature as a foundation we see that a good name is found by honesty, humility, integrity, compassion, justice, etc.
If you have these in any society, you keep your honor.
Trollope couldn’t be further from my own work, but reading his novels sheds an interesting light on how a mark of honor gradually declines into a socially unacceptable flare-up. In an odd way, the decline of the duel is rather like how smoking stopped being cool and started being not-quite-the-thing.