Duels

Youngest Daughter is very fond of Eugene Onegin (the opera and the book), and the subject of duels came up at the table.

My Better Half noticed that the same phenomenon of looking for revenge for insults is alive and well today, and producing a regular supply of corpses and bullet holes in bystanders. But there's no formality or structure to the modern dissing revenge--the old style duelists would have thought them not worth dueling, and not just because the modern fighters are mostly black.

My first thought was that the duelists were embedded in their community to such degree that they drew their identity from how they were viewed, and that perhaps the decline of the duel went together with a rise in individualism. But the duelists didn't represent everyone of their era--just the upper echelons of a particular culture. Lower class folk weren't expected to duel the same way, though I gather they could be just as touchy about their public perception as the elite.

But if everybody is touchy, and not just the elite... Noblesse oblige--perhaps you have to take the risks of following the rules when you avenge your honor, to show that you are worth your rank?

The vices of that sort of "you are as you are viewed" are vivid to us--what about the virtues? Did they go in more for public acts of virtue (e.g. courage)? (in contrast to our preference for virtue signaling with trivial symbols) I don't know how to evaluate cultures like that in a systematic way, but I'd bet there were things they did better than we.

Revenge for insults is everywhere, of course.

Are there added virtues alongside the dissing revenge vices? I haven't seen any, but perhaps they are most visible in the upper echelons. These things vary; sometimes there aren't duels in the usual sense at all.

What the Spanish description fails to express for the Japanese is the old Confucian idea that a man cannot live under the same heaven as his father's enemies. This leads to a proliferation of revenge plays in Japan in which the hero sacrifices himself for his father or for his lord. There are fewer plays in which a man is dishonored personally by insult or adultery and wipes out his shame in blood; most often he acts on behalf of a superior.

...

D.E. Mills outlines the rules and describes the documentation that was required for anyone to carry out an official blood revenge. If the avenger wanted to escape punishment for slaying his enemy it was requisite that he first make application at his local government offices, and this was then recorded and passed on to the central government. Normally he was given permission and a document that he could present to the official of the province where he finally caught up with his enemy.

That last is so very not Scottish...