[apollo_mojave]

Fascinating. There is a famous course at Michigan Law called Bloodfeuds, which takes a scholarly view of the old Icelandic laws of revenge as told through the sagas. The point of the class is that some of the customs and traditions seem unusual, until you begin to consider the cultural / environmental conditions.

Similarly with dueling. In an honor culture where litigation isn't viable recourse to an offense, what's the best manner of resolving disputes? The formality of dueling as we see from the rules probably provided a much-needed measure of social control over private violence.

Compare that to the situation today, where the state has the true monopoly on legal violence. Private disputes that escalate to killing tend to be unordered affairs that lead either to continuing down spirals of violence or to wounding or deaths of innocents.

Personally, I think violence is inherent in human nature and one of the blessings of society is that we regulate and control it. We have violent outlets in sport and increasingly video games etc., but I also think we should consider whether some manner of "dueling" should be implemented. Obviously I would propose something nonlethal, like boxing. Something similar to:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takanakuy

[Zak]

My dad tells me that when he was in high school, students who fought would be given heavy boxing gloves and put in the ring until they were too tired to fight anymore. The heavy gloves prevented any significant injury and were exhausting to use. He says it usually put an end to the the fued.

There are obvious problems with normalizing that kind of thing, such as giving extra social advantages to people who are aggressive and good at boxing, but it doesn't sound like an entirely bad idea.

[williamdclt]

I can see how it makes sense. Rather than repress the violence, make it safe enough: it still works as an outlet, it facilitates it so that hunger for violence doesn’t reach high levels, it provides rules and boundaries implicitly accepted by both sides which helps avoiding revenge and escalation…

It applies to many undesirable -but-hard-to-eliminate things really, eg drug use probably ?

[Zak]

It's usually called "harm reduction" in the context of drug use, but I hadn't made the connection that this was an example of the same thing until now.