‘The Duel’ in The Duel and Other Stories

"Well, like much of Chekhov, it’s powerful in part because, although there is a moral undertone, no moral arguments are made, he’s not a moraliser. It’s about this guy who gets drawn into a duel so ridiculous that it’s impossible, even if you’ve just read the story, to remember exactly what it was they were duelling about. It’s often true of duels that people are prickly and they think their honour is being abused and they end up fighting. What happens is this man who is leading a rather meaningless life, fights a duel and doesn’t get killed and that turns him around and he pulls himself together. It’s just so marvellous, the description of these professional-class Russians, far, far away from Moscow in the provinces, and their preoccupation with status and all that, and these two guys in a completely pointless duel. It’s not just Chekhov creating an interesting narrative moment; it really was so common with these duels that it was extremely difficult to say in a short paragraph exactly what they were about. I think that’s certainly one of the things involved in historical honour. That’s what’s involved when Achilles is worried about his honour or Prince Hal is worried about his honour, and that’s the part of honour that’s rather unattractive. If you think about what’s unattractive about historical honour codes there are three things: one is that they are hierarchical, including subordinating women to men and subordinating ordinary people to upper-class people; two, they tend to involve an awful lot of violence; three, they often lead people to do exactly the opposite of what morality suggests you should do. They are anti-moral, hierarchical, undemocratic and violent. So, if you’re going to say there’s a place for honour, you have to face up to that and wonder whether reform is possible that deals with those problems. I don’t think we’re ever going to be able to stop testosterone-fuelled fights and so on, but we can, I think, make them seem ridiculous and shameful rather than being a source of respect. That can be a response and this relates to how one should use national honour and the honour of groups, Muslim groups and so on, carefully, in terms of how to push people ahead on the moral front. If you shame people too much they just get angry so you have to be careful with that. But I think it’s one thing to say, ‘Shame on you’, to somebody who is already pissed off and in a high state of adrenalin, but at least we are not going to say, ‘Three cheers for you’, so we can stop cheering people on when people do this. Cardinal Newman said that the essence of being a gentleman is that you don’t do anybody harm. That meant that by the mid-19th century gentlemanliness, which was very much associated with violence and feudal knights and all that, at least for a significant part of the educated population, had come to be seen as the opposite of that. We don’t have good numbers on that but we do have good numbers on the role of this kind of thing explaining the murder rate in the United States. It turns out that one of the biggest things that explain the different murder rates in different parts of the American South is whether you’re in a region that was significantly settled by Scots-Irish. If you are from a region that was significantly settled by Scots-Irish who brought with them the kind of honour code that comes from a rural society that kept cattle, in those regions the rate of honour-related reasons (you flirted with my wife and such) are much higher than in other parts of the United States. These data would be from the 60s, 70s, 80s. In fact, attitudes to honour in the South are very different from attitudes to honour in the North. Someone did a nice survey recently where they sent imaginary CVs applying for jobs, and in these CVs there were people who had been in prison. If the CV showed that the reason they were in prison was that they had reacted violently to a threat to their honour, then in the South they could get a job but in the North they couldn’t. The point is that there is plenty of evidence of the pervasiveness of these issues of honour today, including in such things as the murder rates and the rates of assault. You have to face up to that and look for the possibilities for reform – unless you think you can get rid of it, and I don’t think you can. So, as I say, it can be and has been reformed and been moralised. It has changed from motivating people to do what’s bad to motivating them to do what’s good. Hard as it is to imagine when you’re stuck in the middle, we have historical evidence to show that it can be changed."