By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, September 29, 2026

According to an 1838 U.S.-published instruction manual for dueling, the practice of dueling was going to last “as long as a manly independence, and a lofty personal pride in all that dignifies and ennobles the human character, shall continue to exist.”[1] Be that as it may, dueling was soon gone as a practice in any way acceptable or routine, and most of the globe had never had it to begin with.

Many years ago, I wrote a book about the outlawrists of the 1920s, people (led by lawyers) who were fond of pointing out that dueling had been outlawed and abolished, and so could war be. Yet dueling had persisted for centuries in Europe and in the United States despite laws forbidding it as murder. And we’ve now gone a century with laws forbidding war, while the wars persist.

I do not doubt for a minute that laws helped end dueling. Nobody could have finally begun using the laws had there not been any. Nobody could have denounced dueling as a crime had it not been a crime. But I’ve encountered over the years numerous cursory accounts of dueling that explain its demise in very simple terms, albeit each explanation different from all the others. Professional, serious historians will bring up dueling briefly and explain briefly that it ended because people moved to cities where anonymity replaced reputation, or because middleclass people took up dueling causing aristocrats to drop it, or because industrialization altered societal values, or because wealthy people developed privacy and stopped bumping into each other in the street, etc. Some of these ideas can be debunked, while others are probably a part of the story. But too often the emphasis seems to fall on a familiar hunt for causes beyond culture, for forces outside of the easy control of individuals or groups. If you can find the source of all changes in economics or demographics, and blame or credit those forces entirely, then no people have to accept any responsibility for their actions.

Of course, critics of dueling were around for centuries before dueling’s demise, just as laws against dueling were. But they got better and multiplied through the years. And their critiques found greater traction as other factors changed — cultural, economic, demographic, and otherwise, each influencing the others. Opposing dueling was part of larger trends, toward democratic ideas, toward utilitarian ethics, and away from all sorts of violent behavior outside of war, including fist fights, and including capital and corporal punishment by governments, including as public festival. A strong case has been made that dueling did not die out in any country because of the snobbery of the rich, that — on the contrary — the rich were compelled to change their ways by everyone else.[2]

A major factor in the demise of dueling, by numerous accounts, was mockery, combined with the argument that courage was best exemplified by those who refused to duel. Why duel to demonstrate your courage if you were only going to get labeled a coward for not standing up to the clowns demanding a duel? Dueling itself evolved, from swords to guns, from wild scrambles to very formalized rituals, from a focus on the need for the offended party to be shot at to prove his honor, to the need for the offending party to demonstrate some sort of apology. When duelists were shooting in the air, it was only a small step to not dueling at all. When commentators were suggesting that decent seconds would prevent any duel if they were any good at diplomacy, it was a small step to not dueling at all.

The excuse for dueling that it was less violent than assassinations or mass brawls or family feuds had faded as it had become impossible to convince anyone that doing away with dueling would bring those other things back. The excuse for dueling that it filled a gap left by the courts faded as it became possible to sue people in courts. But principally, the idea that dueling could remedy some damage to one’s reputation dissolved in a culture that came to view being known as a duelist as one of the worst stains possible on one’s reputation. A history of dueling published in London in 1841 claimed that dueling could not be abolished until someone developed a “speedy, certain, and reputable method of punishing insults.”[3] That never really happened; rather great masses of people developed a method of viewing insults as not being good reasons for murders, of viewing the respectable man (women rarely engaged in these horrors) as more polite and understanding and less viciously barbarous at the slightest (often mis-)perceived insult.

Of course, newly and redundantly banning dueling helped, and those who had been unphased by the threat of capital punishment were, in some cases, horrified by the threat of some months at prison labor in a prison uniform. And, once dueling was at risk, particular famous and notorious duels helped finish it off in each country, duels that left some admired person dead, or that exhibited all sorts of shameful and risible behavior on the part of the duelists. But the editorial cartoons of monkeys dueling and of duelists less serious than Don Quixote were key. If there had been a dueling industry that had captured the governments and the newspapers, we might all still be shooting each other over laughably tragic misunderstandings, thin-skinned preening, and pretended offenses. Instead, dueling could be not only criticized but mocked. Nobody wants to risk their life and get laughed at for it.

Of course, the weapons technology became more deadly. Of course, people were drunk less of the time. Of course, women became treated somewhat less as property (a major topic of disputes that led to duels). Some children were raised somewhat less violently, predisposing them less to engaging in a cycle of violence. Militaries came to focus less on individual gallantry and more on logistics. There are simply thousands of factors. But the fact that drunken brawls begun on the flimsiest of pretexts by people who wouldn’t seem serious enough to join in a Monty Python sketch were the core of dueling, and the development of mass-media outlets that would say so was critical. Lord Byron had killed a man for claiming to have more animals on his estate than Byron had. That doesn’t alter Byron’s poetry any more than Ed Sheeran’s genocide denial alters his music. But if everybody did what Byron had done, everybody would be at a great risk of being killed every day. The fact is that dueling ebbed and flowed as a fashion, and it finally became extremely unfashionable. If we were to bring it back as a response to insults while insults may be the majority of the content on the internet, there would be a blood bath.

One way in which, for centuries, dueling ebbed and flowed, was with wars and militaries. Members and former members of militaries were, very disproportionately duelists. Following wars, the world saw more duels. If peace lasted, duels faded. Wars resembled duels more than we may remember. Some wars were set for scheduled times to begin and were ended at agreed-upon hours. The slaughter was carried out on fields with two sets of uniforms of different colors. Participants both hated and respected their opponents, whom they believed they could properly murder but not torture or rob or otherwise mistreat. War now takes place in cities and towns hit by missiles and bombs, most of the people killed are not participants, and all lesser crimes are sanctioned by the authorization of the crime of murder. If dueling had lasted but been transformed in a manner parallel to how war has been transformed, perhaps it would look like mass shootings — which we in fact have lots of, and very disproportionately by members and former members of the U.S. military.

To some extent, war replaced dueling. Some violence-inclined men in England went into overseeing the British empire. Some found they could skip dueling and focus on ordering others to commit mass-slaughter. But to a great extent the demise of dueling can be seen as a decline in barbaric practices on a long list that simply doesn’t include war yet. Institutions once proclaimed permanent, inevitable, necessary, righteous, and “human nature” in various times and places have included dueling, slavery, serfdom, lynching, human sacrifice, trial by ordeal, cannibalism, and child labor. Some of them still exist in the margins, very dramatically reduced from what they were. Most people do not want to restore them. Most people do not mock the idea of abolishing them. Most people do not demand to know what they could possibly be replaced with. There are not thousands of websites demanding to know what we could do instead of dueling, or accusing anyone of wanting to defund dueling, or glorifying the righteous preparation for humanitarian dueling. Someday we’ll be able to say the same about war, or police, or prison, or anything else, if we abolish it and if we were right to do so. There are open advocates for bringing back slavery and child labor, but they are the ones most people think are crazy, not those of us who honor the successful abolitions.

With dueling there are particular parallels with war. Dueling was once defended by its supporters by comparing it to war. Now war is disparaged by its opponents by comparing it with dueling. Dueling was always understood as murder, and as murder of the worst sort because premeditated or with “malice aforethought” (meaning simply premeditated, and not meaning anything related to the murderer’s emotions). But an exception was made. This was a type of murder that would be allowed. This exception was made for the wealthy and privileged but was also closely related to the fact that there were two duelists, not one. War is the last remaining acceptable form of murder. In mainstream 2026 dominant-culture thinking, war legalizes and makes good proper war-murders that don’t go beyond vague, ancient, Catholic, and somewhat legalized standards, but war does not render acceptable torture, rape, theft, or any other crime not excused by some preferred autocrat or political party. When President Obama kicked off the habit of blowing small groups of people up with missiles, now routinely used by President Trump on fishing boats, liberal lawyers began arguing that if it wasn’t war it was murder, but if it was war it was perfectly fine (and, in the case of Obama, whether it was war or not could only be answered by a memo written by Obama and kept secret).

In arguing against this way of thinking  — in arguing that, in fact, murder is just murder whether in a war or not in a war — one U.S. philosopher began a book by pointing to the case of Ludwig Wittgenstein who, at the time of World War I, was living in England, had mostly English friends, loved England, had no quarrel with England, etc., but decided that he must join the war for Austria while his friend Bertrand Russell was absolutely wrong not to join the war for England. This had nothing to do with claiming one side was “right” or caring who won. In fact, according to Wittgenstein and his biographer and his sister it was about Wittgenstein believing that he personally would become a better person through his participation in senseless obedience and mass killing and getting out of his office for a bit of work in the outdoors.[4] Some of us don’t know which to scream out first, that he was wrong or that he was behaving as a sociopathic monster — when history shows that what we really need is for someone to make this sort of idiocy funny.

Often the claim is made for war that it is not a collection of murders because — as with dueling — there are two sides. Of course, in most recent wars involving big wealthy countries, the killing and destruction have been extremely one-sided — or entirely one-sided as with those fishing boats (which may be a secret and somewhat strange reason why some people object in particular to those killings). But some authors have argued that even with two sides there can be no justification for killing someone just because there is a war.[5] Claiming that both sides (or even just one side) is engaged in the same sort of behavior as a private individual engaging in self-defense is just not true. Soldiers during a war are not expected to try all nonviolent approaches first before resorting to violence, and in fact routinely kill other soldiers who do not pose any imminent threat. Much killing in historical battles has happened after one side has begun retreating. The United States killed 30,000 retreating Iraqi soldiers during the 1991 Gulf War. War makers will tell you that some greater goal justifies all the killing, but that goal is often a secret, very often a lie, and never a worthy goal that couldn’t have been achieved better without war. Claiming that some of the killing is unintentional or collateral is unconvincing sophistry, as one quickly realizes when placing those words in someone else’s mouth. U.S. terrorist Timothy McVeigh blew up a government building in 1995 and claimed that the deaths that resulted were merely “collateral damage” because killing those people had not been his purpose.

If war is murder, then we can move it into the category with all other types of murder, the category of unacceptable murder. Very often those arguing against that move sound a lot like duelists. U.S. government officials talk a great deal about their “credibility.” This has nothing to do with honesty or believability. Rather, it means their reputation as a government that will reliably go to war at the slightest perception of insult. And grievances against insults will last forever, or until they get Cuba back, whichever comes first.

I would happily send war into the same oblivion as dueling. But I would keep various things from each, dramatically transformed of course.

From dueling, I would keep honor. University honor codes began here in Virginia and developed into systems based around trusting students to be honest. I don’t know why I had grown up bitterly resenting any accusation of lying, much like a duelist. But when I attended the University of Virginia, and the professors left the room during the tests, I suddenly had a new favorite historical object: the honor code. But for godsake I wouldn’t challenge someone to a duel over it, which would quite obviously be worse than cheating on a test.

From war I would keep sacrifice. If you want to go be comradely and brave like Wittgenstein and maybe even take risks precisely to make the world a better place (which it’s not clear he cared about in the slightest), do not hesitate. We have a global shortage of fire-fighters. Palestinians need olive-harvesters right now in the West Bank. The Flamingo Revolution in Albania should have all of our support. The best and bravest you can be is nonviolent and the need is infinite.

For a long time, dueling was both condemned as a crime and demanded by society. Trump is regularly denounced for his war on Iran, but whenever he mumbles something semi-coherent about ending it, many a loyal Democrat starts screaming “TACO! TACO!” meaning “Trump Always Chickens Out” meaning Trump must keep the slaughter going or he’s a coward. This behavior does not demonstrate having learned anything from dueling abolitionists. They would have told Trump to find real courage in standing up to the weapons dealers and lobbyists and media pundits and bloodthirsty senators. They would have made fun of failing to end the war, not of proposing to end it.

If we were learning from abolitionists of dueling, we would be working on an emergency plan to recruit and train comedians willing to oppose the war machine. We would be spreading music by people like Jesse Welles (especially his song “War Isn’t Murder”) far and wide. We would be embarrassing warmakers in public and warning politicians not to join their ranks.

Lengthy, elaborate arguments were made to distinguish the good duels from the bad ones. Some defenders of dueling went so far as to claim that 99 out of 100 duels could and should be prevented by talented seconds resolving the disputes with words. But never 100 out of 100, for the simple reason that the defender of dueling was in love with the idea of dueling. Today the fantasy of the “good war” is dangled out in front of Congressional noses and checkbooks. We don’t have to eradicate that fantasy in a day. All we have to do is move things in the right direction, reduce the war spending instead of dramatically increasing it every year. A virtuous cycle will make our work easier as we advance. This is a key lesson from the demise of polite exchanges of bullets.

Another key lesson is that we do not need to replace war with something answering the same supposed needs as war. We don’t need a different tool with which to steal oil or dominate nations or even defend against imagined enemies. Sure, we can put in place unarmed civilian defense teams, courts of law, disarmament inspections, and so forth. But the parallel to dropping the need for a proper punishment of insults would be dropping the need for a proper imposition of violent force. Instead of replacing it with decently behaved non-murderous individuals, we could replace it with decently behaved non-murderous governments engaged in mutually beneficial cooperation toward new and different purposes.

Another lesson is that history is very complex and not all easily controlled. We don’t know when an opportunity will appear or grow or when we’ll succeed in simply creating one ourselves. So we have to keep trying and trying with our eyes open wide in uproarious laughter at the fascistic buffoons risking all life on the planet for their idiotic feelings.

[1] John Lyde Wilson, The Code of Honor: Rules for the Government of Principals and Seconds in Dueling

[2] Stephen Banks, A Polite Exchange of Bullets: The Duel and the English Gentleman 1750-1850

[3] J.G. Millingen, The History of Dueling. Vol. 2 (of 2)

[4] Jeff McMahan, Killing in War

[5] David Carroll Cochran, Catholic Realism and the Abolition of War

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