In the 19th century sword and gun duel were not that rare, think about Mathematician’s Gallois death for example, it seems to be a thing of the past as the last duel occurred in the late 60’s.
Politics also used to be pretty violent, with fascist leagues in the 30’s and even after the war tons of pretty violent fight between political activist in the 60’s and various armed group including full terrorist groups (RAF, ETA and more).
Without saying that today world is peaceful and today politics is “nice diplomacy” things seems pretty laid back simply compared to our parent era and let alone the 19th century.
I would have expected that people would take advantage of modern medicine to be more violent. A duel, or a street fight between political opponent would be way more survivable than it was 100 years ago, so how comes these stuff seems mostly from the past ?
The two aren’t correlated in that way because nobody is thinking to themselves “I want to inflict an amount of damage commensurate with what can be treated by modern medicine”. If things have devolved to violence, the goal is probably to kill the other.
Politics gets more dangerous as tensions rise in a country. It has nothing to do with what injuries people think can be recovered from. Also we as a society have mostly decided that violence isn’t a good way of solving political disputes. A duel doesn’t tell you who is right, only who is left.
And let’s not forget, duelling always carries a risk of death. Nobody is thinking in terms of “oh don’t worry, as long as they get me to a hospital quick enough I’ll be fine”, because a bullet to the heart or head is still a killing blow.
Pain hurts and people avoid that
I think it stems more from the correlation between modern medicine and modern weaponry.
A duel would be difficult with swords, and yes you could be cut badly but more bruised and possibly broken bone.
A duel with guns, yeah you dead.
way more survivable than it was 100 years ago
Threat assessment, in a nutshell. Back then you could be relatively sure you were evaluating the threat level of any encounter fairly accurately. You could tell if your target was far more privileged than you, deadly weapons were reasonably obvious. These days you have no way of knowing whether your target has immediate access to deadly weaponry, an unseen group of potential reinforcements via socials, or if law enforcement will be able to investigate and prosecute your actions whether there are witnesses or not.
Clarifying edit: I answered in the spirit of speculation, allowing the premise for the sake of conversation.
You aren’t accounting for the increase in cool stuff that makes people want to stick around longer. There’s at least one more Dune movie coming and even a Rebel Moon for the Snyder people. When dueling was popular people were going to church for fun… If you believe in an afterlife and most of your time is spent peasanting about, why not have some fun in a duel?
I love the idea of people who would REALLY want to be in a duel, but don’t want to risk it just in case Half Life 3 gets released.
Even if people were thinking “i want to just harm someone in a way that they can still make a full recovery”, modern medicine also tells us much more about ptsd and other mental health issues that can happen from violence. So even if the while premise of “let’s get violent, they can heal” was true, it would still lead to less violence
I wager the reason why people are not dueling each other, to solve their differences today, is that they simply have more options in how they go about it. I don’t think the survival rate of stab wounds factor in to the decision at all. We have a more accommodating legal system to turn to. One that serves more people than ever.
On another note. If you have to pay for your own medical cost and you live in a place like the USA; then you would probably want to die. If you live in a more civilised pace, then your fellow citizens will pay for your treatment and then promptly lock you up for wasting taxpayer money and endangering yourself and others, like a crazy person.
Give it about 300 more years…
