The beauty of the duel in its ability to instantly curate the gene pool of the literati.  It forces a man to weigh his adjectives against the literal weight of his own mortality.

Let’s be honest about the current state of our collective national discourse, which has devolved into a fetid mess of tepid, womanly, high-pitched shrieking – a digital playground where the most egregious offense is a “ratio” and the primary weapon of choice is the anonymous report button.  We are living in an era of unprecedented, world-class cowardice.  The pussificaation of the modern man – and I use that term with a clinical, diagnostic precision – has led to a society where any low-rent hack can spout vitriol from behind a glowing rectangle without the slightest existential fear of a physical accounting.

We need more duels.  People need to be far more afraid of being shot than they presently are.  There, I said it.

The fundamental problem with the contemporary “cancel culture” ecosystem is its inherent lack of skin in the game.  It is a chickenshit, passive-aggressive avenue for the weak to tear down the bold.  In the 19th century, if you publicly maligned a man’s character or suggested his prose was the literary equivalent of a syphilitic fever dream, you didn’t just wait for a notification: you waited for a knock at the door from a “second” holding a box of polished mahogany.

Take, for example, the high-stakes, lead-based feedback loop of February 16, 1821.  John Scott (of whom the dear yet historically benighted has undoubtedly never heard), editor of The London Magazine, was a man who understood the recursive, high-velocity nature of accountability.  He had spent months engaging in a relentless, textually dense assault on the “Blackwood’s” crowd (you don’t know who the hell they were either) – specifically John Gibson Lockhart (him neither), a man whose talent for the literary hatchet job was matched only by his refusal to be “subtweeted” into submission.  Confused?  I know.  Suffice it to say, there was a lot a static between a couple of editors.

When the friction between these two reached a critical, thermodynamic mass, they didn’t exchange snarky GIFs.  They didn’t start a Change.org petition.  They recognized that some disagreements are so fundamental, so deeply rooted in the fiber of one’s honor, that they can only be resolved by the ballistic trajectory of a lead projectile.

The Protocol of Honor (A Lost Art)

The Challenge: A direct, masculine confrontation with pistols.  No “blocking,” no “muting.”
The Field: Chalk Farm at moonlight.  The ultimate IRL meeting.
The Result: Scott took a bullet to the guy from Jonathan Christie (Lockhart’s proxy).

The Virtue of Consequence

There is a profound, almost spiritual respectability in the way these men operated.  To stand at twelve paces and stare down a rifled barrel is the antithesis of the modern penchant for digital sabotage.  It is a rejection of the “refreshing for likes” dopamine loop in favor of the adrenaline-fueled of the duel.

When you know that lipping off to the wrong man might result in a surgical extraction of your liver via a dueling pistol, you tend to choose your words with a level of care that is currently nonexistent in our low-T, high-speed internet culture.  Scott died, yes – fatally wounded in a display of peak 19th-century bassassery – but he died with a level of dignity that a thousand “canceled” TikTokers could never hope to achieve.

We have traded the pistol for the post, and in doing so, we have sacrificed the only thing that kept the peace: fear.  A society that refuses to fight is a society  that deserves to be bored to death by its own mediocrity.  Give me the smoke-filled field at dawn over a passive-aggressive thread any day of the week.

So the next time you feel brave enough to launch a character assassination from the safety of your phone, ask yourself: would you pull the trigger at dawn, face-to-face with your target?  Because that, dear reader, is what it means to stand behind your words.

N.P.: “Mercy” – The Native Howl