For most of recent Western history, wearing a sword casually (i.e. not as part of paid employment) was primarily a status marker: it said you were part of the aristocratic class, someone with interests and an honor that you could, in theory, be expected to defend. Toward the end of the early modern period swords began to be replaced with walking sticks in this role, but the idea was the same: you were carrying a weapon because that’s what gentry were originally for.
This didn’t necessarily mean you were expected to shank people on a regular basis, though. The amount of actual swordplay involved varied wildly between cultures and times: sometimes swords were essentially male jewelry, sometimes practical dueling weapons that everyone in your social circle would have been trained with and weren’t too unlikely to have used in anger, sometimes something in between. Note too that the existence of a code duello or the equivalent didn’t necessarily mean it was in common use or had a lot of etiquette built up around it.
Anger is indeed the kind of situation where caution and forethought stand a good chance of being thrown to the wind. Which is allegedly why in Open Carry towns people are remarkably polite and civil to each other.
“Used in anger”, as applied to weapons, is idiomatic; it means use with the intent to cause serious harm (i.e. in war or a duel or brawl), regardless of the emotional state of the bearer.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m generally for weapons rights. But the point I was trying to make is that weapons intersect with culture in ways that can’t easily be summed up by phrases like “an armed society is a polite society”. Sometimes the norms of your subculture demand that they not be used in most conceivable circumstances, and so they generally aren’t and their cultural role tends to atrophy. Sometimes those norms demand that they be used in response to perceived slights, which tends not to produce a polite society as we understand the term but rather one excessively concerned with honor, and where skill with weapons affords you a lot of social power through various knock-on effects. If you’re interested in leveraging arms as a means of decentralized social control you’d probably be shooting for something in between, but judging from history that’s a relatively small target.
Oh. One of those idioms, like when knights say they got into a duel because of philosophical differences. Well, I think my point still stands, that anger is the “bluff” that makes weapons function as deterrent. “No one in their right mind would initiate violence over a small slight; it’s not worth the trouble. But maybe I’m wrathful enough that I’ll do it anyway. Do you want to take that chance?” I understand that MAD functioned under a similar framework, of pretending very hard that your country might be just “crazy” enough to launch a first strike, and made a point of being very first-strike-capable.
As for the rest, I already know that truth resists simplicity. I find all of this very confusing, and lots of nuances elude me, but I haven’t given up on understanding it all yet. I can’t possibly be satisfied with the way things are presented on their face.
Hey, lookit that, something I’ve actually studied!
For most of recent Western history, wearing a sword casually (i.e. not as part of paid employment) was primarily a status marker: it said you were part of the aristocratic class, someone with interests and an honor that you could, in theory, be expected to defend. Toward the end of the early modern period swords began to be replaced with walking sticks in this role, but the idea was the same: you were carrying a weapon because that’s what gentry were originally for.
This didn’t necessarily mean you were expected to shank people on a regular basis, though. The amount of actual swordplay involved varied wildly between cultures and times: sometimes swords were essentially male jewelry, sometimes practical dueling weapons that everyone in your social circle would have been trained with and weren’t too unlikely to have used in anger, sometimes something in between. Note too that the existence of a code duello or the equivalent didn’t necessarily mean it was in common use or had a lot of etiquette built up around it.
Anger is indeed the kind of situation where caution and forethought stand a good chance of being thrown to the wind. Which is allegedly why in Open Carry towns people are remarkably polite and civil to each other.
“Used in anger”, as applied to weapons, is idiomatic; it means use with the intent to cause serious harm (i.e. in war or a duel or brawl), regardless of the emotional state of the bearer.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m generally for weapons rights. But the point I was trying to make is that weapons intersect with culture in ways that can’t easily be summed up by phrases like “an armed society is a polite society”. Sometimes the norms of your subculture demand that they not be used in most conceivable circumstances, and so they generally aren’t and their cultural role tends to atrophy. Sometimes those norms demand that they be used in response to perceived slights, which tends not to produce a polite society as we understand the term but rather one excessively concerned with honor, and where skill with weapons affords you a lot of social power through various knock-on effects. If you’re interested in leveraging arms as a means of decentralized social control you’d probably be shooting for something in between, but judging from history that’s a relatively small target.
Oh. One of those idioms, like when knights say they got into a duel because of philosophical differences. Well, I think my point still stands, that anger is the “bluff” that makes weapons function as deterrent. “No one in their right mind would initiate violence over a small slight; it’s not worth the trouble. But maybe I’m wrathful enough that I’ll do it anyway. Do you want to take that chance?” I understand that MAD functioned under a similar framework, of pretending very hard that your country might be just “crazy” enough to launch a first strike, and made a point of being very first-strike-capable.
As for the rest, I already know that truth resists simplicity. I find all of this very confusing, and lots of nuances elude me, but I haven’t given up on understanding it all yet. I can’t possibly be satisfied with the way things are presented on their face.