How come white men no longer try to kill each other over insults to their honor?
Less than 200 years ago, it was not unheard of for well-to-do, cultivated gentlemen to try to kill someone if they felt the person had insulted their honor. For example:
- In 1859, U.S. Congressman Dan Sickles shot and killed a man in cold blood across the street from the White House, because the man was sleeping with Sickles's wife. Sickles surrendered to the police and was acquitted by a jury.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Sickles - In 1848, Judge Francis H. Cone attacked Georgia representative Alexander H. Stephens with a knife, because Cone had heard through the grapevine that Stephens had called him a traitor in a private conversation. Bystanders saved Stephens's life by pulling Cone off him, but by that time Cone had already given him several near-fatal knife wounds. AFAIK, Cone was never prosecuted.
http://bowieknifefightsfighters.blogspot.com/2010/12/knife-assault-on-alexander-h-stephens.html Why did this kind of thing stop happening? Did cheating and insults somehow become less hurtful?
No. What happened is that people basically decided that these things weren't worth getting violent over. If somebody insults you, you deal with it in a lawful, non-violent way (unless you're a thug).
This was a change in
attitude. People decided not to kill each other over an insult.
There's a lesson in this for people who think the Nigger word is special. Sure, it's enormously insulting. But it's still a
word. People can learn to control how they react to it.
But for people to learn that, society needs to stop acting like the Nigger word gives its target a pass for going nuts.