WHO SAYS YOU CAN'T CHANGE HUMAN NATURE?

New Zealand Listener, Volume 9, Issue 219, 3 September 1943, Page 6

WHO SAYS YOU CAN'T CHANGE HUMAN NATURE?

"The Whole Story of Duelling Shows that Some Day Mankind Will Learn to Use as Much Sense in Settling National Disputes as {t Has at Last Learnt to Use in Settling Private Q@uarrels

N a recent talk, a speaker rom 3YA discussed the idea that "You Can’t Change Human Nature." He described this statement as a popular fallacy: in other words, he was convinced that human nature does change. I wonder how many of his listeners agreed with him? Certainly not the correspondent who subsequently wrote to The Listener and quoted the Bible as evidence that man’s nature has not changed in 5000 years. At first sight this might seem just a dry academic argument. On the contrary, it is a very live issue indeed, since if no clear signs can be discovered that human nature is capable of change, then all our hopes of eventual and enduring world peace are just moonshine, and the human race is doomed to go on suffering wars until the end of time. I should like to venture off the film page for a while and range myself alongside those optimists (we prefer to be called idealists), who believe that, in spite of a good deal of evidence to the contrary, human nature-as reflected in human behaviour — can, and does, change slowly for the better. I leave the theologians to define human nature: it is human conduct that really matters here. At this stage in the argument, it is customary for idealists to point triumphantly to slavery, public hangings, burning of witches, child labour, torture of heretics, opposition to anaesthetics, duelling, and so on, as examples of the way in which the group point of view has changed in historical times. I intend to confine myself to the "field of honour" — that area of human conduct embracing the customs of duelling and single combat, Some Romantic Misconceptions The average person to-day probably thinks of duelling as no more than a pleasantly romantic old method of settling disputes about women or gambling which was once indulged in by a few pleasantly romantic people like the Three Musketeers or the characters in novels by Sabatini, using such pleasant and romantic old weapons as the rapier and the pistol. Until I came to look into it, I had much the same idea myself. Indeed, the very fact that this is the prevailing modern conception of duelling is itself proof of the remarkable change that has come about in a comparatively short time. For, among almost all races on the face of the earth, and in almost every century, the custom of single combat once played a big part. From the abort igines of Australia (whose code of honour was astonishingly elaborate and "civilised"), to the cultured exponents of the "Age of Reason" in France, men have stood up against each other to

decide disputes by the shedding of blood; and it. was only really in the last century that a stop, was put to the practice of settling personal quarrels by an appeal to physical force, in the same way as national disputes are still settled. While it remained in prominence, duelling was a custom that profoundly influenced the lives of millions of men, caused the deaths or maiming of thousands, was the subject of countless laws, edicts, and much heated contro-

versy, drained the best blood of several nations, and even had no small effect on the politics of the days in which it flourished. Hot Words in Parliament Duels between politicians and statesmen were once commonplace in Great Britain, America, and on the Continent, Alexander Hamilton was killed in a fight with Aaron Burr (Vice-President of the U.S.A.). Wilkes, Castlereagh, Canning, William Pitt, the Duke of Wellington, and Charles James Fox are just a few celebrated names among dozens of those who fought (sometimes with serious results), in personal combats which arose mostly from hot words in Parliament. Getting rid of the Opposition by challenging them was a favourite trick of the Royalists in the period just before the French Revolution. Says Carlyle: "Black, traitorous aristocrats kill the People’s defenders, cut up not with arguments but with rapier slits. . .. Traitorous Royalism has taken to a new course; that of cutting off Patriotism by systematic duel." No one can imagine Mr. Fraser and Mr. Holland, or Mr. Doidge and Mr. Lee facing one another, sword or pistol in hand, at dawn in some secluded spot behind Parliament Buildings because of something said during the debate on the Lands Bill. But put the clock back just 100 years and it is not at all difficult to imagine. (There is, indeed, in the old Bowen Street Cemetery just behind Parliament, the grave of a man killed in a duel on Wellington soil). More Fatalities Than in War According to Egerton Castle, an authority, "the latter half of the 16th

century saw that extraordinary mania

for private duelling, which cost France in 180 years the useless loss of 40,000 valiant gentlemen, killed in single combats, which arose generally on the most futile ground." In his Life of Henri IV., the Bishop of Rhodes declared that "the madness of duels did seize the spirits of the nobility and gentry so much that they lost more blood by each other’s hands in time of peace than had been shed by their enemies in battle," Coming much nearer the present day, ‘we find an American authoress telling us that, in the single city of New Orleans, "there were fought in 1834 more duels than there are days in the year; 15 one Sunday morning, In 1835 there were 102 duels fought in that city between January 1 and the end of April; and no notice is taken of shooting in a quarrel." (Does anyone remember the Bette Davis film Jezebel? It was a pretty true picture in this respect). Duels Among Prisoners-of-War And here’s a topical ‘instance of how times (and manners) have changed. Duelling was so much a habit that, in the prison-camp at Stapleton, near Bristol, during the Napoleonic Wars, there were no fewer than 150 duels, with cunningly improvised. weapons, among the French prisoners-of-war shut up during a period of three years, But these, you may say, were Frenchmen, naturally volatile and quarrelsome fellows. Yet I have open in front of me an old book containing an account of some of the most important duels fought in England between 1760 and 1821, It shows that a total of 344 individuals were involved, 69 of them being killed, 96 wounded. And naturally these were not by any means the only duels fought in that time: no gentleman, if he wanted to continue being thought a gentleman, could afford to ignore a challenge, but he did do his best to keep his name out of the papers. Taking into account the much smaller populations of those times, it is probably safe to say that the custom of duelling was at least as great a menace to the days in which it flourished as motoring accidents are to modern times. True, the masses of the people were not greatly affected, but the fact remains that the people who did engage in single combat were the ruling classes — the people who, for nearly all public purposes, counted for most in every country, And yet — where is the custom of duelling to-day? To all intents and purposes it is as dead as the men who took part in it. It is now nearly 100 years since the death of Lieutenant Seaton, the last man to be killed in a duel on (Continued on next page)

The Disappearance of Single: Combat

(continued from previous page) English soil. In 1928 there was some scandal about a duel in Oxford, but this affair is to be taken no more seriously than the story of a fight with swords in Auckland some years back over an allegedly disloyal reference to the King or the rapier fight between two American artists who quarrelled about Greta Garbo, ome describing her as "God’s gift to a stricken world,".the other saying’ that "if he had anything to do with Hollywood he would cast Garbo as a laundry-worker for the rest of her life." They fought on a beach and one was wounded in the thumb, Of a similar comic-opera character are most of the duels still fought occasionally in France, Hungary and South America. Even the fact that in 1934 Hitler lifted the ban on duelling among students at German universities, and later incorporated the duel in the German legal system for certain special cases, does not destroy my argument that the duel is to all intents and purposes a dead habit and that the habit does not return to countries from which it has once been banished For the much. advertised German student duels (mensuren), were primarily branding or initiation rituals, not true affairs of honour, and apart from this, Germany has a much less extensive and lurid history of duelling than eecirel any other European country. The Law Was Impotent Somebody who has followed the argument to this point may be inclined to say that duelling went out of fashion simply because the law stepped in and prevented, it. Yet it is one of the most interesting facts about the whole subject that, almost from the moment when the custom arose, there were laws. against it. Henri IV alone granted 14,000 pardons for breaches of his own anti-duelling edicts, but not all monarchs were so generous: other rulers cut off several illustrious heads in an effort to stamp out the custom, though without much effect. The Church also

strongly opposed private com bat, so that even when the custom was at its height, men who drew

their swords in a personal quarrel knew that they were risking execution or imprisonment if caught. Usually it may be said that laws follow and are moulded by public opinion, but in the case of duelling, almost the opposite seems to have happened. ‘ "Reasons" for Fighting Anyway, what could the law do, when duelling had become such a cast-iron convention of society that men were expected to fight one another because of a misconceived gesture or look, a careless word, the wrong tie of a riband, or the wrong tilt of a hat; when the "lie" (the approved niode of giving or taking offence) was sub-divided into 32 different classes, with a corresponding degree of satisfaction necessary for each class (think of it--32 different ways of calling a man a liar!); and when the lie was

so delicately balanced on the point ut honour that the merest breath of contradiction was sufficient to upset it and bring rapiers flashing from their scabbards? Three stories will illustrate the extraordinary extent and variety of the custom. When a M. Mennon went to a M. Disancour to ask for ‘he hand of his niece in marriage, he was met by this remarkable speech; "Friend, it is not yet time for you to marry. This is what you must do if you would be accounted a brave man. First kill in single combat two or three men, then marry and engender two or three chil. dren. Thus the world will neither have gained nor lost by you!" A contemporary writer quotes a case in Trieste where one man was stabbed to death, two wounded and another executed by the authorities because two brothers were too "stedfastly eied" by various young bloods of the city who lounged on street corners staring at the passers by. And then there were the two nobles of France who fought to the death in front of a church altar to decide who had the best right to a certain’ seat and the first use of the Holy Water! "No Option but to Fight’ Absurd? Of course; but it was even more difficult for a man of those days to defy the duelling convention than it is for the average modern businessman to go to work in an open-neck shirt. I have beside me as I write a book about duelling by a young English officer named James P. Gilchrist It was published in 1821, and this is what he says in a preface dedicated to the Duke of York: "An officer in the British Army faced with a duel has only the option between infamy on the one hand and the infraction of the Articles of war, in combination with the whole mass of civil, moral and religious injunctions on the other. . . . To the author of this work one principle appears fully adequate to the removal of the enormous evils connected with the usage in question. But no soldier dare enlarge on this principle, or give a hint ‘regarding it; a young soldier, especially, must for ever close his lips upon this test of military spirit; for even a whisper on the Christian doctrine of ‘forbearance and for giveness of injuries’ would for ever seal his doom as a military man." That was written in England just 122 years ago! Even Duelling Was An Advance And yet, in spite of all this, the rise and development of duelling was, in itself, actually a sign of moral and intellectual progress — a proof that human nature does change. For, particularly in its earlier form of trial by combat, the duel involved the recognition by public opinion that indiscriminate acts of revenge and private murder must be checked; that it was better for two men to stand up on equal terms in open fight than for one to wait behind a hedge with his retainers and bash the other’s head in. Looking back down the centuries at the story of duelling, one can trace in it the whole slow, unsteady. yet upward course of human behaviour, like a graph that rises, then falls, but always rises again a little higher than before. First, almost unrestricted violence, revenge and private murder; then the medieval judicial combat, ot trial by ordeal of battle, with its mass of prohibitions and formalities; then. largely as a result of one French king having backed the wrong side in one

very famous judicial duel, the decline of trial by combat, and the upsurge of the private "affair of honour," accompanied by all the absurdities and extravangances that I have mentioned, but still in many ways an advance on what had gone before. And then, almost suddenly and almost within living memory, the virtual disappearance of the whole custom of duelling, and the acceptance of the rule of law in the settlement of private disputes. The Men Who Objected And those who, in my view, made the greatest single contribution to the task of eradicating the custom were men like Voltaire and Rousseau, Mirabeau and Camille Desmoulins, who refused to obey the duelling convention; who, in the face of a hostile society, heaped scorn upon it, and attacked it with logic; and who, though fighters in every othe: way, would neither take part as principals in a@ duel nor even act as seconds. So I come back to where I started, with the assertion that there has been beyond doubt a change little short of revolutionary in moral outiook and human behaviour — in other words, in human nature — so far as private warfare is concerned. It was not the force of law but the force of changing «nd improving public opinion that finally ostracised the duel in the 19th century. In the course of time, mankind will learn to use as much sense in the settling of national disputes as the majority of mankind has at last learnt to use in the settling of private quarrels. That is a contentious statement, but we can at least be certain that any arguments arising from it will be decided, not with swords or pistols, but with pen and ink or with typewriters at 10 paces, and employing the tactics of an Italian editor who received a letter in these terms: "Sir,-One does not send seconds to a scoundrel like you. I box your ears by letter instead. Please, therefore, regard both your ears as boxed by me and be thankful that / have not used my stick." To which the resourceful editor rfeplied: "Incomparable adversary,--Con-forming with your demand, I regard my ears as boxed by you by letter for which I thank you. Beater by letter. | blow your brains out with six revolver shots in the same manner Regard yourself as a dead man when you have read the lest line of this letter. I salute vour corpse!"

G.

M.