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Edited on Sun Feb-28-10 02:13 PM by Igel
lawsuits in the case of death are pointless. Somebody hits your kid with his car and kills him, why sue? Most people in the US would probably sue to punish. It's that kind of culture. Even then it doesn't usually settle anything--you still hate the other person and would probably seek to do him harm if you could. But we settle for it because we're not usually about to pick up a gun and blow the other guy away.
At least that's true of people in the dominant US cultures.
But other cultures--and Anglo-Saxon culture, as well as probably Roman culture and Celtic cultures--had the concept of blood money. We still have the word. In Arabic it's diyyah. It's to compensate the family/clan/tribe for the loss in resources, and essentially prevents what we'd have called the "avenger of blood" in older times. Instead of a vendetta, a blood feud, you exact money. It's not "atonement" in the sense of buying off divine justice, bribing God to give you a pass. It's "atonement" in the sense of setting things right between tribes and clans and preventing a blood feud. It's an important part of any honor-based system, because unless you exact blood money from the side that's wronged you're not just (a) at an economic disadvantage, but (b) you've been shamed. The family is free to accept or reject blood money, the family or clan is free to bargain for other things (when it's bargaining with equivalent units, another family or clan) such as food, water, or women (or even men, but less often), or to include punishing specifically the perp as part of the deal.
In other words, it's culturally relevant and culturally sensitive. It's how things are done. When in Rome, dontcha know?
One problem--and it's a big one--occurs when the units that have to negotiate are too big to be cohesive, to be able to negotiate; or when one unit feels it's so important that it doesn't need to or is on a divine mission so it can't. Or even when the idea of a blood feud has survived but the mechanisms for reconciling the parties via blood money have faded. Then you get unfettered blood feuds that will rip a society apart. It happened in Iraq. It could easily happen in Pakistan or Afghanistan. Fortunately, much of "Pakhtunistan" is sufficiently un-modern/non-Western that it's less likely than it was in Iraq.
There are subcultures in the US at that stage. Hatfields and the McCoys, Crips and the Bloods, in some ways they're cut from the same cloth. (That's bound to offend people all over the place.) The Burr-Hamilton and Lermontov-Martynov duels are wayposts on the way from this kind of culture to the dominant US culture. For them, honor still had to be paid for in blood but devolved upon individuals and not the clan. In most cases in the US, honor doesn't require blood; in fact, most of US, I think, will tend to think in terms of some sort of abstract justice that has to be served, not in terms of honor. Again, this varies by subculture.
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