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The honorable fistfight is best suited for an environment like school. It includes a level of trust and familiarity. There is some authority figure nearby who can keep things from getting out of hand. Most of this is not replicated in the real world. Most physical altercations occur between strangers in a bar, a traffic dispute, or a misunderstanding in the street. Sometimes in those places, like a bar, there's a mutual understanding, but more often there is not.
What part of it do you consider expansive now?
Exactly. Like, if you try to kick my ass because you missed a turn, you might wind up dead. When I don't know anything about you except you are incapable of regulating yourself after you've fucked up a traffic signal, there's not even a partial desire to test my strength or your honor. I don't trust you. The people committing 4 million simple batteries a year don't deserve the benefit of the doubt from me.
Let me kick your ass a little, it'll be good for ya might be convincing from a Certified Mottezan. I suspect you're not going to break my ribs if you've managed to knock me out. The real world is not made up of Mottezans. In my experience, people that escalate petty disputes to physical confrontation are exactly the kind of people you cannot trust to regulate themselves or use appropriate judgment.
We're long past the point where you can or should trust a stranger to know when you're beat-- if such a world ever did really exist. The situations where a fistfight is good for you are rather limited. The situations where encouraging fistfights ends up as a good thing for society even more limited. Are fistfights more justifiable in some cases of lethal self-defense? Sure, you shouldn't whip out a pistol when Jack, your roommate in college, finds out you've been sleeping with his girlfriend. How many of those circumstances actually occur in one's life? What kind of demographics most frequently escalate fistfights to homicide?
I don't think boys should be expelled from school for getting into a fistfight. Zero tolerance policies are dumb. Encouraging physical violence is not going to improve our society, at least not in any way that a well-armed society can't.
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