1. Bias. We get a thrill out of proving that people who claim they’re better than us are actually worse than us, so we cherry-pick examples. It’s exciting news when a televangelist turns out to be gay, but not when thousands of televangelists are faithful heterosexuals. This post tries to claim a trend based on one story. Since Robin is interested in raising suspicion of anyone who tries to be or claims to be moral, we should be wary of his ability to impartially pick out representative stories and identify trends from them.

2. It’s become common in the past few centuries for the ruling-class/conservatives/traditionalists to call their views “morality”, and for people rebelling against the status quo to accept that label and personally identify as “immoral” – even if they’re motivated as strongly by a sense of righteousness and justice as the other side – in order to dis-identify with the hypocritical morality of the ruling class. If you read Byron’s poems carefully, you realize he’s actually obsessed with what we would call “morality” – but he deliberately rejects what he thinks is the sham that passes for morality in his age. As such, we would expect many people who criticize immoral ruling class actions to be those who put less work into signaling as “moral”.

3. We tend to remember especially moral people not as “moralists”, but for their specific crusades. We remember Wilberforce as an abolitionist (not a moralist), Gandhi as a pacifist (not a moralist) and MLK Jr. as a campaigner for racial tolerance (not a moralist), even though all three of those people talked a lot about morality. Therefore the only moralists who are remembered *as moralists* are the ones who may talk a lot about morality but don’t actually do any particular moral things.
This says more about our biases than anything else – post 20th century, we are suspicious of formal “morality” and especially “moralism” and tend to identify it with cliched Dr. Laura type figures or self-righteous hypocrites, while describing genuinely moral people with other words and emphasizing where they differed from established moral systems.

We tend to think a person chooses and that in our eyes gives a greater moral weight to the actions. I tend to object to both: people often act out rather than make conscious choices and what one feels and is may be as significant as a reasoned choice. In other words, rebellion yes but with less choice and more immaturity, more wildness.

And Wordy is a straw man of an argument. I admit to trouble liking his work enough to treat him fairly but he was one poet, one man, perhaps of a type but one of many poets and public figures who filled a spectrum from outright crazy to staid. To set Byron and Wordy up as a representative duo is a student paper construct – one I think I fell into years past.

As for templates, Byron is one but certainly not THE one. He isn’t even THE dying young rebel template, but one of many. And Byron’s place in these groups is enhanced by his time in history and, more importantly, that his work is read today by the educated in colleges, etc. Others less known now had huge impacts on the youth and aspirations. But it’s such a selective reading of history to pluck Byron out of the line-up in the first place.

Right. Byron is the precursor of all those bad boy rockers who sometimes pose as immoralists and then lecture us on global warming or how bad a person George W. Bush was. Like Byron, they often get downright preachy.

Meanwhile, Shelley, Byron, Hazlitt et. al. don’t seem to me much better in ignoring, and in some cases praising, the revolutionary bloodshed and Bonapartism that followed. They were all passionate moralists, just of a more trendy kind.