Discover more from Overcoming Bias
[Lord Byron] chose to be noisily “immoral” not because he was any worse (or any better) than the average aristocrat of his time but as a weapon against the moralism of Wordsworth. I don’t mean “moralism” in a normative sense – God no. I remember sifting through the elderly Wordsworth’s letters looking for any comment at all on the Great Famine which was extirpating the Irish, and finding only one remark, in which the great moralist earnestly prays that England will not weaken, ie provide any aid whatsoever. It’s one of the curiosities of English literary history that you’ll never find the least particle of compassion for the Irish in “moral” poets like Wordsworth.
Only the “mad, bad and dangerous” Byron mentioned the slaughter of 1798, attacking the PM, Castlereagh, for “dabbling [his] sleek young hands in Erin’s gore” and, as Pope would have recommended, delivering an extra kick to his enemy’s corpse in this epitaph: “Posterity will never survey a nobler grave than this: here lie the bones of Castlereagh: stop, traveler, and piss.”
More here. Why is it that those who seemed at the time to most emphasize morality often end up later looking the least moral?
Hat tip to Paul Gowder.
Byron vs. Wordsworth
I give Byron some authenticity points for going off and dying for what he believed in. No way Wordsworth or the rockers you compare him to would've done that.
"Why is it that those who seemed at the time to most emphasize morality often end up later looking the least moral?"
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.