[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.
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.
Because the writers of history tend to emphasize the crimes of their historical enemies. Had the Tories been victorious we might hear of the terrorism of the Boston mob.
This would be my own major guess, just like "family values" politicians nowadays. People are just incredibly bad at tracking who walks the walk as opposed to talking the talk. Robin Hanson would probably guess that this means people don't really care all that much about the substance as opposed to the group affiliations (I mean, I'm not Robin Hanson, but it seems like a Hansonian thing to say). I would also point to what I see as a widespread and incredible degree to which people have trouble seeing reality through labels or even consciously distinguishing the two.
My only quibble is the conceit that Byron "chose" when it's more that he acted out without sufficient self-control. He was able to get away with it because he was prodigiously gifted and, significantly, produced his popular work when he was young. He lived off that early success in many ways. But Byron was unable to control himself in his life or in the construction of his poetry, as demonstrated in the saga of how Don Juan became his life.
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.
But several of these have never been considered to be "moralists" particularly, even if they would sometimes utter "moralistic" statements about public affairs. Who ever thought that Sartre was a "moralist"?
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.
Wordsworth changed quite a bit over his life. He and Coleridge were early enthursiasts for the French Revolution, but responded to its bloody denouement by becoming arch-conservatives. Wordsworth isn't much admired for his writing on anything later in life.
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.
Why is it that those who seemed at the time to most emphasize morality often end up later looking the least moral?
You probably have some near/far explanation for this, and I'm interested to hear it.
But in the example you gave, I only see a contemporary poltical faction identifying itself with a past political faction. Unsurprisingly, the contemporary political faction considers its selected predecessor to be moral. Furthermore, since this particular contemporary faction considers its contemporary enemies to be immoral moralists, it therefore also considers the enemies of its predecessor to be immoral moralists.
In other words, the dynamic you observe is the result of mapping a contemporary political dispute onto a past political dispute.
Wordsworth thunders about "morals" - he's seen as moral. Wordsworth does morals - he pisses people off and is seen as a busybody. Wordsworth desires to win friends and influence people. You do the math.
I think it is because moral systems are primarily concerned with sustaining and propagating a particular ordering of society. The individuals seen as most moral at a given time are those who promote the established order. Part of that promotion generally includes denigrating alternative orderings of society.
As the established order changes, the old order is redefined as an alternative order, and those who most fiercely promoted the old order are now seen as immorally promoting alternatives to the present ordering of society.
I met Murder by the way:He had a mask like Castlereagh.
Have you read "How the Dismal Science Got Its Name"? It traces Thomas Carlyle's attacks on economics to his hostility to the British antislavery movement, of which John Stuart Mill was the leader and which many economists supported. The literary and humanist intellectuals, such as Carlyle and Ruskin, seem to have been sympathetic to the cause of the slaveowners; Carlyle in particular thought that a human being without a master was a lost soul.
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.
Because the writers of history tend to emphasize the crimes of their historical enemies. Had the Tories been victorious we might hear of the terrorism of the Boston mob.
This would be my own major guess, just like "family values" politicians nowadays. People are just incredibly bad at tracking who walks the walk as opposed to talking the talk. Robin Hanson would probably guess that this means people don't really care all that much about the substance as opposed to the group affiliations (I mean, I'm not Robin Hanson, but it seems like a Hansonian thing to say). I would also point to what I see as a widespread and incredible degree to which people have trouble seeing reality through labels or even consciously distinguishing the two.
My only quibble is the conceit that Byron "chose" when it's more that he acted out without sufficient self-control. He was able to get away with it because he was prodigiously gifted and, significantly, produced his popular work when he was young. He lived off that early success in many ways. But Byron was unable to control himself in his life or in the construction of his poetry, as demonstrated in the saga of how Don Juan became his life.
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.
But several of these have never been considered to be "moralists" particularly, even if they would sometimes utter "moralistic" statements about public affairs. Who ever thought that Sartre was a "moralist"?
I wish it were that simple.
ad:
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.
Wordsworth changed quite a bit over his life. He and Coleridge were early enthursiasts for the French Revolution, but responded to its bloody denouement by becoming arch-conservatives. Wordsworth isn't much admired for his writing on anything later in life.
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.
Why is it that those who seemed at the time to most emphasize morality often end up later looking the least moral?
They'd done their good deeds for the day by talking about morality?
Why is it that those who seemed at the time to most emphasize morality often end up later looking the least moral?
You probably have some near/far explanation for this, and I'm interested to hear it.
But in the example you gave, I only see a contemporary poltical faction identifying itself with a past political faction. Unsurprisingly, the contemporary political faction considers its selected predecessor to be moral. Furthermore, since this particular contemporary faction considers its contemporary enemies to be immoral moralists, it therefore also considers the enemies of its predecessor to be immoral moralists.
In other words, the dynamic you observe is the result of mapping a contemporary political dispute onto a past political dispute.
Yes, its author is down the hall.
Wordsworth thunders about "morals" - he's seen as moral. Wordsworth does morals - he pisses people off and is seen as a busybody. Wordsworth desires to win friends and influence people. You do the math.
Why is it that those who seemed at the time to most emphasize morality often end up later looking the least moral?
Looking the least moral to whom? In the quoted article John Dolan despises Wordsworth and praises Byron - does everyone today agree with him?
After all, some people would disagree with some of his opinions such as:
no heads ever deserved to roll more than those lopped by the so-called Terror
I think it is because moral systems are primarily concerned with sustaining and propagating a particular ordering of society. The individuals seen as most moral at a given time are those who promote the established order. Part of that promotion generally includes denigrating alternative orderings of society.
As the established order changes, the old order is redefined as an alternative order, and those who most fiercely promoted the old order are now seen as immorally promoting alternatives to the present ordering of society.
Shelley, around the same time, wrote
I met Murder by the way:He had a mask like Castlereagh.
Have you read "How the Dismal Science Got Its Name"? It traces Thomas Carlyle's attacks on economics to his hostility to the British antislavery movement, of which John Stuart Mill was the leader and which many economists supported. The literary and humanist intellectuals, such as Carlyle and Ruskin, seem to have been sympathetic to the cause of the slaveowners; Carlyle in particular thought that a human being without a master was a lost soul.