COVER -> DAY ONE
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I can just about understand Coca Cola wishing to retain the services of J.K. Rowling to promote it; after all, she writes well and her books are popular. I can understand, too, Pepsi securing the services of Britney Spears who, I am told, sings quite well and who is, I know, very popular. What I cannot understand is a widespread obsession with 'celebrities' that do nothing at all.
The latest example here is a certain Lady Victoria Hervey who, from what I can tell (I don't read tabloid newspapers or gossip magazines) has simultaneously exhibited a small quantity of breast and buttock and inveighed against the poor for receiving tax payers' money. As I am ill equipped to furnish an adequate description of her flesh and am so contemptuous of her attempt at social analysis, I will confine myself to trying to reach some general conclusions about what the cult of celebrity tells us about ourselves.
The starting point is obvious; in a society so wedded to the visual media, visibility is the most important facet of celebrity or, as Christopher Lasch put it: "Success in our society has to be ratified by publicity".
Jean Baudrillard, referring specifically to the United States, noted its lack of depth, but he might equally have been writing about most of Europe. In a culture where people are largely ignorant of their past -- or have not yet had a unifying past created for them -- and are uncertain about the future, it is difficult to find heroes so we only have the present to absorb our capacity for worship and escapism.
The point about creating the past is important because, in an attempt to forge unity from diversity, nation states have inevitably mangled history to form a coherent narrative, a phenomenon noted in a broader, cultural sense by Krishan Kumar.
Uncertainty about the future is, of course, intrinsic to the human condition; if we knew our futures we could not bear the present and, at a more trivial level, betting on horses would cease.
In what some people, without knowing how to define it, call the "Postmodern" age, we have complicated this blessed uncertainty by replacing scepticism with cynicism and by damning those who cannot meet our need for instant gratification. Whether the cynicism results from the disintegration of a world view or whether it somehow triggered the disintegration is a fascinating subject entangled with the cultural implosion in Vienna before the First World War, the War itself and the formulations of Einstein which were broadcast very shortly after it. In fact the adulation of Einstein is the last example I can recall of instant and widespread adulation for a cultural achievement.
As far as I can ascertain, our condition was first diagnosed in a remarkably prescient book written half a century ago by David Riesman in which he described three phases of social development. In the first we were driven by tradition, a period which lasted approximately to the end of the 17th Century. In the second, covering the period of the Enlightenment and romanticism, we were driven from within. And in the latest phase, emerging in the 20th Century, we have come to be driven by the opinions of others.
Thus (my conclusion), you can't be important nowadays unless other people think you are.From there it is not a very great step to the idea that because other people think you are important, you are.
We are trapped, as Richard Kearney puts it, in a: "Labyrinth of inter-connecting mirrors from which there is no escape", so pieces of the present are repeatedly reflected and intensified, without any reference to the past or the prospects for the future. In this sense, our whole existence is a grim game whose rules were devised by Lacan and Derrida.
In the past there were celebrity and escapism but these were trivial compared with the moral and physical struggle to survive. Now, in our media trap, we have lost all sense of proportion. According to the philosopher Alasdair Macintyre it is worse than that; the title of his great book After Virtue says it all. He says our loss of the past has left us each with our "emotive self" and so, lacking any real character; we can only look to celebrity to differentiate the ordinary from the other.
I was overtaken in these reflections by the ever more surreal stories emerging about the final hours of the Clinton Presidency. Whatever his good points, and I have never been backward in remarking them, the man is clearly without any sense of shame and, perhaps, lacks a clear working definition of right and wrong in the sense that Macintyre would understand it. Clinton's inadequacy, according to poll evidence, is shared by a large minority of his fellow citizens who think he has done no wrong but that might simply be blockheaded partisanship.
What we have in the place of a sense of moral responsibility are two related phenomena, victimhood and litigation. Both arise from an inability to take any responsibility for the world which afflicts us so that we always have to find somebody else to blame. No wonder people increasingly find classical literature incomprehensible. There is not much litigation in Shakespeare and all the suicides arise because the abyss of despair is too deep not because the plain of our existence is too shallow.
The temptation is to see time as a continuum and the temptation for those looking back over it is to see it as a continuum of decline. Personally, I have no wish to live beyond my statistically allotted span and will be content to take refuge in my fortress of books but I have no doubt that there will be an ethical revival, a return of virtue, a recognition of responsibility. What I do not know is the nature and extent of the catastrophe which will be required to bring this about.
REFERENCES: Baudrillard, Jean: America, Verso, 1982
Kearney, Richard: The Wake of Imagination, Century Hutchinson, 1988
Kumar, Krishan: From Post-Industrial to Postmodern Society, Blackwell, 1995
Lasch, Christpher: The Culture of Narcissism, W.W. Norton, 1991.
Macintyre, Alasdair: After Virtue, Duckworth, 1985
Riesman, David: The Lonely Crowd, Yale, 1950
