Anyone who is well known, who in our culture is best known for being well known, whose commodity value is “celebrity” divorced from anything of value he or she has actually accomplished, is probably not worth knowing. This is rooted in common sense, of course, not merely a wish to revel in contrariness. If the culture we have inherited embraces corrupt values, and if fame is granted almost exclusively to those who reflect those values, why would I want to know anything about Paris Hilton or Puff Daddy? I choose those names almost at random, though their manifest silliness makes them irresistible. Even I, who am relatively immunized against the celebrity bacterium, who doesn’t watch television or listen to contemporary pop music, go to the movies or follow sports, have some attenuated notion of who these people are.
Thanks to Dave Lull for sending me an essay on celebrity by Theodore Dalrymple headlined “Pope Rosie? Pray for us,” published on Sunday – where? The New Criterion? City Journal? Nope: the Los Angeles Times, at the epicenter of the celebrity industry. Here’s Dalrymple’s conclusion:
“The cult of celebrity trivializes everything it touches. But then I ask myself: Was there ever a time in human history when people judged serious matters by serious criteria? If so, when was it, and when did it change?”
As a rhetorical device, questions unaccompanied by explicit answers are assumed to carry their own implicitly unhappy answers. Obviously, most people have never “judged serious matters by serious criteria.” Why is Jerry Falwell better known than Dietrich Bonhoeffer? Toni Morrison than Cynthia Ozick? Allen Ginsberg than Geoffrey Hill? Fame is conferred and acknowledged by a conspiracy of impoverished imaginations. In section 94 of Speech! Speech! Hill writes:
“Where are we? Lourdes? Some sodding mystery tour.
What do you mean a break? Pisses me off.
Great singer Elton John though. Christ
Almighty --- even the buses are kneeling!”
Elton John’s ascension in 1970 coincided roughly with the breakup of the Beatles. I’ve always thought of that as a significant hinge in rock history, one more symptom of decadence and decline. Hill’s snottiness, his linkage of fame with worship (a linkage Dalrymple also makes), is delicious. Boswell quoted Johnson as saying, “In civilized society, personal merit will not serve you so much as money will. Sir, you may make the experiment. Go into the street, and give one man a lecture on morality, and another a shilling, and see which will respect you most.”
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Received authority, then, becomes difficult for us when authority belittles ideas or culture. Equality however might mean authority (or fame) could work with culture--hopefully!
The Hood Company
I love the Oxford book of Aphorisms edited by John Gross.
Here is a Spinoza from Ethics,1677:
"Those are most desirous of honour and glory who cry out loudest at its abuse and the vanity of the world."
Some other comments on the futility of power and on fame:
Here is Shelly's "Ozymandias"
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
and ....THomas Gray, a quote from his "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard"
"The paths of glory lead but to the grave"
All paths lead to the grave.
Your point is well taken (and well expressed) but the Ozick/Morrison comparison unfortunately seems to be about something else...
May, exactly and that is the point of the Gray elegy, death is impartial, democratic and inclusive.
here is the entire quatrain:
The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave,
Awaits alike th' inevitable hour:-
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.
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