The News: A User's Manual

Admiration

Interviewer: Usain Bolt is, hands down, the fastest person on the planet … There’s no one else quite like the Golden Bolt … You are my hero. So how does that make you feel?

Bolt: I feel good.

Interviewer: How do you feel? When you get down on those blocks and you’re about to explode, what actually goes through the Golden Bolt’s mind?

Bolt: All you try to do is just relax, really. For me, it’s always just trying to compose myself, try to not think about anything, because as soon as something comes into your mind, then you are going to be in a lot of trouble.

Interviewer: What does it take to be a champion, not just any old champion, [but] to be a great champion?

Bolt: Well, it’s just hard work … Just hard work and dedication.

Interviewer: What is it that motivates you most now? Is it the winning? Is it being the champ? Is it money? Is it fame? Is it the women?

Bolt: It’s everything.

Interviewer: How many times have you been properly in love in your life?

CNN

1.

THE NEWS CONSTANTLY introduces us to a parade of extraordinary men and women: people who can run faster than anyone else on earth, who know how to make us laugh, who have started revolutionary businesses, who can design succulent meals and whose faces are flawlessly beautiful. Their achievements, personalities and good looks excite us as few other things can. As a result, we often want to ask them how they did it, hear them talk about their childhoods, observe what they are wearing, find out whom they are in love with, peek inside their homes, follow them to the seaside and even accompany them across the road when they go out to buy groceries.

2.

THIS SORT OF interest is almost universally condemned by the guardians of elite culture; in serious company, it isn’t generally endearing to reveal a devotion to celebrity news. Partly this comes down to the belief, widely shared among elites, that celebrities can’t reasonably be deemed admirable or worthy subjects of interest when their contributions to society are held up against the backdrop of humanity’s true problems. In the rare case where the merit of a public figure’s achievement is indisputable, the high-minded suggestion is that we should focus exclusively on the actual accomplishment (the business started or the film made) rather than fixate on its author – as we are wont to do, often, to the point where we become obsessed by the smallest details of his or her life, such as whom he took with him to a dinner party or how she tied her hair back at the beach. The elite implication is that there is something demeaning and childish about the need to hero-worship a famous person who is our contemporary but who doesn’t know us: it seems passive and inferior, a confession of inadequacy, a proof that we are insufficiently engaged with our own projects and ambitions and have chosen to ‘escape’ from our lives because we have no idea how to lead them properly.

Emma Watson buys strawberries, New York City, 2012 (Splash News).

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3.

THIS IS A pity – and rather problematic too, for if serious people judge the very concept of celebrity to be beneath them, then the role of anointing celebrities will fall to organizations entirely untroubled by the prospect of appealing to the lowest appetites.

Furthermore, without proper consideration of the purpose of celebrity, we will find it difficult to think through what we might sensibly want from the famous people who live among us. Can admiration lead anywhere worthwhile? Is there anything substantial or important to be gained from revering others?

4.

THE IMPULSE TO admire is an ineradicable and important feature of our psyches. Ignoring or condemning it won’t kill it off; it will simply force it underground, where it will lurk untended and undeveloped, prone to latch on to inappropriate targets. Rather than try to suppress our love of celebrity, we ought to channel it in optimally intelligent and fruitful directions. A properly organized society would be one where the best-known people were those who embodied and reinforced the highest, noblest and most socially beneficial values, and hence one in which an admission of reverence for a given celebrity would be an occasion for pride rather than a prompt for shame or self-deprecating laughter.

Bravery Heracles of Mantinea, c. 460 BC.

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Athletic Prowess Unknown athlete throwing a discus, 460–450 BC.

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Leadership Pericles, 430 BC.

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5.

IN ITS GOLDEN age, the ancient city-state of Athens was unembarrassed about the act of admiration. The city held a number of virtues dear. It believed in democratic government, military valour, intellectual freedom, civic glory, artistic expression and athleticism. However, its belief in these qualities wasn’t abstract; it focused on a range of exceptional people who realized them in concentrated form – and who found themselves, as a result, celebrated and commemorated in statues, festivals and works of literature. Statesmen like Pericles and Demosthenes, athletes like Philammon the Olympic boxer and Chabrias the chariot racer and musicians like Melanippides and Anakreon were looked up to as practical guides to a life of (eudaimonia) or ‘flourishing’.

In its own history, Catholicism has similarly commended to its believers a cohort of worthy individuals in the hope that their example will provoke admiration and emulation: some 10,000 saints whose good character and deeds are meant to reflect the central Christian virtues of humility, liberality, chastity, gentleness, temperance, patience and diligence. In compendia of lives of the saints, such as the late-medieval bestseller The Golden Legend, everything about these canonized men and women was held to be significant and deserving of attention: what sorts of foods they liked, what clothes they wore, who their families were, what colour their hair was. Furthermore, it didn’t strike medieval Christianity as unseemly, after these saints had been dead for a time, to disinter them, cut their skeletons up and put bits of their bones in special niches and chapels, to which one was invited to travel often great distances in order to worship and take inspiration.

The finger of St Catherine of Siena in a silver reliquary.

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Patron Saint of Difficult Marriages St Gengulphus of Burgundy.

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Patron Saint of Failures St Birgitta of Sweden.

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What underlies both the Christian and the Athenian approaches to celebrity is a commitment to the idea of self-improvement, as well as the belief that it is via immersion in the lives of great exemplars that we stand the richest chance of learning how to become better versions of ourselves. Catholicism specifically advises us that at problematic moments in our lives, we ought to ask what a given saint would do in our place. During a domestic argument, we should, for example, think of the calm and forgiving nature of St Gengulphus of Burgundy, the patron saint of difficult marriages, or equally, when facing professional humiliation, we might regain our composure by summoning an image of the unparanoid and gentle St Birgitta of Sweden, the patron saint of failures.

6.

THE APPROACH OF the Catholic Church towards its saints and that of the ancient Athenians towards their orators and discus throwers provides important clues as to how we ourselves might best negotiate modern celebrity.

A first lesson is that we should endeavour to become a little clearer about what it is that we actually find interesting in the characters we admire. The news seldom helps us here, for it tends to leave the deeper sources of curiosity about celebrities untapped and so prevents us from using their examples properly. It simply circles around famous people with a kind of manic energy, asking them again and again what a certain achievement ‘felt like’, or posing a succession of bland logistical queries about when their new film will start shooting or else positioning tenacious paparazzi in the bushes to capture their expressions as they leave the dry cleaner’s – as though these tactics could really assuage the inner itch generated by something good which one evidently detects in a confused way within a celebrity’s personality.

Keeping the example of the Catholics in mind, we should try to locate those celebrities who can best function as guides to virtues we need to bolster in ourselves, perhaps bravery or playfulness, wisdom or creativity, confidence or forgiveness. Out of the hundreds of celebrities that the news introduces us to (from peace negotiators to painters, sports stars to neuroscientists), we should pick out for ourselves a set of people of genuine worth, whose attitudes and achievements can inspire us to lead more successful and contented lives. With no supernatural intent or childish idealism, we can be fortified by holding in our minds a loose ensemble of secular ‘patron saints’, famous people to whom our thoughts may turn for encouragement and inspiration at moments of sterility and lassitude.

To help in this quest to use celebrities more productively, we should redesign that grievously flawed staple of the news: the celebrity interview. A genre at present predominantly fixated on personal revelations and undirected questions about ‘the new project’, the interview should in the future become a chance to answer one question above all others: ‘What can we learn from this famous person?’ It shouldn’t matter that the celebrity operates in a field different from our own. Lessons are transferable and virtues operative across activities. The ideal celebrity interview would help us to answer such questions as: ‘Although I am not a tennis player, what can I learn from the attitude to a bad call displayed in the second set by the eventual Wimbledon winner?’ Or: ‘Although I have no artistic ambitions, how might the example of the multi-talented artist, adept at everything from pottery to architecture, breathe energy into my own career plans?’

We should cease to treat the better celebrities like magical apparitions fit only for passive wonder or sneaky curiosity. They are ordinary humans who have achieved extraordinary feats through hard work and strategic thinking. We should treat them as case studies to be pored over and rigorously dissected with a basic question in mind: ‘What can I absorb from this person?’ The interest that currently latches on to details of celebrities’ clothes or diet should be channelled towards a project of growth. In the ideal news service of the future, every celebrity story would at heart be a piece of education: an invitation to learn from an admirable person about how to become a slightly better version of oneself.

7.

WE ARE USED to thinking that anyone who ‘copies’ a celebrity is sad and inauthentic, but in its highest form, imitation founded on admiration is integral to a good life. To refuse to admire, to take no interest in what distinguished others are up to, is to shut ourselves off, grandly and implausibly, from important knowledge. The job of the news is to make the celebrity section no less exciting than it is now, while ensuring that it provides us with psychologically rich, pedagogic portraits of certain noble-minded individuals who will spark our imaginations because they properly help us to address the flaws in our personalities and the knots in our ambitions. Celebrity news should, in its mature form, be a serious and respectable medium through which we learn to become more than we currently are.