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Fame and the media

30 November, 1999

We’re living in a cynical age, writes Sean O’Conaill, one in which the media offer people instant celebrity substitutes for the leaders of the world who no longer command respect. This is a dangerous power.

When the Soviet Empire collapsed in Europe a decade ago, we in the West celebrated and relaxed. The memory of young people dancing on the Berlin wall is still vivid. Only a decade earlier, many people of the same age had expected global nuclear war. Now that threat had been miraculously removed, US President George Bush forecast a ‘New World Order’ based upon the principles of human rights, free enterprise and democracy.

Here in Ireland, the final defeat of Communist ideology was seen also as a great Catholic victory – a vindication of those who had spent decades praying for the conversion of Russia. Catholicism was certainly under pressure in the West generally, but it seemed secure in Ireland. The Pope, who had visited Ireland to great acclaim in 1979, was now being hailed as one of the heroes of the Soviet collapse. Sacramental observance was ebbing slightly, but it was still markedly higher than in any other Western country. The Catholic clergy and episcopacy in Ireland enjoyed enormous respect, that gift of an Ireland not only free but forever (it seemed) Catholic as well.

Loss of respect for leaders

And in Ireland a spate of sex scandals, beginning with the flight of Bishop Casey in 1992, completely undermined respect for Catholic priests and bishops. Church observance began to melt away – as though the collapse of faith in clerical leadership was also a collapse of faith in God. Almost overnight, it became commonplace to think of this country as Post-Catholic Ireland, especially when a sudden economic resurgence allowed many to put their trust in money instead. These days Irish bookshops are more likely to contain volumes on Buddhism and New Age spirituality than on Catholic theology or lives of the saints.

Rise in cynicism

This is the other side of the problem of fame. There seems to be a law of moral gravity also: the higher people or institutions rise in the estimation of others, the harder the fall from grace – and fall is inevitable. Fame has the bitterest price of all, and it appears to be degradation.

But again there is nothing here that the wisdom of the ancient world did not know. Judaism’s greatest hero, David, is clearly revealed as flawed also. He used his power as king of Israel to arrange the death in battle of the husband of Bathsheba, the woman he just had to possess. Power itself seems to corrupt innocence – which is why we prefer to remember the boy with the sling who overcame Goliath, to the mature man, not king, who behaved so dishonourably. And the same rule applied to the Pharaoh, Nabuchadnezzar, Saul and Herod. The disgrace of Bill Clinton, and of Richard Nixon before him, merely replicate a very old story. We humans just can’t handle fame – even though we seek it avidly. ‘Rich and Famous’ – the American dream – seems to be a passport to disaster.

Desire out of control

The worship of the world seems, therefore, to be deadly dangerous. Hitler’s gift for evoking adulation led to boundless ambition – those waves of glorification from the massed ranks of Nazis at Nuremberg lay at the root of the most terrible war ever fought on earth.

“Which of us is the greatest?” asked the apostles, right up to the eve of the crucifixion. The glory they had expected to share, and elevation to the rank of brother of the new David, melted away at Gethsemane and Golgotha.

Hollowness

One of the greatest failings of the ‘Catholic Ireland’ in which I grew up was that religious observance had become a condition of social respect. To put it bluntly, if you didn’t go to Mass, especially in rural Ireland, you were that awful pariah, a lapsed Catholic, and on the road to hell. To earn respect you said the Rosary and received the Eucharist: if you didn’t you invited the worst kind of insult and sometimes even social ostracism. It followed inexorably that there was a great deal of insincerity in religious observance: people often went to mass in order to flatter the world or to avoid criticism, rather than out of love for the man who had exposed the world’s hollowness.

Healthier situation

The same factor lies at the base of the new interest in spirituality. People are now seeking a deeper understanding of reality, and a way of living that is genuine and loving. The sad thing is that they are more likely to look anywhere but to the spiritual resources of the church that had so wrongly associated truth with outward show, taking ostentatious religiosity at face value. Most tragic of all, they are more likely to find sustenance in the oriental religion or neo-paganism than in the teachings and life of Jesus of Nazareth – the one who understood hypocrisy best of all, and led a life of total integrity. This is the price we are paying for the fact that the church in ‘Catholic Ireland’ was also a pyramid of esteem, a means of social ascent, a worldly institution that valued outward conformity above inner integrity. To the extent that it remains this, it will remain unable either to understand what has happened or to take advantage of the moment.

Media power

It follows inexorably that their power too will be abused, resting as it does upon the arrogance of monopoly. They sell the spotlight to whoever can pay the highest price, exchanging ‘fame’ for money. They make millions for doing nothing more than exploiting institutions in decline, those who were powerful yesterday but on the slide today – the monarchy in the UK, the Catholic Church and yesterday’s political elite in Ireland, the Clinton administration in the US, the Kohl establishment in Germany, the Christian Democrat party in Italy. They make millions more from feeding popular fascination for footballers, film stars, and pop musicians. These ‘stars’ rise and fall on a weekly basis – holding out the prospect of fulfilment of Andy Warhol’s 1960s prediction that soon everybody would be famous for a quarter of an hour.

Power for harm

Here too is one of the most important causes of random violence – for we are still fascinated by violence, and the media flock to wherever blood is spilt. In this fact we find an explanation for matters as different as the Gulf War, the terrorist war in Ireland, football hooliganism and the school shootings in the US. In all of them there is the lure of celebrity, dependent upon the media’s fascination with violence.

Yet God is not mocked. The closer the 21st century gets to the lunacy of the Herods, the closer it gets also to understanding the peerless gift of the life of Jesus Christ.

This article first appeared in Reality (March 2001), a publication of the Irish Redemptorists.

There is enormous power for harm here – in the arrogance of those who enjoy acclaim, and the self-condemnation of those who sit forever in the dark, knowing the spotlight will never fall on them. Here is the source of the unhappiness of people who try to sleep around the clock on alcohol, heroin or cocaine, dreaming in a mental world detached from the real one, or seeking death by anorexia. Here too is the root of the deprivation of millions in the less developed world, and in the slums of the first and second. The price of fame is always the same – the depression of those who must be starved of attention and respect when these are focused upon the totally undeserving few. And the price grows with the power of the media – no ruler of the ancient world came close to commanding the audience for satellite television today.While many institutions have lost respect in Ireland, one has climbed to sole power, so far feeding on the respect it has earned for assisting in the process of exposure. The media is the new power in the West, the power that must be courted by anyone bound for the top. That power rests upon something very simple: the ability to decide who is in and who is out of the spotlight, who is going up and who is on the way down. The media are now the sole controllers of public admiration and fascination, the arbiters of fame.This is the most important reason for the sudden collapse of religious observance in this country. It is Ireland’s revenge for decades of humbug. And it has created a far healthier situation. As there is no longer any social kudos for religious observance, those who practice are far more likely to be sincere, and to understand the crucifixion at a far deeper level.“Why do you call me ‘good?’” Jesus asks; “No one is good but God.” This rejection of the option of self-admiration is part of a pattern throughout the Gospel story. Jesus does not seek glory from the world, but sets out to expose its hollowness. In this way, he earns the world’s hatred instead, and pays the ultimate penalty – a humiliation he so clearly doesn’t deserve that the wisdom of the world – secular and religious – is clearly exposed as a sham. What we consider ‘great’ almost always conceals a moral hollowness – and Caiphas and Pilate are revealed as the straw men they were.The problem seems to be that when we are told by enough people that we are ‘great,’ we begin to believe it. We become infatuated with ourselves, self worshipping – and therefore self-indulgent, withholding nothing we desire. And since our desires are therefore no longer under control, this self-admiration can escalate to a point of boundless appetite and uncontrollable arrogance. Something like this must have led Herod the Great to slaughter the innocents of Bethlehem and Herod Antipas to decapitate John the Baptist. Their self-respect depended upon maintaining the myth of their own ‘greatness’. They had become trapped within their own mystique, unable to step back into reality.Cynicism, however, is the church of the moment. All the institutions that once serenely floated on a cushion of unreflective respect – church, state, judiciary, medicine – now struggle to regain credibility in a sea of disillusionment, tribunal investigation and media exposure. We have had so much bad news that we have developed a daily expectation of more.Just over a decade later, we look out on a different landscape. In the West generally, and in Ireland especially, there has been a collapse of respect for leadership, both secular and religious. Names once great – Kohl in Germany, Andreotti in Italy, Clinton in the USA, Haughey in Ireland became associated with self-indulgence and the abuse of power. The media, which had once lauded them, now picked avidly over the ruins of their reputations.

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