Let us not Praise Famous Men (a celibate celebrity?)
The composer William Schuman, before his death, was asked in interview whether or not he would have preferred to be more famous than he was, given his munificent talent and accomplishments, known more fully only within cultured circles. His response remains instructive: ‘Given the many factors and their quality that go into the construction of fame in our time, I would not have preferred that.’ He later suggests that these factors distract from one’s work, appeal to the baser emotions, and exist as well as temptations to the artist to lend to his intent an outside influence which takes away from the work itself. This rejection of fame can be seen as a secularized version of that Augustinian, the first detailed statement we possess about both temptation and the perils of persona over against personhood. Sirach’s ecclesiastical text, from which the phrase, itself famous, originally comes, speaks to us through much of the Gospels, providing not merely a sense that some of Hebrew ethics are ported quite bodily into the nascent Christian outlook but as well, that, barring any overzealous sense of messianic property, prodigality, and perhaps yet propriety, from the period between c. 170 BCE and c. 80 CE, a quarter of a millennium which seems so telescoped from our vantage point as to be a single moment as well as a singular one, the popularity and use of Sirach was such that Jesus’ sensibilities could only be translated by way of these older and more established rhetorical remarks.
However this may be, it is clear that the many moments, especially in Matthew, wherein Jesus is quoted as expressing almost exact advice and counsel as does Sirach, tells us of a consistency in the Hebrew outlook under Roman rule. It is the view of a people conquered and striving to make the best community possible in harsh times. Agee and Walker’s Roosevelt-era document bearing the same title tells indeed the same story; of the courage and even nobility of the most marginal persons in Depression America, working to make as generous a community as possible under severe hardship. In a word, such persons are to be celebrated not because of their fame, which none in life possess, but rather are to be recalled and exalted because of their lot and their response to it; Sirach can be thus seen as the original hagiographic accounting. It is an unfortunate coincidence that the Hitler Youth leader and sometimes poet had a similar name as the Hebrew ecclesiast, but for Balder von Schirach, fame was something with which one got drunk. He reminds us, also in interview, that ‘Hitler’s genius made him a man without measure’, but does add that this can cut both ways, as it were. Fame accrued during a life of missionizing – on the side of the marginal themselves, Jesus, on the side of the margin itself, Hitler – makes it more difficult to distinguish its ‘use and abuse’, if you will. For the ability to convince others of one’s mission is of the utmost to its continuation.
Jesus was executed on a personal vendetta, Schirach served a full twenty-year sentence handed down at Nuremberg for crimes against humanity, of which he maintained until his death he had no knowledge. One wonders at the fate of the famous, but not at the destiny of fame itself. Our entire relationship to the former is disingenuous in the extreme. We vault this or that person into a persona and hope to see them topple from their aerie perch. Celebrity in our society is a function of ressentiment alone. We love the idea of fame whilst hating those who have it. As long as they do remain persona, we provide for them our modernist worship; adulation, fandom, wealth and other privileges of both exclusivity and even outright exclusion. But when their actual humanity shows them to be as we are, then the pressing question collapses the card-castle; why them and not us? ‘How is it that I am not rich and famous’?, is an extrapolation of the less outlandish but still resentment-fueled ‘what does she see in him?’ type of query. In it, there is a promotion not so much of self-doubt, that which our very existence can authentically challenge us and indeed needs do so, but rather a self-denigration, which can only add to our resentment. What transmutes mere resentment into malicious existential envy is just this conundrum; what is it about me that is of less merit than her?
It thus very much matters how a culture defines merit. For the ancient Hebrews, insofar as we can judge through their writings, the meritorious is a combination of pious and ritualistic adherence to taboos and mores, and a willingness to speak of ideals otherwise in their face. For the Reich, ritual too is certainly present, but in this ‘new religion’ that Hitler, at a dinner with English aristocracy of all things, announced he would create, and more or less to himself seated at a long table overburdened with silver and glass, it is rather the expression of cultural will itself that is the most noble thing. It remains a stunning logistical and economic accomplishment that, in spite of the overwhelming demands made of Germany under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, in a scant few years the nation transmuted itself from the very margins to the very center. The Reich is, historically speaking, writ large the personal transfiguration of the converted Jew. This ‘new religion’, godless and yet just as mythical as any antique belief, in its extermination of European ‘Jewry’, found for itself the ultimate conversion experience. And its model had been present specifically in German Romanticism; the overcoming of the person, the death of the self by its self-transcendence through art.
The Reich’s non-rational ideal was to create a society based solely upon art. Those whose livelihood was gained by attaching themselves, like parasites, to either art itself or the life of the artist – presumably, artists of Jewish descent were deliberate frauds, mocking the superior works with their doggerel dogma, hence the preponderance of their works displayed as ‘Entarteite Kunst’; though it is important to recall that a number of ‘Aryan’ artists’ works, notably those of Otto Dix for instance, were also included in these ‘showings’ – were to be removed, not only from the discourse but also from society as a whole. Such is fame, one might say at this juncture, for its fickle flame is fanned now here now there, by this one and then by that, one work adored and the next disdained – Richard Strauss, himself the Reich’s Arts Director for some years before he resigned due to his support for Jewish artists, knew these ups and downs of celebrity very well – that Schuman must be understood as being quite correct in his estimation thereof. And just as no God survives an absence of belief in Him, so no celebrity is left standing who, through her own shared humanity, exhibits in any way the mortal coils of an equally human life.
The radical conception of a God on earth is the origin of celebrity. Jesus himself shunned it, which was presumably part of the whole point of working as the neighbor figure alone, even within the confines of ‘embodiment’, but since then we have bodily embraced it. Mass media is ever on the look-out for the next messiah, whether it be in politics, popular music, sport, or self-help, amongst others. Those whose mission stands the test, not of time, but rather of taste, endure as part of a pop-culture pantheon, to be repeated, with self-serving irony, in the afterlife. We regularly hear musicians and critics extoll ‘heaven’s band’, which by now would have to be the ultimate super-group. The unutterable nonsense of celebrity must needs extend itself into what has been ‘shown to us as a mystery’ only; even the apparent dotards of antiquity understood that much. That we continue to praise the persona framed round an otherwise human life and ignore the person within such frames only speaks to the loss of Godhead historically, and the corresponding loss of community socially. Coupled with the desperation exhibited in cursing an immortal conception with a merely human life, fame does a double disservice to both forms of being; it at once commits God to an ill-fitting grave while destining Humanity to resent its own existence.
G.V. Loewen is the author of 59 books in ethics, education, aesthetics, religion, social theory and health, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.