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.
(picture credit 11.5)
Patron Saint of Difficult Marriages St Gengulphus of Burgundy.
(picture credit 11.6)
Patron Saint of Failures St Birgitta of Sweden.
(picture credit 11.7)
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.
Envy
For a rich guy with a private jet and a million-dollar sports car, Elon Musk is unusually quiet and shy. He is tall, with long arms and big hands and a boyish face that often looks distracted; you can tell the wheels inside his head never quite stop spinning. Before he founded SpaceX in 2002, Musk created two Internet companies: Zip2, which he sold to Compaq in 1999 for $307 million in cash, and PayPal, which went public shortly before being sold to eBay. Musk, the largest shareholder, was 30 years old.
Wired
1.
THE WEEKEND CAN be the time for the softer bits of news: the colour supplements, the tech, design and media blogs, the style sections and the interview and profile pieces. This is where we may learn, over the course of an hour or so of browsing, about the twenty-five-year-old chef who runs four successful seafood restaurants in Lower Manhattan, about the fashion label started up by the daughter of a well-known film director, about the Silicon Valley entrepreneur who has set up an online university backed by $1 billion in Qatari venture capital money, about the revered German artist at work on his own museum in Berlin and about the former Wall Street banker who is about to open twenty boutique hotels across China – all of this on a morning that began with a sense of inner ease, calm and dedication to domestic goals, with the sun filtering through the curtains and the sound of birds in the garden outside.