Mark Rowlands on the modern phenomenon that links suicide bombers and hot young Hollywood

The things I do in the name of research. It is an idea breathtaking in its brilliance and stunning in its simplicity: if only I had thought of it when I was a teenager. The person who actually thought it up was Joseph R. Francis – currently facing federal prison on tax evasion charges, which goes to show just how much a good idea can screw up your life if it’s followed by a not so good idea. The essence of Francis’ good idea is this: ask girls to take their clothes off. Here’s the surprising part: they do. Girls Gone Wild is an extraordinarily successful series of short films. The title effectively captures the oeuvre: the films feature teenage or twenty-something girls going wild in various, broadly sexual, ways – including exposing breasts and/or buttocks to the camera with additional fondling of said breasts or buttocks when deemed necessary. In hindsight, perhaps my office wasn’t the best place to be conducting this research – various quizzical eyebrows being raised by the odd student showing up unannounced to ask questions about this or that essay. Leave me alone: can’t you see I’m working.

The question is: why? Why would people want to man-handle – or, more accurately, girl-handle – themselves in front of a potential audience of millions? Why anyone would want to watch this is an equally good question – but one for another time. What these young ladies want, it seems, is neither money nor respect but fame. And if so, this says a lot about the current state of fame.

I am not being judgemental; still less misogynistic. I have no moral problem with girls who have gone wild. I come not to judge but to understand. And, in particular, I want to understand the sort of fame that motivates them and why it is such a powerful motivation. In any case, men are equally susceptible to the lure of fame. Mercifully, there is, at least as far as I know, no corresponding series Boys Gone Wild: presumably because there are significantly fewer people interested in watching boys man-handle themselves. Nonetheless, men are keen to get in on the act in any way they can. And to do so they have to find entirely new, and often rather eccentric, ways of publicly humiliating themselves. For example, on an episode of The Graham Norton Show, a small but nonetheless non-negligible portion of the programme was devoted to watching a man have his back, rear, and scrotum waxed (the “back, crack and sack” as it is apparently known in the industry). There’s no judgement here: perhaps hairless nether regions do indeed have their merits. But who would volunteer to have such regions rendered hairless in front of an audience of millions? Who would want to do it? And, more importantly, why would they want to do it? This rather ghastly image provides, I think, another lurid example of modern fame and our obsession with it.

Who wants fame? Judging from the popularity of TV shows that deal, in one way or another, with fame, it seems that most of us do. There are programmes whose entire raison d’être is to take people off the street and make them famous. Some of these shows trade on modest talents these people possess innately. Others – Big Brother providing the most obvious example – eschew the need for talent altogether (although some might argue that the post-eviction ability to trade pleasantries with the terrifyingly manic Davina McCall is itself an impressive kind of talent). Other types of show deal with the lives, loves, tribulations, and scandals of people who are already famous. And there are magazines in their gazillions that deal in similar fare. From humble beginnings, fame has risen from obscurity, like a Joaquin Phoenix from the ashes, to become perhaps the most pronounced cultural phenomenon of our time. But in the process something has happened to fame. Perhaps all the attention has gone to its head. But, for one reason or another, fame is not at all what it used to be. Fame has gone wild.

Fame was once so diffident and demure. She was – bar the occasional indiscretion – very careful in the company she kept. She used to consort with people who, in one way or another, deserved her. They deserved her because of some exceptional act, achievement or ability. In virtue of this act, achievement or ability, they became worthy of respect, and respect is what used to do it for fame. Of course, she made the odd mistake. But generally, she got it right. Now, she’s about as demure as a gaggle of girls from Croydon after their tenth double vodka and red bull.

What happened? How did fame become, as we might put it, new variant fame – vfame; like vCJD? What is the rogue cultural prion responsible for the transformation of fame into vfame? A cultural prion that breaks the connection between fame and achievement the way the biological prion responsible for vCJD breaks the connection between CJD and old age? And, the most important question of all: what does Osama bin Laden have to do with all of this? The answer, I’ll try to show, lies in a remarkable philosophical experiment that began in seventeenth century France and continues to this day. This experiment became known as the Enlightenment. But to really understand this experiment, we must first go back to fourth century BCE Athens.

Footnotes to Plato

Here is an outline of the story I’m going to tell. First, vfame is a symptom. The significance of vfame lies not in what it is in itself, but in the fact that it is a symptom of something else. The question, then, is: what is vfame a symptom of? I’ll argue that it is a symptom of a form of cultural degeneration that has a specific character. The next question is, then, obviously, this: what is the specific character of this cultural degeneration? To understand this, we have to examine the nature of the culture in which the degeneration occurs. Our culture, is built on two major principles. The first, it acquired from ancient Athens, and, in particular, from the philosopher Plato. The second is more recent, being supplied by certain intellectual developments that occurred in seventeenth and eighteenth century France. The intellectual heart of the modern West, is provided by the combination of these ideas. This leads to our fourth question: why should a culture formed on the basis of these ideas naturally undergo a form of cultural degeneration? The reason is twofold. First of all, the idea supplied by Plato and the idea supplied by eighteenth century France are mutually compatible – but only just. They exist in a constant state of tension with each other. What we call the West always was a delicate juggling act. Secondly, and more importantly, each of the ideas naturally degenerates – largely due to certain deficiencies in human character – into something else: they naturally deteriorate into inferior and pernicious forms. If the West was a juggling act to begin with, then the difficulty facing the juggler is significantly – and perhaps even fatally – exacerbated by the fact that the balls can, at any time, turn into shit.

The decisive contribution of ancient Athens was supplied by Plato in his rejection of a doctrine associated with a man called Protagoras. Protagoras, at least according to Plato, claimed that “man is the measure of all things”. Plato thought there were two things Protagoras could have meant by this. The first was a claim about truth; the second a claim about value. The first claim would be that truth is relative to us. What is true or false depends on what we believe, on what we think is true. This, I think, is unlikely to have been Protagoras’s view, since it is a truly asinine doctrine that, today, can find a home only in English and Cultural Studies Departments. More sensibly, however, Protagoras can be interpreted as making a claim not about truth but about value. As such, his claim is an expression of what has become known as moral relativism.

According to this, standards of right and wrong are relative to cultures not in the anodyne sense that different cultures have different ideas or beliefs about what is right and wrong. Rather, the claim is that what actually is right and wrong is culture-relative. What people believe about right and wrong exhausts everything there is to know about these things. In this, moral claims are like ones concerning legality. It makes no sense to say, for example, that driving on the left side of the road is illegal. It all depends on where you are. The idea of a culture-independent right or wrong makes no sense with legal statutes. Legal statutes are essentially culture relative. Protagoras, in effect, argues that the same is true of moral rules or principles. There are no culture-independent standards of right and wrong.

For various reasons, upon which we need not dwell, Plato won. And history is, of course, written by the winners. As a result, the West, which was in part Plato’s legacy, became based on moral objectivism: the idea that there are standards of right and wrong independent of people’s beliefs about these things. The importance of Christianity in supporting this belief should not, of course, be underestimated. But neither should one underestimate Plato’s influence on the development of Christianity.

Plato’s objectivism, however, naturally degenerates into another form: fundamentalism. Fundamentalism is, basically, objectivism without the arguments. Fundamentalists take the idea of the objectivity of values defended by Plato, but dispense with the sorts of arguments he used to actually defend it: and not just Plato’s arguments; any arguments. One thing you can never take away from Plato, and his mentor Socrates, is this: whether or not you actually agree with their arguments, at least they provided them! That is what philosophy is all about – trying to develop arguments in favour of what you believe, and never simply being content with what you believe. Philosophy is all about arguments, and without them it is nothing. Socrates and Plato were among the first to understand this. And that is why they are justifiably counted among the greats – even if you don’t think their arguments actually work.

Philosophy is therefore anathema to fundamentalism. Fundamentalism is in the business of not providing arguments – indeed of stopping them in their tracks. A fundamentalist “justification” – if I may use the term loosely – is one step removed from “Because I say so”. Indeed, it’s not clear that there is even a step. For obvious reasons, “God says so” or “this holy text says so” are both versions of “my faith tells me so”. And this is just a variant of “I say so”.

However, because of certain human frailties, moral objectivism of the sort defended by Socrates and Plato has a natural tendency to degenerate into fundamentalism. The primary frailty in question is that many of us simply don’t like arguments, and we have little respect for them. Most of the time, we believe what we want to, and hang the arguments for or against those beliefs. It is easy to see why. Arguments are difficult. Thinking is hard. Sometimes it really hurts. Therefore, we try not to do it if we can possibly help it. One can hardly blame Socrates and Plato for this basic human predilection: they effectively invented philosophy to subvert it. Nevertheless, Plato’s legacy to the West of moral objectivism has ensured that fundamentalism has continually dogged our tracks. From its conceptual inception the West has been haunted by fundamentalism.

Enlightenment Individualism

The second idea upon which the West has been built is individualism. This is the idea that a person’s life typically goes best when it is lived from the inside: that is, when the person is allowed to choose how they are going to live it, and to live it on the basis of the choices they make. Accordingly, the most important thing in life is individual choice, and this is one of the most fundamental values that society must respect. Of course, it is not always true that a person’s life goes best when they are allowed to choose how to live it. The choices we make are not always good ones and, as a result, we can often make an embarrassing mess of our lives. But individualism is the idea that, in general, the lives of the people who can choose how to live them are, in some notoriously difficult to pin down sense, better than the lives of those who are not.

It might be thought that the West is, therefore, hostile to Plato’s moral objectivism. Wouldn’t Plato be more in favour of an authoritarian society constructed with a view to safeguarding objective values? Many people have thought so, most notably Plato himself. Plato was famously attacked by Karl Popper as an enemy of the “open” – i.e. free – society. The ideal society envisaged by Plato was an authoritarian one where each person was allotted a place determined by his or her innate talents; and where all were subject to the philosopher kings – those with most insight into the world of forms.

The genius of the Enlightenment, however, was to take the Platonic project of rational inquiry into objective truth and value and see that this project was best pursued by people who were equipped to do so by living lives of autonomous self-realization. The principal merit of the free society bequeathed us by the Enlightenment is that it makes us the sorts of being that can pursue the Platonic project. That is why, at a less superficial level, the Enlightenment is the fulfilment of Plato rather than his rejection.

But there is an even deeper connection between the two. Without Platonic objectivism, individualism wouldn’t even make sense. There is a certain fragility – more accurately, an instability – that lies at the heart of the Enlightenment project. The value of individualism lies in its promoting the possibility of self-realization: the idea, very roughly, that people should maximize their abilities and potentialities, thus becoming all they can be. You do this through the choices you make and your willingness to learn from those choices. However, it can’t be that any choice counts as self-realization. If absolutely anything you do counts as self-realization, then the idea of self-realization is vacuous. This point has been developed forcefully by the Canadian philosopher, Charles Taylor.

How do we avoid this? We avoid it by accepting that individualism makes sense only against a background of objectivism. What we need to do is ensure that not every form of self-realization counts as equally good as any other. And to ensure this, we need an objective system for ranking our choices – the choices we make in realizing ourselves. Not every choice we make is as good as any other. Some choices are better than others. Some choices are good ones, some are excellent ones; some are positively banal, and some are just plain stupid. It is an unfortunate, inconvenient, but nonetheless necessary truth that if there is no such thing as a bad choice, then there is no such thing as a good choice either. Or, as Gore Vidal once put it: it’s not enough to succeed; others have to fail. This leads us back to objectivism of the sort defended by Plato. Far from being a rejection of Plato, Enlightenment individualism seems to require him.

This makes it truly unfortunate that, like objectivism, individualism also has a degenerate form – a degenerate version with which it is frequently confused. We have already encountered this: it is our old friend Protagorean relativism – this time applied to individuals and the lives they lead. Thus applied, relativism is the idea that all forms of life are equally viable and therefore equally valuable. This vapid form of relativism is not only seriously confused; it is, from the perspective of the Enlightenment, unintelligible. The core ideas of the Enlightenment make sense only if we have some objective system of value that we can use for ranking choices: a system that will allow us to recognize that some choices are better than others.

This means that the West is, in many ways, a confusing place to be. It is confusing in the sense that its products – us – are continually misunderstanding it. And no wonder. The West is based on two principles – which are, in fact, compatible but which we often think are not. And each of these principles easily deteriorates into its own degenerate form, a form that we often confuse with its non-degenerate alternative.

Lightness and Weight

The collapse of objectivism into fundamentalism is one of the ways in which Enlightenment can degenerate. We are all familiar with the products of this sort of degeneration. There is the Christian fundamentalism that would, on the grounds of faith, entreat us to ignore the theory of evolution, one of the most empirically confirmed theories of all time, and replace it with the teaching of a facile creationism. On the other hand, there is the Islamic fundamentalism that perpetrates spectacular atrocities. And scarcely a week seems to go by without some Islamic mob or other, numbering in the thousands, parading through the streets of some city or other calling for the death of someone or other: Jews, gays, “The West”, cartoonists, award winning novelists, teachers, teddy bears, etc.

We are all familiar with these symbols of our age. But we are, in our own way, just as familiar with the other sort of decline to which Enlightenment is susceptible; the degeneration of individualism into a vapid relativism that refuses to recognize distinctions of quality. The logical culmination of this decline is a constitutional – and, for us, it may also already be a congenital – inability to distinguish quality from bullshit. This decline is the soil in which vfame can grow. This decline is the cultural prion responsible for the transformation of good old fashioned fame, diffident and demure, into her slutty alter-ego.

The tensions, contradictions and degenerations of the Enlightenment, I suspect, write themselves into our souls in various ways. Each of us is a mélange of competing drives, tendencies and forms of self-understanding. The fundamentalist understands himself as defined by his values in the sense that were they to change, he would no longer exist as the person he is. His values are, in this sense, identity-constituting. For the relativist, unconstrained by any sense of objective standards of evaluation, what is important is that you choose your life and not what life you actually choose. Your life goes best when you have authority over your life in the sense that you are the author of it. But an author – one and the same author – can write many books. And if there is no way of evaluating these books, then it is not what you write that is important, but that you write. A person who thinks of herself in this way understands herself as existing prior to and independently of the values she endorses.

I think the Czech novelist Milan Kundera has done more than anyone to explore the tensions, and potential deteriorations, endemic in the Enlightenment project. He represents the distinction I have just drawn in terms of the dichotomy between lightness and weight. In his most famous book, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, he writes:

“The heaviest burden crushes us, we bend beneath it, it presses us to the ground. But in the love poetry of all centuries, the woman desires to receive the burden of the male body. The heaviest burden is, therefore, at the same time the image of the most intense fulfilment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more they are real and true.

“On the other hand, the absence of weight makes the human being become lighter than air, he flies away, removed from the earth and his earthly being, and becomes only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant.

“What then shall we choose? Lightness or weight?”

Kundera has done more than anyone to show the barrenness of each type of life unconstrained by the other. The life of pure heaviness is the life of a fanatic; it is a life of a person so dwarfed by their values that they have become merely an empty place-holder for them. But the life of pure lightness is the life of a ghost; the life of someone who drifts through their existence never really touching and never really being touched by anyone else.

It is no coincidence, I think, that more and more suicide bombers are “home grown”. Nor is it any coincidence that many of them are recent converts to Islam. It is still less of a coincidence that many of them are former drug users or petty criminals. The sheer emptiness of those acquainted with the life of unadulterated lightness makes them fertile soil for a purpose or cause: and, often, any purpose or cause will do.

If the rise of fundamentalism is one sort of decline that the Enlightenment can undergo, then the rise of vfame is the corresponding, mirror, form of degeneration. Fame can transmogrify into vfame only in a society where individualism has degenerated into the sort of relativism that is no longer able to understand that there is such a thing as quality and it, in fact, is not all bullshit. It would be a mistake to think of the two forms of degeneration as separate. Each reinforces the other because each is a reaction to the other. The tribulations of Enlightenment are manifested in a plethora of princes and princesses of Young Hot Hollywood, and more importantly in our fascination with them. But for every one of these, as part of the same underlying historical process, there is an Osama bin Laden.

This is an edited extract from Fame, published by Acumen as part of the Art of Living series.