The Culture of Celebrity, Let us now praise famous airheads, is an essay by the American writer Joseph Epstein, published in the conservative Weekly Standard magazine. It is literate, well-reasoned, witty, worldly and wise. Epstein begins with a study of formal meaning and current usage of the word “culture” with several witty asides about corporate culture, the culture of poverty, and the culture of journalism.
His definition of the culture of celebrity involves fraudulent self-promotion for the sake of publicity and power. This evokes what Harry Frankfurt discussed as Bullshit.
The title of the essay is familiar. It is an allusion to Eccliasticus 44:1, “Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us”, a passage sometimes invoked by 19th century writers. It inspired Rudyard Kipling, who alludes to it in the verse forward to his novel of English Public (Boarding) School life, Stalky & Co.. “Let us Now Praise Famous Men” is better known to students of journalism, photography and the history of 20th century in America as the title of a book by James Agee and Walker Evans, published in 1941.
For the most part, Epstein’s essay is politically neutral. His conservative loyalties appear when he writes about public intellectuals – he calls them publicity intellectuals. His point that academics, writers and commentators promote themselves should apply with equal force across the political spectrum, but he makes it seem, by taking shots at the late Susan Sontag, that liberal intellectuals are less credible than his conservative friends and allies. He seems to be following the lead of Richard Posner’s book Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline (ISBN 067400633X). Posner’s book is apparently neutral, but conservative writers have been using it in aid of the project of discrediting liberalism.
Author: Tony Dalmyn
Red-neck Eschatology
On Thursday (October 13) the Wpg Free Press published an article called “Intellectuals, The Empty Drums of Scholarship” on the editorial page, in a section called View from the West. The author was Barry Cooper, professor of political science at the University of Calgary, and managing director of Calgary office of the Fraser Institute. He writes a regular column for the Calgary Herald. This article was probably a reprint his column in the Herald on October 5, published as “Ignatieff’s Vanity”. It is an attack on Michael Ignatieff
Cooper’s criticism of Ignatieff is that he is a liberal, and his concern is that Ignatieff is rumoured to be considering entering Canadian politics as a Liberal. Ignatieff has had tremendous media experience and he has a background and presence that would put him on a par with Pierre Trudeau as a formidable candidate. Cooper tries to dismiss Ignatieff as a mere intellectual dilettante. He also criticizes Ignatieff’s willingness as a liberal, to use power to implement an agenda that Cooper, as a conservative, finds to be utopian, inherently oppressive and potentially totalitarian.
Alzheimer
Dad and I attended the Alzheimer Society workshop, called Living with Alzheimer Disease, on September 24 and Saturday October 1. It was scheduled for 10 hours over the two days, divided into 6 presentations or workshops. Dad and I went to all three sessions the first day and one session the second day. I had coffee with him and discussed the workshops. We got package of printed material which included printed versions of the Powerpoint slides that some of the presenters used, and some other literature. I picked up other fact sheets, booklets and pamphlets. In the presentation and literature the person with the illness is generally identified as the person or individual, and sometimes as the patient. For social services, the person with the illness is the client.
Intervention
My mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer Disease just before Christmas last year. She has been showing short-term memory loss, losing track of what she is doing and acting erratically for the last two to four years. My father has been trying to manage on his own and has been resisting involving the provincial Home Care program. He says Mom made him promise not to “lock her” up in a nursing home, and he has been respecting her wishes. In the last few months she has started to wander, and has become increasingly paranoid and agitated. He has also mentioned a couple of episodes when she became angry and hit him. He has been keeping information to himself, and has only recently started to share his concerns.
My sister Teresa asked me to help to convince him to attend a care planning workshop with the Alzheimer Society (AS), and I went with him. This was, obviously, an intervention. The work and the worry have been wearing him down, and her symptoms have been getting worse. He can’t manage the disease. He can’t reason with Mom – he never could. He doesn’t like the message that she is ill to the point of being crazy. She is losing control. He needs someone independent to help him see that it isn’t personal. He is going to live through some bad days, but may be able to minimize them and still have some good days.
Civilization
Roger Sandall’s essays on anthropology and culture are clearly written and forceful. I suspect that his opinions represent a Minority report in current anthropology. I found his site when AL Daily linked his essay on the Mayans, Collapsing the Maya. His essay on The Noble Savage, Rousseau or Lucretius is carefully reasoned. His essay Tribal Yearnings, which is about Karl Popper’s theory of an open society and the legitimacy of tribalism, is fascinating.
Pet Peeve
From Spiked, a book review Self Help: More than just a Sham, reviewing SHAM: How the gurus of the self-help movement make us helpless, by Nicholas Brealey. One of my pet peeves. The reviewer r mentions several fakirs including “Dr.” John Gray, who wrote Men are from Mars – a charlatan right down to his phony doctorate. Like Chopra, Gray is a graduate of the Maharishi’s scamming system. The Skeptic’s Dictionary has a longer entry on Chopra.
Serenity
Serenity got some cautiously supportive advance reviews in the Free Press and I decided to catch it at a Sunday matinee when it opened last weekend. It is an adaptation of Joss Whedon’s Firefly TV series. I wasn’t familiar with this series – I went to the movie as a Firefly Virgin. Most or all of the regular cast of the series were in the movie. They have a fair number of TV guest credits and a few movie credits, but none of them have achieved any stature in the movie industry. Canadian actor Nate Fillion, who plays Captain Mal Reynolds, was in Saving Private Ryan. British actor Chiwetel Ejiofor, who wasn’t a regular in the series, was in Love Actually and Dirty Pretty Things. What this movie had working for it, to attract an audience, was Joss Whedon’s reputation as the creative force behind Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the reputation of the series. After that it’s going to rest on review and on word of mouth.
IMDb reports it did well on its first weekend. It deserves to do well. It’s a clever, stylish production.
The story has a classical sf setting on the fraying edges of an interstellar human civilization. Ship’s captain Mal Reynolds is a freewheeling smuggler, bandit and buccaneer, in the tradition of Han Solo. He has a past as a rebel soldier in an unsuccessful rebellion or civil war by the libertarian outer planets against the control of the more civilized inner planets and the central Parliament. His voyage becomes a mission and an adventure, protecting River Tam (actress Summer Glau) and her secret from the Parliament’s sinister Operative (Chiwetel Ejiofor). The acting is competent, perhaps a bit over the top – in the wise-cracking, ironic style of the early Star Wars movies and Buffy the Vampire slayer. The plot is tight and fast. The visuals and special effects are professional. There are a couple of great martial arts scenes which will certainly build Summer Glau’s reputation. There is a strong ethical theme about peacefulness, aggression, social controls, free will, human nature and the messiness of life – think Brave New World or Clockwork Orange. We get an early glimpse of this in scenes of River’s back story, when she was being educated and socially conditioned as a young child on a planet controlled by the Parliament. The Operative provides a second ethical theme. He is a perfect soldier, proficient in his technique, aware of the immorality of his violent intrusions into other people’s lives and freedom, justifying it in the faith that he is working for a better world. Because he does have an ethical compass, there is a continuing tension in his character. But enough hints and spoilers
This movie has all the pieces and put them together very well.
God Jokes
Comedian Emo Phillips, writing in the Guardian Online, takes credit here for a joke voted the funniest religious joke of all time at the Ship of Fools. There are several other religious jokes in the story. Under modern British law, and under the law in many European countries, I suppose Phillips is on shaky ground telling religious jokes – if someone’s feelings get hurt, he might be charged with a hate crime.
A less risible approach to religious tolerance in an essay by Stuart Jeffries on religious tolerance, also from the Guardian Online, here. This essay takes a point made by Jurgen Habermas at a public lecture last year. The point is founded in his theories of civil society and the Public Sphere. AL Daily had a link to an article on Habemas in The Chronicle of Higher Education – but it has expired and now all you get is a stub article and an invitation to subscribe.
A different approach to tolerance again – Christian (American fundamentalist style) tolerance for secular culture in colleges and Universities – an essay called Faith Camp in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Read it now – I think this is a temporary link.
Hmmm
A recent story from the Times of London, on line, about a social study in the Journal of Religion and Society attempting to correlate religious practice with other social events. The Journal looks like a serious journal. The article in question, Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies by Gregory Paul, is on line in full here. Also of possible interest, Christian Theology in the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter.
Dictionary
The Nation published an essay by Nicholas von Hoffman called A Devil’s Dictionary of Business which seems to be based on his book by the same name.
The original Devil’s Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce is a classic of political satire. It is in the public domain and can be downloaded at Project Gutenberg. Bierce was cynical and skeptical, and he made few friends when he stripped away pretensions and popped the ballooned egos of the comfortable and the powerful.
I mentioned John Ralston Saul’s Doubter’s Companion in an entry in July. It fits into the tradition of satirical dictionaries.