American Virtues, Part 1: Celebrities

One of my favorite novels is The Tides of War by Steven Pressfield, a historical fiction novel that describes the role of Alcibiades in the Peloponnesian War.  In one poignant scene the Spartan Polemarch Lysander gives a speech to his fellow Spartans, some of which I think will be useful in introducing the topic and thought process of this article.

"We, Spartans and Peloponnesians, possess courage.  Our enemies [the Athenians] possess boldness.  They own thrasytes, we andreia... Boldness is impatient.  Courage is long-suffering.  Boldness cannot endure hardship or delay; it is ravenous, it must feed on victory or it dies.  Boldness makes its seat upon the air; it is gossamer and phantom.  Courage pants its feet upon the Earth and draws its strength from God's holy fundament.  Thrasytes presumes to comman heaven; it forces God's hand and calls this virtue.  Andreia reveres the immortals; it seeks heaven's guidance and acts only to enforce God's will." (pages 333-334).

Though this is a fictional book, I think Lysander's discussion of society-wide virtues can be readily applied to American life.  The above quote is all about the war between Athens and Sparta, but I'm not going to discuss American virtues in terms of its military here, I'll save that for part two.

This article is about the American fetish for celebrities, which has long baffled me.  Sure, other countries and cultures have celebrities, but we are far and away the celebrity creating-and-stalking capital of the world.

We Americans value the explorer, the astronaut, the pioneer, and the frontiersman.  We idealize the cowboy on the open range of the western frontier, or Captain Jack Sparrow exploring the edges of the then-known map.  We value individualism- those that dare strike out to do something alone, that go into the darkness and leave and trail for the rest to follow.

Earlier I wrote an article (http://thusspokithyu.blogspot.com/2011/04/psychological-analysis-of-sports.html) discussing how sports fandom is a manifestation of one's inability to achieve that which sports stars do.  I think our fetishization of celebrities is born of a similar force, but at a much deeper and profound level.

I think that we've found our virtue of individualism to ultimately be hollow.  I think that our individualistic nature, combined with our Protestant work ethic as described by Max Weber, has led to hyper individualism, where interpersonal social ties are few in number and low in strength, and where family bonds have weakened beyond any point in history.  I think that we as a society are lonely.

To compensate for our own lack of deep personal ties and for the lack of a social life, I think people turn to celebrities to vicariously live out lives they don't have access to otherwise.  We pretend that the actions of one celebrity out of a population of 300 million Americans matter, because we don't have anything else in our lives that does.  In a very existentialist and nihilistic sense, our consumer culture and our rabid appetite for celebrity attempt to fill the gaping hole that is our lives.

I think we should find meaning elsewhere.

I'll write up part 2 soon, which'll be a discussion of American/Greek virtues as they relate to our recent military history.