Many of the supposed "heroes" of the past were liars, frauds, and butchers to varying degrees. The association of fame with entertainers, for all its flaws, departs from earlier concepts of heroic brutality and martial virtue. Most of today’s famous people have had to persuade consumers to offer their allegiance and their dollars. Nowadays fame is attained through a high-stakes game of pursuit and seduction, rather than a heroic contest or a show of force in battle. The shift in fame to entertainers is a modern extension of the Enlightenment doux commerce thesis that the wealth of the market civilizes morals and manners and supports an ethic of bourgeois virtue.
…Modern politics emphasizes images, rumor, negative campaigning, and a circus-like, mass media atmosphere. Leaders lose their stature and become another set of celebrities. We talk about them and use them for entertainment. Yet contrary to the views of many critics, these developments are by no means wholly negative.
Commercial society has brought the taming of fame to politics…
That is from my 2000 book What Price Fame?
How silly. The separation from “heroic contest or a show of force in battle” is only true if you ignore modern sports heroes. Almost all famous people today are STILL liars and frauds.
What is this post apropos of? I’m not sure I understand what it is in reference to, if anything.
Duh, people, do you not read the news and follow the campaign?
very interesting conversation along the same lines has been occurring over at free darko. This article and the one the precedes it are especially enlightening.
http://freedarko.blogspot.com/2008/08/it-was-so-familiar-then.html#comments
1) A stimulating post, and true enough historically about military and aristocratic virtues as opposed to bourgeois ones . . . with countries around the world in the 19th and early 20th century — in the initial 150-170 years of the industrial revolution period — fairly easily divided into the bourgeois-dominated cultures and societies of the Anglo-American countries, plus Holland, Switzerland, and Scandinavia countries, on one side and Germany, Austro-Hungary, Czarist Russia, France, Spain, and Japan on the side of anti-bourgeois sentiments.
The same was no less true of Latin America and Muslim countries around the world, with possibly China reflecting a mixture of both traditions. Italy, too, was divided culturally and socially — not least along regional lines (the south vs. the north), both before and after unification in the 1860s.
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All these heroic, military-celebrating countries spawned, by the 1930s, fascisms of various kinds: whether Italian, the originator, or Nazism in Germany or clerical fascism as in Spain, Portugal, Austria, Hungary, and virtually all the rest of Eastern Europe. The same was true of ultra-nationalist, militarized Japan (with its own native twists).
The major exception? The Soviet Union, where Communists took power in the revolution 1917 and 1918. France was something of an exception too, with large historical statist traditions and militarism, except that the 3rd Republic, established in 1875 and lasting until WWII (1940), managed to stave off right-wing coups and survive for 75 years, only to plunge into polarized class-conflicts and growing ideological clashes in the late 1930s.
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2) What all these Fascist-militarized or Communist countries had in common historically:
†¢ Powerful statist traditions, even in the newly unified countries like Germany.
†¢ Intense and inflamed nationalism, especially as a way to deal with internal social and ethnic conflicts . . . aggravated by a sense of being “have-not† countries compared to the United States and the British Empire before and after WWII. State-worship materialized in all of them during the interwar period, usually topped by charismatic leaders like Hitler, Stalin, or Mussolini. And the later nationalist unity came (which was impossible in multi-ethnic empires like the Ottoman, Czarist, and Austo-Hungarian empires), the more intense the nationalism as these empires began to break down in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
†¢ Pourous land-borders (Spain and Portugal something of an exception), which required large standing armies. In the 19th and 20th centuries, that meant conscripted armies sooner or later. Not so in the Anglo-American countries. In Scandinavia, as the militarized conflicts between Sweden and its neighbors abated in the decades after the Napoleonic wars, conscription was used, but the countries began to opt for neutrality and remained so right down to 1939, with Sweden and Switzerland neutral in WWII (and probably pro-German, if anything).
The Anglo-American countries, protected by oceans or the English channel, could rely largely on sea-power until the 20th century for national protection. And they didn’t need or use conscription even in WWI and WWII (as well as in parts of the US in the civil war). Conscription then ended for Britain in the cold war in the late 1950s and in the US in the mid-1970s.
†¢ Late industrial development, compared to the British and Americans (and rates of big agricultural productivity in modernizing farms and ranches in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand). The role of the state was the greater, the more backward the country when it tried to industrialize: true, of course, of both the Fascist countries and the Soviet Union.
†¢ Because of late industrialization — and also a cause of such retarded economic development — the social, economic, and political orders of these countries were dominated by aristocrats, clerical heads, traditional pre-industrial bourgeois groups (lawyers, accountants, bankers), and guild-leaders, plus usually, not always, autocratic royal rulers.
Modern middle class types of the sort who began to spread throughout British life, say, from the 16tth and 17th centuries on — nicely documented recently in Gregory Clark’s Farewell to Alms — were far weaker. The more you moved south and east in Europe before 1940, the weaker these modern middle classes were in number and influence.
†¢ Ideological/cultural traditions that were inimical to free-market individualism and liberal democracy.
Start with romantic Catholicism (especially in Iberia and East Europe and Italy) that balked at the individualism and alleged egoism of modern capitalism were rife in the Catholic countries, and in the Orthodox ones as well. In Japan, heroic Samurai traditions were invoked by the bourgeois-hating military extremists in the 1930s and 1940s. To an extent, that was and is also true of Islam, even if there is nothing per se anti-capitalism in Islamic traditions themselves (rather, the local cultural traditions emphasize autocracy, patron-client networks, crony capitalism, and advancement by mutual back-scratching services, not professional and business accomplishments.)
And, where autocracy or electoral democracy permitted, extremist ideologies began polarizing political life in the late19th and 20th centuries: fascism, militarized reaction, or revolution socialism and later Communism. In these countries, whether militarized reactionist or fascist or Communist (or with a large radical socialist movement as in France), intellectuals were overwhelmingly anti-bourgeois, anti-capitalist, and full of contempt for modern life as reflected, say, in Anglo-American life. And, not surprisingly — since there had to be scapegoats — these are the same countries (Japan obviously an exception) where anti-Semitism flourished and was the most vicious . . . Italy, with a small and very successful Jewish population, only a partial exception in the Mussolini era.
By contrast, , in Britain, the US, and the other Anglo-American countries, Holland and Scandinavia too, fascist movements never gained much support, and the same was true of Communism. (The US never even had much of a socialist tradition of any sort, whereas strong Labor Parties did emerge in the other English-speaking countries). All these extremist ideologies, by contrast, spawned and reinforced anti-capitalist, anti-free market virtues and values, along with vicious anti-Semitism as the symbol of detested capitalism and money-making.
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3 )All of this changed after WWII in Japan, the rest of Northern Pacific Asia that was non-Communist, and in West Europe after 1945 too. And it has begun to change all over the democratic new EU members in Eastern and Central Europe since the break-up of the Soviet Empire, over East Europe and within the former Soviet Union.
And yet — notice this: There is still little in the way of enthusiasm in any of West or East Europe outside Britain for the kind of free-market traditions that have overwhelmingly marked the US since 1789 (save for manufacturing tariff protection in the 19th century) or, as with Britain in the 1980s again, in Australia and New Zealand since the overhaul of their welfare-state legacies between 1945 and the late 1980s. Americans, not least libertarians, have historical blind-spots when it comes to making sense of the popular enthusiasm in Europe for the regulatory and welfare-state economies and, in Japan, for statist-regulated capitalism.
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4) Popular celebrities in the entertainment world as new idols.
Just a query, nothing else: are you not bothered by celebrity-worship and identification, Tyler and others who share his views? Does it not seem . . . well, a little infantile and a reflection of what we could call a narcissistic personality syndrome?
The latter meaning, observe carefully, not just self-absorption and callousness toward others — it everyday conservational definition.. Rather, in a clinical sense, meaning a weak personality structure that oscillates between the poles of grandiosity and self-contempt, rage, or depression when the dreams of glory, riches, and fame don’t materialize. With, to boot, celebrity identification a form of compensatory externalization — as though famous rock-stars or movie-stars or TV types (themselves self-absorbed to the max and probably with less solid personalities in most cases than their adulating fans) somehow have a richer, solider life? Not to mention, on an entirely different, non-psychological level, the almost entire absence of aesthetic standards beyond . . . “Hey, dude! I like it! If you don’t, fuck off!†
All the while, theses worshipped celebrities being even more inclined than average fans toward alcoholism, drug-abuse, breakdowns, and unstable sexual relations . . . not least in marriage.
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Michael Gordon, AKA, the buggy professor http://www.thebuggyprofessor.org
^^^
I didn’t know we could get our signatures to be italicized.
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