Transfixed by the public eye…
Novelist Maggie Gee, in her essay for this month’s Prospect, takes a long look at an especially knotty social question: just how cruel are the British people today? On the one hand, she explores the “tide of sympathy” that the media seems perpetually primed to unleash over particular kinds of public tragedy—Jade Goody’s untimely death, the prime minister or the leader of the opposition losing a child. On the other hand, she teases out a certain “excessive curiosity tinged with ghoulishness” that can lie behind such outpourings, together with the “appetite in millions of people for having a laugh at someone else’s expense” evidenced by shows like The X Factor or The Apprentice.
Famous people, Gee suggests, occupy a strange zone between adulation and contempt that makes them “the new non-persons in modern lives”: people whose lives we feel free to enjoy and deplore in equal measure because “we have deemed them to be not our own kind.” Enter Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand, and the scandal that seemed to channel a bottomless pool of national rage, sympathy and envy touched with guilt. And then, of course, there’s the phenomenon of ordinary folks like Susan Boyle, elevated into sudden super-stardom by their own abilities on Britain’s Got Talent: a channel for public largesse of a peculiarly anti-celebrity kind (as Sam Leith explores elsewhere in the current issue).
Gee goes on to search philosophy, literature, psychoanlysis and evolutionary biology for clues in her wide-ranging survey of what it may mean, today, to be kind as a nation. Where would you turn for answers? Let us know your own thoughts below.
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the best quotes I have ever read that defines the philosophy of kindness are those spoken out by Ron Hubbard: ”One can spot times when he knows he should have been tougher—he’s sure of it. But a highly informative series of Scientology spiritual counseling procedures demonstrates that the person who is willing to confront other things doesn’t ever have to say no, he doesn’t ever have to be mean, he doesn’t ever have to be tough at all. (And by confront things, we mean face things without flinching or avoiding.) It is perfectly all right to be nice to people. It isn’t a weakness at all. As a matter of fact, if you aren’t, you’re in the soup.
You could say that the only times for which you are suffering are those times when you weren’t nice enough, when you weren’t kind enough and when you weren’t unmean enough. Those are the only times from which you’re really suffering.”
To interpret deeply the philosophy of kindness in celebrities’ actions one can easily expose humanism, affection and morality in the deeds of some cilibrities. Try to delve for example deeply in Bob’s Geldof efforts to uplift African states from poverty and destitution through influencing western foreign policies toward Africa, the symbolic act from Angelina Jolie or Madona of adopting African orphans..and other examples, this shows that being celebrity doesn’t mean that we don’t feel or sense our co-human sufferings.
They hate us while we admire them, or they love us while we loath them is human nature, Camus said it a long time ago ”Il faut de tous pour faire un monde”
Well we rip off the heads of 600 of our own unborn children every day in the UK and we didn’t do that a couple of generations ago. So if thats what we do to our own children God help you if you’re a stranger or an animal and you meet a Brit