Britain’s got talons: just how cruel are we?

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 cruelty of strangers: preview the new Prospect on Radio Four

Maggie Gee asks if we are more enthralled with with cruelty than we'd care to admit.

Britain’s got talent, but what about kindness? Is the nation’s love for TV talent shows and celebrity flagellation indicative of an enduring pleasure in cruelty? These questions are explored by novelist Maggie Gee in her article for the forthcoming June edition of Prospect, on the shelves as of Thursday 28th May.

But for those of you who cannot wait until then, fear not—you can get a sneak preview of what Gee has to say by listening to her appearance on the BBC Radio Four’s Start The Week programme.  This week’s show also feature John Micklethwait, whose new book, God is Back, is reviewed in the June edition of Prospect. It’s available here on iPlayer, but only for a few more days, so tune in now before it’s too late…

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