The phenomenon of celebrity as a modern version of charisma is experienced as a transcendental intrusion into daily life, a kind of dubious sacrality. Encountering HaShem at the burning bush poses no ontological problem, since the One God is not subject to the limitations of our world. But a celebrity is only another human being, and the fact that his/her name and face are quasi-universally known is an artifact of sources of publicity and the general public’s reaction to their output, similar to that of brand names and images in the overall marketplace. Celebrities, like brand names, are designed to guarantee certain products, be they songs, books, films… or just “publicity,” for those who are “famous for being famous.”
That the level of media penetration in today’s screenic age, when everyone is accompanied in permanence by a smartphone, goes well beyond that of previous times, is reflected by the term mega-celebrity, exemplified above all by Taylor Swift.
The Swift phenomenon may well be the acme of celebritism, given that at a certain point the social benefit of the phenomenon may no longer justify the expense of its continued maintenance. As I pointed out in Chronicle 783, Swift’s symbolic role embodies American culture’s maximal effort to bridge the gap between its overall trend toward foul language, obsessive sexual references, and often extreme left-wing politics, and the traditional virtues of the sort that she encourages the “Swifties” to practice: ladylike neatness, service to others: all in all, being “nice girls” in contrast to the multi-pierced blue-haired morphs active on TikTok. We may well see Swift as the ultimate “great white hope,” whose combination of an attractive face and figure with an absence of open seductiveness makes her, as I previously suggested, America’s cheerleader rather than its sex symbol.
Can this last indefinitely? Swift will turn 35 this year, and it’s hard to imagine that any woman, however gifted or attractive, could take over the unique role she has cut out for herself. But variants are certainly conceivable.
Meanwhile, in the less glamorous field of what used to be called academe, the very notion of celebrity has all but lost its luster. From the French Theory era, René Girard’s is about the only name that has survived among the general public (e.g., being named last year in a NYT crossword puzzle), although the Girardian Colloquium on Violence and Religion is at least as much a personality cult as an intellectually serious operation. (Indeed, it was COV&R members’ dissatisfaction with that organization that inspired the founding of the GASC.) There remain a few “star” academic intellectuals, but they have little of the intellectual significance of those of the French Theory era; Judith Butler or Giorgio Agamben cannot be compared with Derrida or Foucault.
But I cannot imagine that a charismatic figure would be likely to create such a theory as GA, which minimizes rather than maximizes the excitement of the thinker’s own language at the expense of the worldly reality he is describing. Words like “sign” and “scene” don’t have the publicity value of “deconstruction” or différance, or even “violence,” and a scenario that ends with a peaceful communal meal is far less salient than the “emissary murder” of a scapegoat.
I would not accuse the creators of these ideas of deliberate sensationalism, but the fact is that philosophy always foregrounds the language of the philosopher, presumed to have recovered traces of the prophets’ revelatory power (think of Heidegger and das Sein), whereas from the first sentence of TOOL, my idea has been that “mysteries should not be multiplied beyond necessity.” Laboratory scientists win their renown without rhetorical gimmicks, and the same should hold true of all thinkers, above all of anthropological humanists,** whose task is to demystify their subject.
Indeed, as Parmenides insisted, we must remain aware of the dangerous tension between rationality and charisma, or what he called the way of truth and the way of opinion. The sacred that charisma usurps is necessary to humanity, but it can easily be turned to less than noble ends. Whence the need to avoid letting our thinking be dominated by spokespeople for Wokism, whose charisma distills the anti-sacred of resentment.
The one deadly sin
The point of calling these web essays “Chronicles of Love and Resentment” is that if love sums up all virtues, in that the love for one’s fellows ensures our contribution to our species’ survival, resentment includes all sins, even if most of those on the official list: gluttony, sloth, lust, avarice… are more its passive consequences than direct expressions. And if love is a necessarily conscious drive to affirm the value of one’s fellows even at the expense of one’s own safety, resentment is less a “drive” than a rejection of love, however assiduously its current avatar may disguise itself as seeking benefits for those one presents as victims of privileged others.
The line between defending real victims of injustice and virtue-signaling in the cause of so-called victims as a weapon against one’s fellows is not easy to draw without seeing into others’ souls, and we should be grateful to the ugly tactics of so many of our latter-day defenders of virtue for making transparent their real motivations. They are as they describe their enemies, motivated not by love but by hate, and this distinction is easy enough to detect behind its mimetic disguises. To love one’s enemy in the Christian sense is not to be the dupe of his pretensions, but to deal with his hostility and even, if necessary, his evil, while never losing sight of one’s common humanity.
Resentment is a reversion to a state of mimetic desire from which the sacred force of love/peace has been deliberately expunged; the “man of resentment” rejects human morality in a semiconscious effort to deny his humanity. All genuine religions know this. Which, in the case of Islam, should lead its believers to reject the extremes of jihad, which views those who refuse Islam as subhuman, “sons of apes and pigs.”
It is notable that in today’s political context dominated by rival resentments, where there is no love lost between rivals, the celebrity’s charisma is by and large a force of love rather than resentment. There are to be sure charismatic haters, but the biggest stars remain those on the side of love. Taylor Swift has deliberately cultivated this aspect of her image, and however much profit it may bring her, it is hard to believe that is not a reflection of real affection for her fellow humans. But the same is true of all true celebrities, including pretend-misanthropes like Rodney Dangerfield—as opposed to truly hateful personalities like David Duke or Louis Farrakhan.
But if this is true, why is it that in the domain of politics negativity reigns, certainly more today than in the recent past? Can this be merely a swing of the pendulum from the calm after the storm of WWII—and the entire first half of the 20th century—as if, as with antisemitism, the politics of resentment had merely paused to catch its breath?
If this is indeed the case, we must trace the path opened up by this politics in taking advantage of the Western hegemony established with the fall of the USSR to define its target and unite in opposition the postcolonial forces of the “South” with those of the not-quite-former Communist bloc. For if China has remained Communist while Russia is so no longer, Putin and Xi see eye to eye in their common desire to overthrow the centuries-long Western domination.
Clearly the 1991 “end of history” was wildly premature; the powers it briefly reconciled were both Western: the West as such, and the rebellious Bolsheviks, the sans-culottes’ far more violent and cynical heirs. Is there any hope of reconciling the North with the South, Western Civilization and its Eastern emulators (Japan, South Korea, Singapore…) with Africa, the South Asian and South American countries, and the ever-more-insistent Islamists who have renewed the jihad originally defeated by the Industrial Revolution, to bring about the real “end of history” and the establishment of a peaceful world? Hardly, but so long as we avoid major catastrophes and the use of nuclear and other hyperdestructive weapons, we may at least hope that humanity will survive the 21st century. The temptation to risk the limit (monter à l’extrême) that Girard refers to in his Achever Clausewitz remains very much alive in Islamism, but even there one wonders if the religious fervor of the leaders of the Islamic powers makes them truly willing to risk widespread destruction and death. A question whose answer we would not like to have to discover in practice.
In a world where it seems that an increasing percentage of the population depends on politically expressed resentment to maintain its sense of self-worth, it becomes increasingly difficult to find political positions that can bring diverse factions together in a common cause. Already the sans-culottes’ revolt depended on their having surpassed the degree of poverty where the will to action is drained of energy, while inhabiting a partially urbanized environment where common resentments could combine in strength. In today’s world, the internet connects people without need for proximity, and dozens of resentful subcultures exist beside one another, in many cases “intersectionally” stoking each other’s flame.
There has been suspiciously little publicly available analysis of the functioning of the Antifa, BLM, and other shadowy extremist groups on the left, which are funded with impunity by billionaires such as George Soros through “charitable” organizations that receive tax write-offs, as though supplying an antisocial militia should be seen as a rewardable mode of action. That one couldn’t dream of getting away with such activities in China or Russia can only be viewed as a sign of their superior cohesion. And in this world where, increasingly, autocracies alone keep order, the West’s increasingly feckless democracies not only let disorder reign but come down far harder on the Burkean citizenry who stand on the side of tradition than on the radical thugs whose pretension of representing society’s victims allows them free rein. Surely the time has come to forbid the public burning of America’s national flag as an encouragement to disrespect our laws, as we see when public monuments are defaced in association with the burning—almost always equally without penalty.
The fact is that today the world’s real political energy is on the side of resentment, both in the South and in the West, while the opposition to it yet remains inchoate. Vast sums of money are being funneled to anti-“Zionist” street and campus demonstrations, including no doubt some from enemy powers such as Iran (which Democratic administrations have financed since Obama without ever taking the least serious counteraction). Obama’s Iran policy may have been presented as an attempt to create equilibrium in the Middle East, but it is all too clear that it embodies a postcolonial ideology ultimately hostile to the maintenance of American power either in the Middle East or elsewhere. We talk today as if the “red-green” alliance were a recent development, but its roots are easily visible in the policies of the last three Democratic administrations.
In this context, the positive model of Taylor Swift serves as a near-pathetic agent of nostalgia for a once harmonious polity. A society where ordinary individuals pay hundreds and even thousands of dollars—often on top of travel and hotel expenses—to hear the mega-star perform a few musically unremarkable songs shows how highly it values a few hours’ illusion of the normality it has lost the will to enforce.
And a not unexpected indication of its illusory nature is the fact that there is already a “Swifties for Kamala” organization, but surely will never be a “Swifties for Trump.” For what remains of “respectability” in American society is still on the side of the Democrats, certainly not the Trump Republicans, whose voters, as we know, are clingers and deplorables, even fascists—albeit strangely more supportive of Israel than their opponents.
**I think that the practitioner of a humanist anthropology such as GA should be called an anthropological humanist rather than, inelegantly, a humanist anthropologist.