What happens when the laws of notoriety clash with the terminal illness of a young woman? We see the way in which we live in a potemkin society.

3MT : Empty Reputations [ 4:14 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (168)

UPDATE: Jade Goody’s publicist, Max Clifford, has announced that she will not “die on camera” : “She wants to do maybe a one-off with Piers [Morgan] for ITV. There might be one or two other things and some charity work. But no more: reality TV can only take so much reality.”

Which really says it all…

When do you think this was written?

Never could notoriety exist as it does now, in any former age of the world; now that the news of the hour from all parts of the world, private news as well as public, is brought day by day to every individual… by processes so uniform, so unvarying, so spontaneous, that they almost bear the semblance of a natural law. And hence notoriety, or the making a noise in the world, has come to be considered a great good in itself, and a ground of veneration. …Notoriety, or, as it may be called, newspaper fame, … becomes… a sort of idol, worshipped for its own sake, and without any reference to the shape in which it comes before men. It may be an evil fame or a good fame… It matters not; so that a man is talked much of, and read much of, he is thought much of…

It was written in 1849, by John Henry Newman, who saw the effect the explosive growth in popular newspapers was having upon mid-Victorian society.¹  Of course, nothing which afflicted the Victorians could possibly affect us, could it?

At the moment in the UK we have the unedifying spectacle of a young woman, famous for being famous, exploited for being famous, and reviled for being famous, terminally ill with cancer, and at the same time attempting to exploit the media monster which created and abused her, in exchange for a financial legacy for her two young sons. There is nothing but sorrow and tragedy to be found in this situation: tragedy, not because of the fall from grace of a great and heroic person, but tragedy because we have so managed to lie to ourselves, to persuade ourselves that notoriety is the only true virtue, and newspaper fame is the only evidence of our existence, that we will allow a young woman’s life to become the raw material of our own morbidity and callousness.

Notoriety is the external expression of the internal attitude vanity: as Christopher Jamison has described it², vanity comes from the Latin vanagloria, meaning “empty reputation”. We have chosen to build a society of facades, a potemkin society, and we wonder why, when the first chill winds blow, we can find no shelter. The antidote for vanitas, says Dom Christopher, is magnanimity, great-heartedness, big-soulness. It is hard to see where that magnanimity will come from, in world where newspaper fame, and newspaper cruelty, rules.

1. John Henry Newman, “Saintliness the Standard of Christian Principle,” in Discourses addressed to mixed congregations (London: Longmans, Green, 1906), pp 90-92. [↩]
2. Christopher Jamison, Finding Happiness: Monastic Steps for a Fulfilling Life (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2008). [↩]