Taylor Swift

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The best argument against democracy, said Winston Churchill, is a five-minute conversation with an elector. Of course, we are not the type of elector to whom Churchill was referring, that is to say the averagely ignorant, ill-informed, or foolish elector; nor are we prey to the foolish passions that affect everyone else. But if Churchill was right, the best that can be hoped for in any democracy is that the stupidities of the population, when grouped together, are equal and opposite, and cancel each other out, so that out of them wisdom may emerge: wisdom on this theory being the midpoint between two opposing idiocies.

It need hardly be pointed out that stupidity is not the province alone of the unintelligent and uneducated. Where it exists, such stupidity is far less dangerous than the stupidity of the intelligent and the highly educated, who are better equipped to justify or rationalize their idiotic beliefs and can make absurdity sound reasonable and therefore impose it as policy. It would probably be more accurate to say that man, statistically speaking, is more the rationalizing animal than he is the rational one.

“Error is a large subject,” begins a book by an eminent psychologist on humanity’s proneness to it, whose name is James Reason. One cannot help but wonder whether his surname influenced his choice of subject; though if so, it would have been a manifestation of unreason.

Be that as it may, I was struck recently by the “endorsement” of Kamala Harris for president by Taylor Swift. I must be one of the few people on the planet who would not recognize the last-named if I saw her, since I assiduously avoid anything that smacks of modern celebrity, but even I know that she is an immensely popular singer. What have immensely popular singers, however, to do with the election of the President of the United States?

Political scientists, so-called, have long debated whether “endorsements” by such as she actually work to the advantage of the person endorsed. Like economists, some of them say yes and some say no, and yet other say perhaps. The fact that political campaigners are delighted to have such endorsements does not quite answer the question: Their delight might be misplaced. Endorsements might even do harm.

Nevertheless, such delight is disheartening, for it implies that political campaigners must hold the electorate in contempt, if they believe that the electorate is or could be swayed by such endorsements by people whose only qualification is that they are extremely famous. Celebrity endorsement is the tribute that cynicism pays to idiocy.

It is not possible to place an exact date on the beginning of the cult of celebrity, partly because the phenomenon itself is not perfectly delimited. Like most social phenomena, celebrity has its penumbra, but clearly it depends on the means of mass communication: The more developed they are, the more people’s minds are filled with it, to such an extent that not to be a celebrity in some way is, for many people, to be a failure or even to cease to exist. I have known criminals who have been largely motivated by the hope of notoriety, which is the celebrity available to the underworld, at least in the scale of their wrongdoing. And I have known several who succeeded in achieving their fifteen minutes in the sun of fame, albeit for the worst of reasons. But opprobrium is preferable to certain people than total obscurity.

While there is a desire to stand out and be noticed by as many people as possible, to be a celebrity, there is also a desire to be as like as many other people as possible, or at least to belong to a recognizable social group or tribe. To sink oneself in a mass, to be indistinguishable from a crowd, comes as a relief, for it obviates the necessity to think for oneself and lightens the burden of personal responsibility, that appalling corollary of free will.

These contradictory desires—to stand out from the crowd and to be part of it—explain (perhaps, one cannot be dogmatic on these subjects) the rise in the popularity of tattooing. In an age of celebrity, people feel a greater necessity than ever to individuate themselves, to be a “brand,” in the horrible language of life coaching and human resourcing. People feel that they have to be known for something, and what easier way than to tattoo oneself with a supposedly unique design?

By doing so, however, one joins a million other people doing exactly the same; and in these days, when real communities, for good or evil, or for both, cease to exist, people who have anything in common, however superficial, in this case the bearing of a tattoo, become members of a community. (If tattooing were ever to be universal, its popularity would cease.) I recall an early academic book on the spread of tattooing up the social scale that indeed referred to “the tattooed community.”

But in a world of billions of people, straining after difference from others as a goal in itself is futile. If you try to be different, you will end up being the same. There is something bogus about the self-conscious eccentric. The real eccentric is the one who does very odd things by other people’s standards because, for him, they are the natural things to do, and it would not occur to him to do them otherwise. He is not aiming for otherness, much less fame, for which he does not care in the least. He is not seeking notice; he is doing things the way he thinks they ought to be done, or at any rate the way he ought to do them (an eccentric does not want to impose his ways on others).

Modern celebrities—the most recent ones, the kind who “endorse” political candidates—seem to be mass man (or woman) made large: They are us, but on a larger scale. They excite a kind of worship that is really a disguised form of self-worship. They are different from us, but the same as us. We cling to our individualism, but without much individuality.

Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is Ramses: A Memoir, published by New English Review.