And yet, there must be a primordial reason why humans gravitate toward fame. Whether to love or hate famous people, we all enjoy reading or knowing about them. This ambivalence of love and hate is inevitable. Nothing woos our attention more than stories of how famous people become even more famous or fall into disrepute from some scandal or other. We pass judgement on famous people all the time. We all, in a sense, hound them with our expectations. And this is how we need them: our modern day heroes, our secular gods of sorts.
One imagines how Athens went abuzz with chatter when news came of how the senate had condemned Socrates to death with a shot of hemlock. And all for believing something that was against the grain of what, in those days, was accepted and required thought. Socrates was a famous man. But in his own way: the way of the philosopher, quite unlike the way of entertainers, politicians, warriors, traders, explorers, and other heroes of the time, mythical or real.
And then, one imagines the ancient Athenian agora where would go to speak, teachers from all walks and from everywhere. They all went here for fame, in a way, to ask the most important questions, to deliver answers, to be listened to, to be believed. It was always a noble competition. People “bought” what they chose to believe. They did not always choose in favor of truth, not immediately, anyway.
And yet, the very thought of civilization itself roots on the idea: The truth will establish itself in the minds of people, inevitably and eventually. The agora is a marketplace. The marketplace is a battleground; the competition: always cutthroat.
Things have hardly changed even if they seem greatly transformed since the time of the ancients. In the age of information, the marketplace is everywhere in front of us, the TV, the computer screens, our cellphones. And by now, people know exactly how to make things and people famous. But there is a cost. Fame is bought and sold all the time. Some are famous only for being famous.
And so we question the very idea of fame itself. But even as we do this, we still hold: There are people who become famous on the strength of their true abilities.
The information age has changed the nature of the agora profoundly. The social networks have made the agora more democratic. Or at least, more democratic than when the agora was dominated by a very centralized mass media. As with all good agoras, there is a wonderful chaos about the social networks where humans try to clarify their identities inside the collective identity of the mass.
The very concept of pop culture is changing even more rapidly. And already, we are seeing its worst potential in phenomena like ISIS and the current US American Republican candidates. We are excused to ask: Is the end result of all these good or bad for us?
It will most likely be a mix of both. What we know for sure is that the information age has been helpful to the worst kinds of people. And we feel almost compelled by a sense of ethics to compete with them, as if on the premise, there are better people than they, better arguments than they propound. Doesn’t this compulsion seem rather harebrained? One would have to be, truly, very optimistic of humans and their future to even participate.
Our innocent sense of optimism moves us this way, drawing on faith, that out of all these chaotic technologies, a new sense of collective intelligence and morality must inevitably arise. Not all humans are stupid. Though it is possible most humans probably are not too smart either, as the old Greek philosophers had claimed thousands of years ago. Even so, in a mass of stupidity, a good idea may still be seen, recognized, and then understood for what it is: A good idea.
The problem with good ideas is that they have to become famous first before they become good for anything at all. And good ideas must compete with oceans of bad ones. Ridiculous as it may seem, we must accept the moral obligation to participate in the competition: Out of necessity, as the modernist philosopher Immanuel Kant claimed, to declare something good or beautiful as soon as we judge it to be so. This may not ensure the world’s survival. But it is our only way of making the world better. It must have to suffice.
And yet, isn’t it irony of the blackest humor that in this age of atheism, all still redounds on faith? And where we cannot place our faith in God, would we rather put our faith on the possibility that in this mass of chaos, good ideas are still being born all the time?
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