Melanie Phillips
THE "ME" IN MEDIA
Look at Me: Celebrating the Self in Modern Britain
By Peter Whittle (The Social Affairs Unit 93pp £10)

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In this short but insightful book, Peter Whittle pinpoints one of the most conspicuous but shallowly perceived phenomena of our times. The cult of celebrity is in itself hardly news. We live in a time when fame has arguably eclipsed even money - with which it is so often paired - as the most desirable attribute to be pursued.

Once-serious newspapers now devote acres of space to the activities of TV or rock stars. The lives and homes of celebrities are exhaustively opened up to us through Hello! and OK! magazines. So desperate are ordinary people to achieve their fifteen minutes of fame that they queue up to be publicly humiliated on cruel and voyeuristic TV game shows. Reality TV both constructs celebrity out of the mundane and ruthlessly cuts the famous down to size.

What Peter Whittle has grasped, however, is that modern celebrity is not characterised, as it was in previous times, by the idea of 'them and us', the sense of a curtain being lifted on a world ordinary people don't share and which draws its glamour precisely from its inaccessibility. On the contrary, the current obsession with fame actually represents a deeply narcissistic obsession with the self. What we worship most of all in the media are the first two letters of that word. Celebrities represent a star-studded mirror which mesmerises us because we imagine that in it we can see ourselves.

This is because the modern cult of fame derives from a culture in which the individual has become the centre of the universe: the sun around which everyone and everything else must revolve. With external authority now considered an affront to the self along with the religious doctrines that imposed it, morality and culture have been systematically privatised and relativised so that no one's values or lifestyle can trump those of anyone else. Every individual is thus a hero to himself.

If everyone is special, however, it follows that no one is special. So people can achieve fame even if they have no particular talent or have achieved nothing of distinction. They can be famous simply for being famous. Indeed, our super-egalitarian culture tells us that elitism is a bad thing; the very idea of a hierarchy of values offends our most cherished belief that no one can be judged inferior to anyone else.

So since we can no longer look up, instead we look down. Entertainers such as the stars of Little Britain are feted for representing the dismal and degraded; the more dysfunctional the life of the celebrity - Amy Winehouse springs to mind - the more she is adored. With so many of us living wrecked or chaotic lives, it comforts us to see people who, despite similar problems, manage to be fashionable, wealthy or successful. Princess Diana was of course the most conspicuous example of this trend - someone who embodied and seemed to transcend difficulties with which we could identify, on the basis of a life that we confidently imagined we knew as intimately as our own. But of course we didn't. All we know of such a life is the image the celebrity herself - or the media - has constructed for us. Our subscription to celebrity culture is our entry ticket to Planet Virtual Reality.

As Whittle observes, it is children who think that the world revolves around them - and our culture ensures that they never leave that solipsistic state. The education system's obsessive wish that everything children are taught has to be 'relevant' to their lives means that rather than leading children to understand the world around them, it merely confirms in them what they already know. So they cannot grow outwards and upwards to proper adulthood.

At the same time, they are treated as premature adults by a grown-up world that will not discipline them on the basis that they must make their own 'choices' about how to behave and ensures that they never fail at anything in case this destroys their 'self-esteem'.

They grow up into an adult world that is deeply infantilised. Everything is all about 'me'. The therapy culture is devoted to getting in touch with the child within in order to actualise the repressed self. Everyone is obsessed with remaining perpetually young, at least as far as face-lifted, Botoxed appearance is concerned. Private emotion has been replaced by mass exhibitionism, in order to make public statements about what nice people we are. But the public displays of grief following the deaths of famous strangers actually express sentimentality and false emotion: you can't grieve for someone you don't know, and to think that you do means you don't know what real grief or love or emotion actually are.

This leads straight on to indifference, or worse, towards other people. Another of Whittle's insights is that much contemporary antisocial behaviour is designed to put on a show. 'Look at me misbehaving' says the drunken yob. Any remonstration with the youth putting his feet up on the train seat produces outrage, and even violence, since the remonstrator is at fault for daring to encroach on the miscreant's personal space.

One further question arises from this book - which is why fame is so important to us. It's hard not to conclude that, although (or because) we have made ourselves the centre of the universe, our lives are hollow and empty. We seek validation from others for our lives. 'Look at me', we say, 'and then I will know I am worthy; only then will I know I exist.'