We are overwhelmed in our time by images of suffering from far away -- devastation unfolding in real time in digital resolution and Dolby sound, lives being ruined before our eyes -- that we don't know what to do with, how to live with. It's a kind of relief to turn to another genre of dramatic images that bombard us: the lives of celebrities, people who by contrast "have it all." We can admire their excess of beauty and revelry and love affairs and then, when their marriages end or they head into treatment, we can follow their plight knowing that they require nothing of us, not even guilt. They have all the resources for all the solutions in the world.
All this is by way of saying that I don't worry overly about our cultural interest in celebrities per se. I understand and participate in it and suspect it is as old as time. But as I've watched Britney Spears unravel before our eyes, in real time, with no end in sight, I have begun to think it's time for a pause, a moment of cultural soul-searching. I've been disturbed by the numerous reports I've heard - not in People or Us but in major news outlets - gleefully tallying all the money she continues to make for paparazzi and other people around her, noting with amusement that the profits only rise as she sinks to ever-lower depths.
A few years ago I had a conversation with Pankaj Mishra, an Indian journalist who traced the Buddha's legacy in history and across the world as a social thinker. Mishra himself is an intellectual and a skeptic and came to an interest in religion warily and indirectly. But when I pressed him about the rise of Buddhism and other contemplative religious practices in Hollywood in recent years, he refused to be critical. Stars, he said, have achieved the fame and wealth that our culture exalts and decrees as the pinnacle of success. Yet they discover, each in their own private places and struggles, that fame and wealth can accompany an utter void of meaning. Outward glory does not equal, and may in fact thwart, personal happiness. This simple insight, too, is as old as time.
Britney Spears, as much as any other current celebrity, is our creation. She achieved stardom at an age when her sense of self, of what is good and right and meaningful in life, was completely determined by the adults and the culture around her. But the same machine that made her is exquisitely calibrated to destroy and discard her.
So though it might seem a stretch to add Britney's plight to our public list of "moral values" issues, I'm proposing that she might belong there. I'd like to hear religious and spiritual leaders bold enough to call for compassion and introspection. I wonder who or what could effect a stop to the paparazzi hounding of an already ruined person? Where are the voices genuinely concerned about the plight of her children, whose own personal devastation is also on display in real time, a matter of public spectacle through no fault of their own? What is it doing to our own children when we fail to think and speak about our collective complicity in the creation and downfall of a human being like Britney Spears?
When I write about why religion matters and how to talk about it, I am describing my own longing that diverse religious, ethical, spiritual and theological voices in our culture could gain a new weight and wisdom beyond the tired and polarizing issues - even and precisely in situations like this.
Krista Tippett is creator and host of Speaking of Faith at American Public Media. Her program is heard on over 200 public radio stations across the U.S. and globally via podcast. She is author of "Speaking of Faith - Why Religion Matters and How to Talk about it."
