Do we feel guilt for Liam Payne’s death?

We want the celebrity world to exist, but it returns terrible violence.

Jack Chisnall

Jack Chisnall is a former gag teller and Oxford Theology graduate, combining the two at Holy Fooling.

A crowd of teenagers gather by a Peter Pan statue to mourn a dead pop star

A fan vigil beside a Peter Pan Statue, London.

Sky News.

It’s no secret that fame is a poisoned chalice. Those reading about Liam Payne, the former One Direction star who died last week, will have noticed the theme: denied privacy, loaded with unbearable expectations, in a milieu where illegal substances were too much to hand - what chance did he have? The word ‘tragedy’ is scattered across multiple headlines.

One young Telegraph writer sees it as a generational trauma: “our first celebrity-induced reminder that life can be cruel, and fleeting”. Formerly Elvis, or John Lennon, now Payne; plus ça change. But what really haunts our society about Payne’s death is not a feeling it was unavoidable. It is, rather, our guilt: did we do this? Our rapacious appetites, consumer needs, and reckless licensing of rock-’n-roll form - did we tie this teen idol to the sacrificial altar?

Religious language is not inappropriate: thousands in cities around the world are holding vigils to Payne’s memory, and these shrines would have interested René Girard, who had a theory about how society works. While staying “a few pages ahead of the students” in French novels at Indiana University during the late 1950s, Girard noticed that humans want things, but not because of innate desires. We want things because other humans want them. There is always this undercurrent of rivalry to our world, even amongst close friends - in fact, especially for those whose goals are most similar.

What becomes of this collective aggression? It has to be banished through scapegoating. It’s everyone against one; a victim is butchered. For Girard, culture is what happens when a group achieves temporary peace in the wake of a sacrificial death. The bubble of built-up tension has burst, and an epoch of nonviolence means we get on with civilisation. We raise the kids, build some structures, or write a poem.

Religious mourning for Payne reveals these sacrificial contours of our culture. We want the celebrity world to exist, for its fantasies, desirable bodies, and danger. But it returns terrible violence - exploitation, harassment, and rejection (Payne’s own solo career had not kept him at the thrilling toppermost of the chart). The death of a victim sobers us up, momentarily, from our intoxication. But how long until we repeat it again?

Girard converted to Catholicism in 1959, after he encountered in the Gospels a religion that acknowledged these human trends, and offered a solution. It still required imitation - of Jesus Christ - but without the threat of rivalry. But in the crucifixion was a scapegoating that did not seem to leave things open to repetition. It had finished something, for good. Sunday morning yielded a new kind of peace.

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Politics

5 March 2024

5 min read

Politics needs some deep stirring emotion

In politics, the struggle between our reason and desire is a fair fight.

Henna Cundill

Henna is a researcher with the Centre for Autism and Theology at the University of Aberdeen.

A young woman in a blue suit stands at a wooden box in a parliamentary debating chamber looking upward while speaking.

British Youth Council parliamentary debate.

British Youth Council.

“The government you elect is the government you deserve.” So goes the famous quote, variously attributed to Thomas Jefferson, Joseph de Maistre and George Bernard Shaw. Of all these thinkers, Maistre is perhaps the most interesting, describing the business of government as a kind of religion, a political “faith” – one complete with dogmas, mysteries and even ministers.

Maistre was, somewhat surprisingly amid the turmoil of eighteenth-century France, a staunch monarchist. His argument was that, if the authority of a political leader was only a product of social convention, then that authority would always lack a sufficient degree of legitimacy, leaving the door wide open for violence and strife. His solution was to defend the divine right of kings. This was a controversial position, as much then as it is now.

Aside from his famous quote about elections, Maistre’s political philosophy is oft-criticised as polemical, hearkening back to a golden era of European monarchy that never really existed. Nevertheless, within his writings, Maistre laid bare a reality that we often prefer to keep veiled: that our political will is as much about what we find to be emotionally compelling as it is about what we find to be rationally convincing, indeed, the latter is very much dependent on the former. The more social scientists are able to demonstrate the reality of subtle phenomena such as confirmation bias, unconscious bias, and racial prejudice, the more we see that we are often being governed by pre-cognitive or non-cognitive instincts, even those of us who like to think that we are better than that. In the end, we have to concede that when it comes to politics, as with so much else, the struggle between our faculty of reason and the desire of our heart is a fair fight.

“They have few standards by which to judge between falsehood and truth in revolutionary movements.”

Amy Buller

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In 1930’s Europe, there was certainly a lot of emotionally compelling politics around. Fascinated by the language and culture of the German people, thinker and educator Amy Buller made repeated visits to Germany from the 1920’s onwards, often accompanied by reading parties of British academics, church leaders and university students. In those decades, as the political landscape of Germany began to shift, her purpose became less about countryside walks and studying, and more about the facilitation of urgent, open and honest dialogue between Buller, her fellow travellers, and their German counterparts in the churches and universities wherever she had contacts. As Hitler rose to power, and even before the full horrors of Nazism became widely known, Amy was compelled to find out why so many people, especially young people, were being attracted by what she saw as a “brutish” ideology.

In 1943, amid the violence and destruction of World War II, Buller published a book, Darkness Over Germany, which gives a first-hand account of the many people that she and her travelling parties had met, and the conversations that had taken place. Like Maistre, Buller proposed that without God, politics was a dangerous kind of faith in something, one that tended towards violence. In the introduction to her book she writes of “…the tragedy of a whole generation of German youth, who, having no faith, made Nazism their religion.”

It’s common these days to hear complaints about the political apathy of the young, with polls commonly reporting that only about 50 per cent of British 18 to 24-year-olds are intending to vote in the next General Election. However, there are those who raise the caution that this may not be a symptom of apathy, so much as a symptom of the cultural and structural injustices that put barriers in the way of young people engaging with our nation’s political life. Young people are not likely to “believe in” a political system from which they feel excluded. As Buller’s writing notes – when this happens, young people are likely to put their “faith” in something else.

Maistre’s solution was perhaps too extreme for modern sensibilities: asking the politically minded populace to believe that their leaders were imbued with the authority of God, by God. In the twentieth-century, Buller took a more moderate view. As the Nazis began to view her with suspicion, trips to Germany became increasingly difficult to arrange, so she travelled elsewhere to places such as Hungary and Bulgaria. Wherever Buller went, she found more and more young people who wanted to talk to her about their political hopes and ideals. Summarising the whole, Buller suggested that Europe’s political landscape was eschewing “shallow rationalism” and instead being shaken by a “deep stirring” of emotion, particularly among young people. She recorded the observation:

“They all want change, and they all want a chance to play a part in that change, but so few have any religious faith, which means that they have few standards by which to judge between falsehood and truth in revolutionary movements.”

In a recent report, published by the Jo Cox Foundation, increasing the public’s “political literacy” was highlighted as a key response to prevent the outbreaks of abuse, intimidation and violence towards elected officials. As any educator will tell you, literacy is a two-way street – it includes not only the “shallow rationalism” of knowing information, or knowing where to access information, but also the ability to communicate that information effectively to others. Such communication comes from a much deeper, embodied kind of knowing, one which requires one to have assimilated knowledge and worked with it, feeling its malleability, and testing its apparent truth-claims against an internal standard of what is true and false, or right and wrong.

For Buller, this internal standard was inextricably linked to faith. To the end of her life, she remained open minded as to what form this faith might take, albeit her own religious practice was firmly Christian. Cumberland Lodge, the educational charity she set up to promote her aims, was from the start open to those of all faiths and none, and she warmly welcomed dialogue between those of different faith groups, including atheism. But in 1943, as Amy Buller looked with hope towards the prospect of a post-war Europe, she summed up the political landscape as follows:

We are now faced with the greater task of bringing healing to the nations, including our own, I am convinced this cannot be done without a faith in God adequate to the tremendous task of reconstruction.

Given Amy Buller’s open-mindedness, one can read the word “God” in this statement its broadest possible sense, as referring to whatever moral compass one takes as an internal standard of what is true and false, or right and wrong. But the point remains that the political will is therefore not a matter of rational thought, or not only of that, but is an expression of feelings and instincts that run far, far deeper.