THE CULT OF DIANA
NEWELL, WALLER R.
THE CULT OF DIANA by Waller R. Newell THIS TIME LAST YEAR, I arrived in London just days after the death of the princess of Wales. The city was paralyzed by the rites of mourning. Every park and...
...The counterculture scorned the bourgeois virtues as hopelessly hypocritical and alienating...
...For Diana, in her apotheosis, was no longer just the princess of Wales...
...They receive them from the mass media—television, movies, and popular music...
...All you needed was the right vibes, freedom from hang-ups, and a faith that the system must change...
...The proletariat of Marxist theory gave way to the celebritari-at of the stylishly disaffected, hip, and hedonistic...
...The Left searches for a new International of the dispossessed (students, environmentalists, aboriginals), while on the right, Peter Drucker tells us that our heritage of constitutional government, stretching back to Locke and the Federalist Papers, with its checks and balances and tendency to overregulation, is the chief remaining impediment to global economic efficiency...
...If celebrities are the new opinion elite of our increasingly depoliticized culture, in death Diana, who loved the company of the glitterati, became their celestial monarch...
...His "Crisis of Manliness" appeared in our August 3 issue...
...The outpouring, moreover, was not just a British phenomenon...
...Today's celebrity can escape censure for the most disgraceful behavior if he or she embraces the right causes...
...Albert Schweitzer and Eleanor Roosevelt yielded to Jack Nicholson, Mick Jagger, and Madonna as cultural heroes and role models...
...If destiny is determined by global processes, why attend to the civic culture of one's own country...
...It turns out, however, that caring about distant abstractions is no substitute for engaging with one's own culture and traditions...
...Who needed knowledge of policy, history, ideology, or culture to embrace the values of Love and Peace...
...No one better typifies the new fame than Diana's friend and most public mourner, the aging rock star Elton John...
...She was, as one of the floral tributes proclaimed, "Diana of Love," our first global celebrity princess...
...Into the psychological vacuum flows the pantheism of the New Age, the pseudo-religion that conjures forth the cyberspace kingdom of Love, Peace, and Caring, peopled with celebrity courtiers—and reigned over now by Diana...
...the picture, entitled "Tears for a Princess," was surrounded by burning tapers, with a kind of causeway marked off on either side, evocative of the cargo cults of New Guinea, full of chalk inscriptions, prayers, and poems left by passers-by...
...Just have the right gut feeling...
...The crowds were hushed, not only from reverence but also from the sheer stupefaction of those like me who could not explain how millions of people in the land of the stiff upper lip had suddenly descended into paganism...
...Waller R. Newell is professor of political science and philosophy at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada...
...Views grounded in knowledge, evidence, and tradition are seen as outmoded in an emerging world without borders...
...Thus, the more unrestrained you were in your personal life—the more titanic your excesses and luxuries— the better-suited you were to preach the new anti-morality...
...Today, vast participatory rites of spontaneous sentimentality about moral and political issues not only encroach on the sphere of religion, they are celebrated as if they were more authentic than action grounded in narrative history and received wisdom...
...Both sides are seeking (as Jonathan Schell put it) "to reinvent politics, reinvent the world...
...The middle realm of nation-states, each with its unique historical pedigree, seems to fade...
...A profile in Vanity Fair last year revealed an overgrown adolescent whose restless boredom, when he's not recording or performing, seeks relief through a staggeringly vulgar consumerism...
...The funeral service in Westminster Abbey was seen on television all over the world...
...When i started taking photos, the self-appointed priest ran toward me shouting, "You're the ones who killed her...
...Before the rise of the counterculture, it was assumed that the right to influence public opinion was linked to one's personal integrity and relevant expertise...
...Every park and monument was piled yards high with floral tributes, sometimes for blocks...
...The effect was bizarre, the overall impact simultaneously moving and embarrassing...
...However worthy the causes, what the cult of Diana has in common with the earlier celebrity-led effusions is that it places few demands on its followers...
...in a giant chalk drawing made by a street person on the Embankment, a dark-haired Diana merged with a Hindu goddess...
...At a recent tribute, Baywatch star David Hasselhoff prayed to her to end the rain, and claimed she did...
...No need to know much about actual events or issues or the background to public policy...
...But with the sixties came a new kind of celebrity that is with us still, the millionaire anti-hero...
...So does the need to know much about the past or even to appreciate political realities as elementary as the difference between liberal democracy and tyranny...
...A worldwide satellite feed of celebrities singing that Mankind Is One is more real to a young person, more in tune with the quicksilver impulses of his adolescence and the vagueness of his education, than the dense complexities of diplomacy, strategy, or political psychology...
...Diana married the venerable glamour of the royal family to the New Age aristocracy of caring...
...Amidst the bouquets were thousands of tiny, elaborate shrines— photos nestled among burning candles, adorned with pieces of costume jewelry, teddy bears, and ribbons...
...These handmade shrines had a New Age quality, evocative of many religions but obedient to none...
...Once she divorced herself from the royal family, she was caught up in currents she did not comprehend...
...Her televised obsequies—complete with Elton John's musical eulogy (a reworked tribute to Marilyn Monroe), its CD proceeds designated for charity—were in a line of celebrity love-ins going back to the counterculture of the sixties and the peace movement of the eighties: from the Beatles' "All You Need Is Love" (1967) to John and Yoko's "Give Peace a Chance" (1969) to the mass celebrity anthem in aid of African famine victims, "We Are The World" (1985...
...People today do not, for the most part, acquire their perceptions of major events from schools (where the teaching of history has languished) or from reading...
...By the end, of course, Diana far transcended the Windsor connection...
...This Diana stood for moral abstractions like Peace and Compassion...
...To the extent that the new utopian visions are believed, they lead to fatalism and ennui...
...As people adjust to a new world of global economic processes and moral crusades, such as environmental-ism, they are urged to "think globally, act locally...
...Through these rituals of virtual community, celebrities function as a new global opinion elite, aiding the impoverished of Bangladesh, battling landmines, or championing Tibetan Buddhists on no authority other than their fame...
...One showed the Virgin Mary holding the baby Jesus and John the Baptist, suggesting a parallel to Diana and her two sons...
...She became an icon, and onto her millions of people around the world projected their yearnings and fantasies...
Vol. 3 • September 1998 • No. 49
