The term "celebrity culture" does to celebrity what "materialism" does to shopping: dismisses the whole thing as banal and evil. The only way clever people do celebrity is ironically: the chosen approach of many a smart, biting columnist, who wants to let you know she too has been thinking of Harry Styles, but only ironically, thankfully (given the degree from Balliol).
The elite implication is that there is something demeaning and childish about the need to hero-worship or dwell on a famous person who is our contemporary but who doesn't know us: it seems passive and inferior, a confession of inadequacy, a proof that we are insufficiently engaged with our own projects and have chosen to "escape" from our lives because we have no idea how to lead them properly.
This is a real pity – and problematic too, for if serious people judge the very concept of celebrity to be beneath them, then the role of anointing celebrities (which everyone can have a shot at doing, the Guardian as much as any other group with a constituency) will fall to organisations entirely untroubled by the prospect of appealing to the lowest denominator.
The impulse to admire is an ineradicable and important feature of our psyches. Ignoring or condemning it won't kill it off; it will simply force it underground, where it will lurk untended and undeveloped, prone to latch on to inappropriate targets. Rather than try to suppress our love of celebrity, we ought to channel it in optimally intelligent and fruitful directions. A properly organised society would be one where the best-known people were those who embodied and reinforced the highest, noblest and most socially beneficial values, and hence one in which an admission of reverence for a celebrity could be an occasion for pride rather than a prompt for shame or self-deprecating laughter.
Last year, Angelina Jolie was the highest paid female star in Hollywood. She goes to Africa a lot, too. She doesn't visit refugee camps in the Democratic Republic of Congo or in Rwanda to boost her income. She goes there to help people who are in great need. But more than anything, what she does is make Africa "sexy".
This is often seen as ridiculous – and a key reason why we should despise celebrities. A moralistic, or aggressively "mature" person would point out that we should not need celebrity endorsement to get worried about systematic rape or the plight of refugees in Sierra Leone or Tanzania. That's true. But in reality such attitudes are self-defeating. They fatally miscalculate what it takes to motivate people.
In a fantasy world we'd be motivated purely by the love of justice and humanitarian generosity. But most of us are not like that. We need a lot of encouragement, a lot of inducements, before we direct our thoughts – and money and effort – to distant strangers. Not because we are mean but because we are normal. It's normal to care a lot more about your own family than about other people's, to be obsessed about your own life and pretty detached about the suffering of people you'll never meet. Getting over that hurdle isn't simple, though sometimes it's important. The stern moralist forgets the barrier is there and so can't help us over it.
Something – a place or a cause – becomes "sexy" when we are given a sense that enthusiasm for it would be understood and liked by some very exciting people. By buying into it, we position ourselves as a little more attractive and glamorous. Jolie helps us to feel good about ourselves for caring about things that actually do deserve our concern, but which are at risk of seeming so miserable and intractable that we would otherwise simply tune out.
What Jolie does with Africa can be done with many other things. We need celebs to make a whole lot else sexy, including reading, being kind, forgiving and working towards social justice. Ideally, it would be normal for the most captivating people to lend their magnetism to the promotion of our best, long term interests. Too often at present, fame and sex-appeal is given over exclusively to profit-seeking. The things we genuinely need have not as yet been able, or willing, to draw on the raw appeal of the most glamorous and most famous people on the planet.
We are used to thinking that anyone who "copies" a celebrity is sad and inauthentic, but in its highest form, imitation founded on admiration is integral to a good life. To refuse to admire, to take no interest in what distinguished others are up to, is to shut ourselves off, grandly and implausibly, from important knowledge. The job of the news is to make the celebrity section no less exciting than it is now, while ensuring that it provides us with portraits of people who can guide us to what matters, in ourselves and the world.
