But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God.
--Paul, 1 Corinthians 1:27-29
Yesterday, possibly the deadliest shooting in the history of Nebraska took place in an Omaha shopping mall. Myriad horrible reasons can lead a person to shoot fellow humans en masse a la Columbine or Virginia Tech, and I don't believe any one reason can explain a complex situation. But the BBC news coverage included information about the shooter's suicide note not found in other news I read. Rumored to have lost his job that day at McDonald's, the gunman's note apparently also described his desire to be famous.
I refuse to write his name in this blog for that precise reason. While I am certain that a desire for fame could not be the sole reason that he committed an atrocity prior to suicide, the possibility of its contribution to this occurrence hangs heavy on my head. We as members of this culture are guilty in our support of fame over excellence. My friend Valerie, a Gen X-er, often challenges that those of us in our 20s tend to value fame over the excellence that should be a natural predecessor to fame. While excellence may have led to Meryl Streep's fame, it certainly had nothing to do with Paris Hilton's. What does it mean to seek fame for fame's sake?
I began this post with a quotation from Paul, not because he has the most psychologically stable advice to offer us today, but because its rhetorical valuation of what is dishonorable to the Roman world popped into my head today. Robert Jewett draws on this quotation from Paul in Saint Paul Returns to the Movies: Triumph Over Shame in part as a call for people to seek themselves in things other than those deemed great by the world. Excellence is not something the outside world can measure for us as individuals. I can only assume that we seek fame, at least in part, to relieve the existential quandary of human existence, but, though not myself famous, I am certain fame alone cannot solve that quandary. And if we, in that cultural space that somehow transforms individual psychology, cannot learn to value an excellence completely unmeasurable by how often our youtube video is played then we may all end up killing ourselves in Nebraska shopping malls.
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On a completely unrelated note, I just had to note that NewsCorp bought beliefnet.com, citing, at least in the Financial Times, the Pew study finding that 82 million people in the USA turn to the internet as part of their faith. What will Murdoch controlled online religion look like? And to what purposes will it be put?
