Whatever views we may hold on the subject of Jade Goody, Romans would have found it grimly appropriate that a woman ‘famous’ for appearing on Big Brother should choose to die in the arms of a PR consultant.
Whatever views we may hold on the subject of Jade Goody, Romans would have found it grimly appropriate that a woman ‘famous’ for appearing on Big Brother should choose to die in the arms of a PR consultant. But the Stoics would have been baffled why she and her unhappy demise were thought worthy of such attention from the media.
Stoicism, invented by the Cypriot Zeno (335-263 bc), taught that the ‘divine’ element in man was his rational mind. So the happy life — one in accordance with the course set for you by the god — consisted in ensuring that your opinions, impulses, emotions, desires, aversions and so on were under rational control; if not, unhappiness was the inevitable result. Apekhou kai anekhou said the Stoic thinker Epictetus: ‘restrain yourself and endure’. A favourite Stoic image is that of the dog on the leash. The dog can travel his destined course by acting rationally, and so go freely and happily; or by acting irrationally, and so struggle and be miserable. Doubtless journalists would contend that, by controlling the nation’s base appetites with their rational, restrained and unsentimentalised coverage of Ms Goody’s misfortune, they were spreading happiness far and wide.
Zeno likewise argued that all forms of subjugation were evil, and therefore e.g. slavery was morally wrong. Other Stoics agreed: ‘Justice instructs you to spare all men, to respect the human race, to return to each his own, not to touch what is sacred, or what belongs to the state, or what belongs to someone else’. The argument was extended by later Stoics to embrace the idea that humans were naturally bound to one another by a code of law, and that for one man to use another merely for his own benefit was to break that natural, mutual bond. The media will surely proclaim that its lavish coverage of Ms Goody’s demise was entirely selfless, to none but her and her children’s advantage.
Is there no end to the virtue of journalists? We should be grateful for the heart-warming sight of the British media sobbing ecstatically at the prospect of Ms Goody’s funeral. These are, after all, fraught times for newspaper sales, but nothing will stop them doing good. It is presumably what she wanted, too. De mortuis nil nisi bonus (and the bigger the better), eh, Lord Copper?
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