The world is full of 'legends'

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): I managed not to write about Princess Diana on the first anniversary of her death a few weeks ago -- after all, she hasn't done much that's newsworthy in the past year -- but you just can't get away from the topic of fame. Which, of course, inevitably leads the conversation straight back to you-know-who.

It started at dinner, with Kate, my 6-year-old, asking what we meant by saying that someone was a 'legend'. I said that it was a famous person who stayed famous after they died -- which started an argument about whether there could really be a 'living legend'.

Sure, said her mother, there are lots of them. Bob Dylan, for example -- whereupon the 15-year-old asked who Bob Dylan was.

He wrote lots of songs that you've heard, Tina said. Blowing in the Wind, for example.

Gone with the Wind? Melissa replied. No, that's a book and a film, not a song, I said.

Well, is it that song about Princess Diana? Melissa asked. No, that's Candle in the Wind, I said -- and added: The song was originally about Marilyn Monroe. She's a legend, too.

The point being that we are overrun with legends. The average person now recognizes the names and faces of many more "famous" people whom they have never met than real people whom they actually know. And this is surely an historical first.

If you doubt me, try this experiment. Just keep track of how many people die in the next week or two that you have heard of. Not just mega-stars like Frank Sinatra, but anyone whose face and name you recognise. You'll find that there are at least a couple a week.

Two people per week is a hundred a year. At least one hundred people you have never met but nevertheless know something about -- actors and actresses, sports stars, politicians, business people, musicians and singers -- are dying each year. You see it on the television or read it in the paper, and generally pass on dry-eyed.

In the very same month that Diana died, Mother Theresa passed away in Calcutta. General Mobutu, ex-dictator of Zaire, died, as did American pop artist Roy Lichtenstein, and Prof. Hans Eysenck, whose views on race and intelligence were widely condemned as racist. That's an average of more than one person dying per week whose fame is international.

Add in the deaths of all those who are only famous in the country or city where you live, and the number climbs very steeply indeed -- to at least a dozen a month.

Even counting people whom you met once and barely remember, nothing like one hundred people whom you actually know die each year. You "know" at least ten times as many people by their fame as you know in your real life.

The number of people you know well enough to have a brief conversation when you meet is a remarkably stable figure: between 140 and 200 people. Hermits know fewer people, insurance salesmen and politicians know more, but unless some professional deformation skews the total, the number of names in your address book will stay about the same as the maximum size of a hunting- and-gathering band.

Well, obviously. Human beings evolved in hunting-and-gathering bands, and spent 99 percent of our history living in groups of that size. We are programmed to deal with around 140-200 relationships -- some close, many more casual -- because what held those groups together was a dense network of social ties.

These are very large numbers for our sort of primates, by the way. Chimpanzees. our nearest relatives, cannot handle more than about seventy relationships, and their bands split in two if they grow beyond that number.

Our secret weapon was speech, which gave us a low-cost way to maintain a large number of social ties while getting on with our lives. (You can't do anything else while you're servicing a relationship by picking nits out of your neighbor's fur). There are even those who argue that the very large size of human bands was a key factor in starting us down the road to global domination.

But now we have grown to average "band sizes" in the millions. There is no way to know so many people: personal ties cannot hold the group together. For the first five thousand years of civilization we solved the problems of cohesion and cooperation with force: all early mass societies were tyrannies that you could not leave. But now most of us live in democracies.

Mass media, starting with books and newspapers and ending with television and the internet, are the reason democracy became possible.

They gave people a way of following the argument about who are we and where are we going as a society, and even taking part in it from time to time (mainly by voting). But it turns out that the mass media also have another function: to fill our minds with a large phantom population of "famous" people who stand in for the millions of fellow-citizens we cannot really know.

Andy Warhol talked about a future where everybody would be famous for fifteen minutes, and there are now down-market television freak-shows that prove he was at least partly right. But the willing victims who are briefly exposed and humiliated on vehicles like the Jerry Springer Show aren't really famous. You will never read their obituaries in the paper.

Some famous people are known for what they actually did in the world: Mobutu and Mother Theresa, for example. Others, like Princess Diana or Frank Sinatra, were famous more for being who they were -- for the kind of personality that their simplified public image embodied. And that, I suspect, is the point.

In the hugely complex societies we live in now, we cannot even begin to understand the variety of human experience and personality through our own narrow circle of acquaintance. The famous people whom we vicariously "know" help to fill that gap, and since these are zero-maintenance relationships, we can have as many as we need.

So if you obsessed about Diana, don't worry. (Maybe that's what Bill Clinton is there for, too.)