When a woman tells the BBC of 'suffocation and fear' at the hands of a celebrity, one might expect a global outcry. Instead, we get a live report that reads like a cross between a tabloid shocker and a human rights tribunal. The British justice system, we are told, has been 'praised' for its handling of the case. Let us pause to consider what this says about our times.
Kanye West, a man who once styled himself as a genius, now finds himself accused of what amounts to common thuggery. The model's testimony reeks of the sort of degradation one might find in a Juvenal satire. But the real story here is not the alleged assault, it is the response. We are meant to celebrate the machinery of state that processes such sordid affairs. Yet I find little to cheer.
We live in an age of intellectual decadence. The cult of celebrity has long since replaced the cult of heroism. To see the British legal system, once a beacon of ordered liberty, reduced to a stage for this circus is a sad spectacle. The praise heaped upon it is the praise of a nation desperate for reassurance that its institutions still function. Function they do, but to what end? To adjudicate the squabbles of the vapid and the violent.
Consider the parallels with the Late Roman Empire. Then, as now, the public became obsessed with games and spectacles. Today, our games are the trials and tribulations of the famous. We watch them as the Romans watched gladiators, not for the justice of the contest but for the thrill of the blood. The victim's testimony of 'suffocation and fear' is our arena. We consume it with a mix of outrage and titillation.
The British justice system has a long history of being a model for the world. But when it is tasked with managing the fallouts of moral decay, it becomes a janitor, not a judge. The praise is misplaced. A system that can barely keep up with the torrent of iconoclastic behaviour from the rich and famous is a system in crisis.
Kanye West is merely a symptom. The disease is a culture that elevates the abnormal to the idolatrous. We have replaced reverence with fame, wisdom with notoriety. The model's suffering is real, but it is also a prop in a larger drama about our collective values.
In Victorian England, there would have been no live report. The matter would have been handled with discretion, if at all. The press would have focused on the principles at stake, not the lurid details. Today, we have lost that sense of proportion. We are lost in a world of instant opinion and manufactured outrage.
Let us not praise the system for doing its basic duty. Let us instead ask why we need it to intervene in such sordid affairs, and what that says about the state of our civilisation. The fall of Rome did not come from barbarians at the gate, but from rot within. We are rotting, one headline at a time.
