One of my favourite New Yorker cartoons joked about how, as we become adults, our brain fills up and we have to throw out old knowledge to stuff in new facts. The accompanying picture had a woman walking along happily reading Celebrity Chat magazine, while in the dustbin behind her lay a discarded filing drawer marked “Western Philosophers A-Z”.

When I saw it, I ruefully reflected that my retention of the name of almost every Premier League football player painfully contrasts with my ability to recall the terms in which Karl Popper assails Plato in volume one of The Open Society and its Enemies. You’ve got to laugh.

Except that some people don’t. At the Cheltenham Literature Festival last weekend the damage caused by “celebrity culture” was assessed and the case for the prosecution was put by the admirable writer and physician Raymond Tallis. I want to mount at least part of the case for the defence.

I realise I am compressing my opponents’ argument wildly, but it goes something like this. Society is going to hell in a handcart, and part of the reason is the rise in our collective worship of empty celebrities. Our interest in them, and gossip about them is, as Tallis puts it, “a black hole sucking up light”.

Where shall I start? Here, I think — society is not going to hell in a handcart.

The search for a reason why it is will therefore prove unavailing.

I would go farther. In his book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, Steven Pinker cites evidence that civilisation has brought with it fewer wars and a reduced tendency to kill those who do not belong to our immediate social group. You could argue that global media is part of the reason for this reduced tendency. The more we have in common, the more strange faces we see on television, the less strange strangers will appear. Far from sending the world to hell in a handcart, celebrity culture is a large reason why it hasn’t gone that way.

Indeed, I bet that if you could find an accurate measure, the amount of celebrity gossip engaged in by a social group would be positively correlated to the peacefulness, prosperity and happiness of societies.

That brings me to a more general point about gossip. I am not a historian, so I cannot provide an empirical retort to the idea that our celebrity fixation is greater than in other times. It is possible that the fixation is more general because more people have prosperity and leisure, and therefore the ability both to enjoy celebrities and to express their enjoyment of them. But this seems an odd thing to regret.

Whatever the historical evidence, gossip is a natural part of being human. In his book The Moral Animal, Robert Wright speculates about the origins of human co-operation and friendship. He suggests that much of its value is the exchange of information. In other words, he suggests, friendship exists primarily to exchange gossip.

Part of the prosecution case is that celebrities today, as opposed to those of previous times, are famous for doing nothing. It is not clear that either part of that contention is true. Few celebrities are famous for nothing. There are some who are noteworthy only because they are sexually attractive, but that is different. And there are others known only for being married to someone famous. But hasn’t that always been the case? The literature of the Victorian period is full of tales recounting the progress through society of attractive people on their way to marry famous aristocrats.

It is true that young people, when asked about their ambitions, often reply that they want to be famous. But the desire for status, like the gossip instinct, is a basic part of human nature. Of course, fame and wealth are attainable for more people in modern Western societies. Am I supposed to think that is a bad thing?

Finally, there is the dumbing down accusation. But we are not dumbing down, we are dumbing up. I agree that Heat magazine is not intellectually nourishing, but the idea that it is driving out the study of Homer seems unlikely. The work of James Flynn, published in his book What is Intelligence?, suggests that IQ is rising, and that forms of knowledge are changing. We know more about science, for instance.

Last week I was reading about the spat over University Challenge. Peter Gwyn, the programme’s executive producer, has been studying past questions. “In 1962, a team struggled to answer the question: ‘Who came up with E=mc²?’.” They should have known. After all, Albert Einstein was quite a celebrity.

daniel.finkelstein@thetimes.co.uk

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