In this weekend’s News of the World, Gazza’s ex-wife Sheryl was dishing the dirt on her ex-hubby, once a footballer of some (justified) renown. The magazine shelves of W H Smith are currently offering six different versions of the state of play in the circulation war that is the relationship between Katie Price (aka Jordan) and her ex-hubby, Peter Andre. Amy Winehouse is waiting in the wings to make her comeback to or from scandal.

This is the celebrity culture, and some will tell you that if it makes you vomit or rage, “just get over it”. Even King Canute (that one-factoid celebrity) gave up when he saw the ice-cream vans floating in the sea. Besides, there are, surely, worse curses: violence, greed, poverty and — looking farther afield — civil war, dictatorship, plague. Even so, celebrity is a curse — as we debated at The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival last weekend. It is a cognitive malaise that affects us all.

The heart of the celebrity culture is an individual emptiness gawped at by a collective emptiness. OK, so it’s not very edifying but isn’t it all a bit of harmless fun? No it is not, and the harm has many dimensions.

First and foremost, there is the opportunity cost of interminable second-hand gossip; preoccupation with celebrities is an appalling squandering of human consciousness.

The centuries of prattle, of air time and screen time, the miles of column inches are a sickening misuse of the gift of life, of health and adequate nutrition, of freedom from oppression, of the access we now have to the world of knowledge and the arts. They are stolen from thought about, or discussion of, things that are truly important or worthwhile; fighting poverty, disease and the iniquities and injustice of the world; the profound joy afforded by literature and the arts; questions about the meaningful purpose of life.

The celebrity culture is a black hole sucking up light. It is not only a manifestation of the cretinisation or tabloidisation of our culture but further cretinises it.

Celebrity culture spreads like a stain. It engulfs even those whose fame is rooted in real achievement or real responsibility. As the empty are valued, so the valuable are emptied. They are treated as if they were as vacuous as pop idols. Scientists, artists and politicians become defined in the collective consciousness not by the serious, complex matters that they deal with or by their real achievements but, increasingly, by their sex lives, their personal traumas, their peccadillos.

Never mind the general theory of relativity and those field equations that are one of the greatest monuments of the human intellect. What the punter wants to know is whether Einstein shagged his dog. This is what we might call, after Alan Bennett’s play, the Kafka’s Dick Syndrome. Don’t bore me with the fact that Kafka had one of the great imaginations of the last century — tell me what he was like in the sack.

Another damaging aspect of celebrity culture is the increasing tendency to treat celebrities as oracles. This goes beyond unscrupulous product endorsement. I lost count of the number of household names whose ignorant, innumerable opinions clouded the debate on the MMR vaccine. The expertise of the empty reached its climax when a certain pop star who, as my mother said, has to distract from the poverty of her music by prancing half-naked round a stage, commands attention for her opinion that mystic kaballah fluid could decontaminate radioactive sites.

It seems that it must be wonderful when people hang on your every ill-considered opinion, your choice of lipstick, every twist and turn of your turbulent relationship with Mr Not Right.

So it’s hardly surprising that so many young people declare that they wish to be famous as a primary aim rather than as a by-product of true achievement or as a result of making a difference to the world. Victoria Beckham is an example of someone who awakens aspirations that are at once worthless and, for the vast majority of people, beyond reach.

And then there is the disgusting endgame. When those who have been elevated to divine status stumble, the pack smells blood. The erstwhile worshippers, in the grip of schadenfreude, rejoice to see the Photoshop-enhanced body fall over with poo on its knickers, rowing with its partner, throwing up in the gutter or checking in and out of rehab.

All right, it may be conceded that celebrity culture is harmful in many ways, but surely it is not new. Mark Bostridge’s brilliant recent biography reminds us of the extraordinary cult that surrounded Florence Nightingale. But at least she earned her fame on the basis of a fundamental contribution to making the world a better place. She was not just a pair of big tits attached to a savvy PR machine. And the celebrity culture is now more efficiently mediated; it is wall-to-wall.

It is perhaps a touch Utopian to imagine a society in which people are preoccupied by the large, practical problems of the world, immersed in the richness of art and exercised by the mystery of human nature. But surely we do not have to settle for a diet of eternal gassing about tenth-order ephemera reported at third hand.

Celebrity culture degrades us all. The conversation we have with ourselves about things that matter is immeasurably impoverished and our lives are lost to lifestyle. None of us who cares for the world we live in should “just get over it”.

Raymond Tallis is a writer and physician. His latest book is The Kingdom of Infinite Space: A Fantastical Journey Around Your Head (Atlantic Books)

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