For some years now, the US TV host Glenn Beck has pursued a second career, in addition to his primary role spreading delusional paranoia on Fox News: he's also a self-help author. His latest, written with Keith Ablow, is The Seven Wonders That Will Change Your Life. (I'd summarise its message, but I suspect you've better things to do with your time, such as amputating each limb in turn with a circular saw.) The notion that Beck, who gives every impression of being deeply troubled, might be a credible adviser on "personal transformation and fulfilment", as his book claims, is preposterous. But, to be fair, it's only an extreme case of a problem underlying similar tomes by TV and film stars and business titans: why do we assume the ability to achieve celebrity is correlated with a superior understanding of human happiness? If anything, you'd expect the reverse to be true: that the relentless pursuit of fame might be rooted in an extreme craving for recognition, along with other traits unconducive to peace of mind. Few of us still look to celebrities, if we ever did, as models for how to live.
Given this, WD Wetherell may seem to be on a hiding to nothing with his book On Admiration, which aims "to restore admiration to its rightful place as the most honourable and enjoyable of all human emotions". His list of heroes – Eisenhower, Davy Crockett, Edmund Hillary – might read like conservative nostalgia, a longing for a time before youngsters started wearing their hair long and smoking iPads. But his point is more profound. It is that there's a way of relating to certain high-profile figures, albeit not Beck, that avoids both craven celebrity-worship and the fascinated contempt with which we follow the antics of reality TV's D-listers. People we truly admire – who needn't be celebrities, of course – "expand our sense of possibility" with a deep feeling of uplift, quite different from merely "liking" a beer or a band.
Yet until recently psychologists had barely studied admiration at all. Leading the way in redressing that is Jonathan Haidt, who classes admiration with gratitude as a "moral emotion", related to what he calls "elevation" – a category of feelings that resist psychology's usual effort to classify all emotions as somehow selfish, even if covertly so. "The emotions we feel when others do good, skilful or admirable things," Haidt observes, are "unusual in that they are not primarily about ourselves... they make us feel like better people; they are self-transcendent." Perhaps they ultimately hold society together. But first and foremost, they deliver happiness by shifting our focus away from our own happiness.
This column has inveighed before against comparing your life with the famous, who provide only edited versions of themselves – a classic case of "comparing your insides with other people's outsides". But admiration isn't the same as comparison, and some research suggests the "parasocial" relationships people have with celebrities can sometimes boost self-esteem, making them feel closer to their ideal selves. (Moreover, the researchers noted, imagined friendships carry a "low risk of rejection", so they're oddly secure.) Instead of passive celebrity-obsession, Wetherell suggests, we need more true admiration – an active emotion that, "at its most intense, floods over you like a wave [and] takes you to a strange new shore that, in the end, turns out to be the one that makes all the difference." Sounds like an admirable goal to me.
oliver.burkeman@guardian.co.uk
