As modern cultures become more secular, celebrities seem to fill the roles once occupied by the gods of old. Sometimes the differences between the two start to blur. Some people insist Elvis never died. Or was that Jim Morrison? The recent tributes to Princess Diana ten years after her death show that she is starting to ascend into the celebrity pantheon. Has Diana become a new kind of saint? If so, what does that tell us about some people’s need to have someone to revere—preferably someone who did not live out a normal life-span?
I encountered the cult of Princess Diana in 2004, when I was in Hyde Park on the day the Queen opened the Princess Diana Memorial Fountain. I found myself among a group of middle-aged women wearing jackets and hats completely covered with badges. They resembled football fanatics, except that instead of David Beckham’s face staring out from the badges there was Diana’s. In chatting with them, I learned that their clothing, handbags, and shoes were patterned after those that Diana had worn. Some of them described what seemed to be a kind of shrine to Diana in their homes—a special room, or section of a room, filled with memorabilia of the princess. Their lives, it seemed, now revolved around a woman who had at that point been dead for seven years. The Italian sculptor Luigi Baggi offered his view of this phenomenon with a statue of Diana in a pose and robes suggestive of the Virgin Mary. He seemed to think that celebrities have replaced religious figures. Margaret Evans, a British researcher, studied tributes people left for Diana after her death and found that some referred to her as a saint or an angel; a few even compared her directly with Jesus.
Also reminiscent of the death of Jesus is the fact that bizarre theories about Diana’s death sprung up soon after, including claims that she was not dead at all but living happily with her new love, Dodi Fayed, having staged the entire event to get away from the glare of publicity. Then, as befits a quasi-divine figure, a prophecy of her death was discovered in the words of singer/songwriter Morrissey on the Smiths’ album The Queen Is Dead. In October 2007, a long-delayed inquest into her death opened before a judge and jury to render an official verdict on the improbable theory put forward by Harrods’ owner Mohamed al Fayed that his son Dodi and Diana were murdered on the orders of the Royal Family to prevent the princess from marrying a Muslim.
If we take a detached rational perspective, this idolizing of Diana is as absurd as any other cult. Granted, she used her prominence to promote worthwhile causes, especially those related to the sick and marginalized. Her work for a ban on land mines was sometimes ridiculed as politically naïve, but it drew worldwide attention to the issue. Whether it would have led, without her death, to the Ottawa treaty banning land mines is impossible to tell. And even with the overwhelming popular demand triggered by her death that her work be brought to a successful conclusion, many nations, including the United States, Russia, China, Israel, and Iran, have still not signed the treaty. But there was often a disturbing incongruity between Diana’s commitment to the poor and sick and her extravagant lifestyle.
Diana’s flaws were part of her appeal. In contrast to the stiff, reserved members of the British royal family, she showed herself to be a princess who was also a normal human being, more like the rest of us. As she went through a messy marriage breakup triggered by an unfaithful husband, millions of women shared her pain. Diana’s life was reality television in an era before reality television shows. The constant media focus on her made it possible for people to feel that they really knew her, so they followed and cared intensely about her ups and downs as if she were a member of their family. If their own lives were dull and lacking in glamour, she made up for their deficiencies.
Earl Spencer urged us to resist the temptation to canonize his sister. In his funeral speech—the most interesting of all the Diana eulogies—he said that turning her into a saint was incompatible with appreciating her “mischievous sense of humor.” Nevertheless, he went on to attribute some saintlike qualities to her, especially her “almost childlike” desire to do good for others. And, in trying to account for the way in which British newspapers sneered at her good intentions, he said: “My own and only explanation is that genuine goodness is threatening to those at the opposite end of the moral spectrum.”
That remark may have been a bitter payback for the role Spencer believed the media, and the paparazzi who worked for them, had played in Diana’s death, but it was not without a grain of truth. Some people use cynicism about morality as an excuse for not trying to be a better person. If you can convince yourself that everyone is really only looking out for themselves then you don’t have to feel bad about doing the same. A princess with a naïve but sincere desire to do good threatens that protective shell, and one way to blunt the threat is to sneer. Diana might have had a better life in the United States, where people and the media are less cynical about doing good, and more ready to accept good intentions at face value.
If people need to have gods, then, Diana isn’t a bad one to have. She did try in her own way to do some good in the world, and that isn’t a poor example to set. Plus, there seems little danger that a Temple of Diana would try to impose on its adherents a repressive morality that made them feel guilty about sex.
Peter Singer is the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University. His books include Should the Baby Live? (coauthored with Helga Kuhse) and Rethinking Life and Death.
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