CELINE COOPER
It’s December, which means it’s year-in-review time again. So who will top the palmarès as 2014’s most powerful person? Richest? Sexiest?
You know what I would love to see? A list of 2014’s most worthy celebrities. My No. 1 would go to 17-year-old Malala Yousafzai, this year’s co-laureate of the Nobel Peace Prize. If ever there were a role model for our times, she is it.
Malala’s story of determination and survival has been on a loop since she was shot in 2012. Still, it bears repeating: Malala was born into a Pashtun family in Pakistan’s Swat Valley. The district was a tourist destination until the Taliban bore down, restricting girls’ access to schools and eventually imposing Shariah law in 2009. Malala began speaking out for children’s education when she was only 10 years old. In 2008, she travelled to Peshawar where she gave a speech titled: “How dare the Taliban take away my basic right to education?” As militants bombed schools and threatened teachers, students and parents, she began blogging anonymously for the BBC about the rights abuses in her home district in Swat under Taliban rule.
In October 2012, a Taliban gunman boarded her school bus and shot her in the head for her high-profile activism. She was 15 at the time. After the assassination attempt, her family moved to Britain and today, she lives in Birmingham, England. On Dec. 10, Malala became the youngest-ever recipient of a Nobel Peace Prize and the first Pakistani to become a laureate. She shares the award with 60-year-old Kailash Satyarthi of India, a dedicated children’s rights and anti-slavery campaigner.
Somewhere amid the morass of our modern culture of celebrity and consumerism, Malala has emerged as the real deal: an ordinary girl living through extraordinary circumstances, whose life has been characterized by honesty and courage. She didn’t seek out fame or celebrity, it found her. She hasn’t used it for her own gain, but rather to amplify her message for global education. It’s a reminder that celebrity doesn’t have to be so vacuous after all.
According to social anthropologist Jamie Tehrani of Durham University, our fixation with celebrity culture is a result of our poorly adapted brains. In a piece for the BBC, he argued: “As a hyper-social species, we acquire the bulk of our knowledge, ideas and skills by copying from others …” Yet, as he goes on to write, “while celebrities today get more attention and prestige than at any other point in human history, we are frequently being told not to hold them up as role models … What are celebrities for if they are not to be role models?”
Good question.
“Our age is lousy with celebrities,” wrote George Packer in the International Herald Tribune last year. In this modern era when mass media has artificially puffed up the power, influence and wealth associated with fame, it no longer matters what you are known for. Fame itself is the goal.
What do these famous-for-being-famous celebrities do? They move product. They make money. They sell us the illusion that we can be like them if we buy whatever they’re hawking. But their job is to remain apart, untouchable and godlike, to distract us from the humdrum of daily life. Ours is to worship, follow and fawn.
And then there are people like Malala Yousafzai who understand themselves as fundamentally part of the larger picture. They implore us to join them. “I tell my story not because it is unique but because it is not,” she said in her speech at the Nobel ceremony. “It is the story of many girls. Today, I tell their stories too.”
As we pick through the bones of 2014, let’s leave the celebrities who dazzled and scandalized us aside. Let’s highlight the ones who inspired us instead.
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