Our celebrity obsession reveals what we really think it means to be human, says MICHAEL JENSEN

As I write this, we have come to that important time of the year again " the Big Brother season. The human zoo is open for inspection, and the usual bunch of annoying but oddly fascinating wannabes are about to become as familiar to us as the people we live with. We see them from every angle. We speak of them by their first names and instantly know who they are…and I don't watch the show itself, just the surrounding media coverage!

The hype around the show is such that it's virtually impossible to have a discussion with a younger Australian about an ethical issue without examples from Big Brother being drawn in. What causes bullying? What constitutes sexual harassment? How does child abuse influence later adult behaviour? These are some of the recent questions covered in the serious press as a result of Big Brother. 

So, how can these five second celebrities wield such authority in our culture that they can set our ethical agenda to this extent?

It's got me to thinking about the nature of human beings. Who are we really? What are we supposed to be like? What purpose do we serve?

Despite the ruminations and ponderings of the so-called human sciences " anthropology, sociology, political science, cultural studies, gender studies, psychology, philosophy and more " we are not really much the wiser. We can't explain our coming to being, and we are at a loss to explain why we should cease to exist. Whatever identity we have made for ourselves, whatever we have said and done, whatever we as individuals have achieved " it all faces extinguishment at our death.

The cult of celebrity is most interesting because of what it says about our view of authority. Who do we model ourselves on? From whom do we learn how to live?

The puzzle for us in the West, is a problem with authority. Freedom is, for we postmoderns, the ultimate value: human identity is, for us, constructed by throwing off the heavy burden of authority and exercising our freedom. Freedom makes humans human. "They may take our lives, but they will never take our" ", says a very postmodern William Wallace, Braveheart. 

But far from being a political dream, freedom has become for us nothing more than an addiction to choice: having the power to define myself by the things I buy as I move through the great shopping mall of life.

Suspicion of authority is the counterpart of this great hunger for freedom. Authority has been rebadged as authoritarianism: any command directed towards me infringes my freedom and so must be rejected as squashing that very thing which makes me human. There are good grounds for this suspicion, of course; people have an alarming tendency to abuse power over others when they get it; and scarcely a week goes by without some news story of how a person entrusted with authority over others has abused that trust.

God of course has been tainted with the authoritarian brush. The thought of a God who might expect obedience as the response to his commands is absurd to our contemporaries; rather, we choose to encounter God, or rather, the divine, in a way that resonates with our experience and matches our accessories. The newly popular Kabbalah movement, which counts Madonna as a follower " is the latest example of this Prada spirituality. 

But the God of the scriptures doesn't relate to human beings in this way. In the first garden he gives to the first couple commands that will result in their benefit " that they fill the earth, that they bring it to its potential and that they name and rule its animals. And yet he gives them freedom as to how they might choose to accomplish these tasks. Plenty of opportunity for self-expression here!

Even in the one prohibition in this garden there is a statement of freedom under God's command " "You may freely eat of every tree of the garden" " before the single restriction is mentioned. God's authority is exercised in utter generosity and by the setting for men and women a purpose for their existence.

And yet the choice of man and woman was to reject even this limitation.

But there was a second garden: an olive grove near Jerusalem. There, in extreme circumstances, we see another way of being human. Now Jesus' whole life had been one of unique obedience to God; and it was a life that proved him pleasing to God " as we hear at his baptism and again at his transfiguration. Jesus knew the heart of God's command to human people was love. To love God and to love the neighbour summed up everything that was required of humanity. And so Jesus loved God, and loved people.

In the end, he prays "not my will, but yours" " he submits his will to his Father's will. He does so freely. He does not understand the will of God as some remorseless impersonal engine of fate grinding him in its cogs. The plan of God is something to which he can freely submit, else there is no submission to it at all. Jesus does not here reluctantly resign himself to the will of God; but rather actively embraces it: as someone has said "a radiant Yes to the actual will of God".

From Jesus of Nazareth, we learn that true humanity is expressed in free obedience to the will of God. How bizarre must this sound to our contemporaries: but the true human says to God "not my will, but yours". Our true human destiny is to freely serve him who made us; to find our selves in the tasks that he has set us. Paul describes Jesus "taking the form of a servant" in the incarnation: as if "servant" was as good description of "human being" as any. And so it is!

Michael Jensen lectures in philosophy at Moore College.