No, it’s not about the vodka…I’m told by people who drink that stuff that Grey Goose is better…it’s about the kind of personal philosophical rigidity that I’ll argue can lead to all kinds of bad things…from terrorism to gridlock.
Demosthenes has a great post today on it, using a graphic-novel series called the ‘Watchmen’ (I’ve got limited knowledge of these, although after reading ‘From Hell’ on the recommendation of a friend, I’ll be looking at more).
I’ll suggest that this is a part of the same Romantic rejection of the ‘bourgeois’ values of moderation, compromise, and community that I discuss when I talked about the Isiah Berlin book ‘The Roots of Romanticism’