Those who admire and wish to propagate the bourgeois virtues—prudence, thrift, industry, honesty, moderation, politeness, self-restraint, and so forth—are sometimes haunted by an uncomfortable question: how would the world be if, as is not very likely, everyone were to adopt these virtues as his own? Would not the world be a duller (though of course a much better ordered) place—a kind of giant Lucerne or Vevey? It is surely not a coincidence that the iconography of hell is so much more vivid and interesting than that of heaven, a location that induces a deadly boredom even as one strains to...
