Theodor Adorno famously realised that, given the choice between an aesthetic experience and that of being drunk, drunkenness would win out almost every time.
His words took on a new dimension at the weekend when, with the Taoiseach facing the most challenging phase yet of the Northern renegotiations, a heavily-publicised story ran on his once so-called private life. Not that it was a story in any standard sense. This one seemed to follow the tabloid maxim so well noted by Lambert, editor of the resolutely upmarket Financial Times: "If it bleeds, it leads".
With a topically Halloween touch, the blood proved to be fake.
Mr Ahern's refusal to give any new personal details to his forthcoming biographers, whose research was being featured, had left them with no story to speak of, save of course the salient exception of enough headlines for a rollickingly noticeable radio ad which probably reached at least three times the audience of the printed story.
The questions begged yet again were about why Irish readers and viewers are unwilling to indulge in the kind of public disclosure now so regularly practised in British and American societies. Or why they were willing to do so, thus far.
In Britain in the same time-span, the unfortunate Welsh secretary, Ron Davies, resigned after a mysterious mugging incident on Clapham Common. Then, while discussing the matter on BBC 2's Newsnight, columnist Matthew Parris attempted to out another British government minister, the New Labour strategy supremo, Peter Mandelson.
Responses to the two men reflected in large measure their respective clout in London media circles, and particularly their standing with the government press advisor, Alistair Campbell. Mr Davies, a certain leader of the new Welsh Assembly, received little mercy; Mr Mandelson seemed to win new friends. That either man should have been picked out in the first place was unfair, if not wholly inappropriate.
It couldn't happen here, so they say. But why not?
To believe that there is something intrinsically noble in the condition of being Irish which insures us against such happenstance is to ignore - with some peril - the experience of other places which once cherished exactly the same assumption.
However feeble in itself, this weekend's story may well be a harbinger of routes to come, for which we have no road map. The inevitable dilemma is how to talk about the issues that arise from such events without indulging in the gossipy elements that they do. Bertie Ahern is no Bill Clinton: the act of wishing will not make him so. Yet if the story sells newspapers, odds are its like will be repeated.
The challenge arising amounts to translating ideas about what constitutes "sin" from the sphere of religion to that of secular discourse. In that sense, the putative story about the Taoiseach is a testing of the waters, one among a number proposed for public attention in the last year. Thus, when the Taoiseach did choose to deny smears that had been circulating about him, the denial itself was laden with risk.
With old monoliths breaking down, what are the secular sins about which consensus can be secured? That challenge is bigger than any one story. Yet the paradox of this particular one is that old measures are being applied, namely the issue of whether separated people are in some way answerable for their actions to the rest of the community in a way that, for example, people with untaxed off-shore accounts are not.
The apparent series of cultural manoeuvrings leading from The Valley of the Squinting Windows to Valley of the Dolls is no less conservative than was the earlier position, but neither is it as straightforward as may initially appear. Irish society is as scandal-mongering and as confessional as are the United States and the United Kingdom, and likely always has been. And in so relatively small a country you can't ignore the added risk that opinions can often change faster than elsewhere, or people whose reputations are broken, fairly or unfairly, may find it more difficult to start again.
People in Ireland gossip too. The difference is one of degree, not of extent. While a scandal here can circulate faster and more widely, it won't necessarily hit the public domain. A scandal in the US, and increasingly in the UK, can hardly be resolved unless it does so. Without mass pardon, preferably in a tabloid newspaper or on a show like Oprah or Vanessa, there is no forgiveness.
The judgmental, tuppenny moralising of tabloid thinking justifies itself on the grounds of the public's right to know. But that in itself is a two-edged sword. You can stand alongside Jerry Springer when he argues that his country's constitution was founded on precisely the same right to freedom of speech as he exercises, or you can note that in all the public interest about a decade of Diana stories, the reader could be seen to have stood as a virtual accomplice in the gross acts of voyeurism to which she was subjected.
What stands as private "sin" in Ireland still remains the business of the individual and his/her God, whether with or without the mediation of a minister or priest. What amounts to private "sin" in those societies is now read as a public transgression, offending the community as a whole.
When push comes to shove, America comes before its ideas of God. The American people are not just the chosen people, they are in effect their own godhead, exercising a devotional relationship to their own national identity. They control the meaning and attribution of "sin": it is in the public's gift to bestow and refuse penance, and they prefer to do so on network television.
Ideas of "sin" and of penance are still up for grabs in Ireland. With religious and political monoliths breaking down, public opinion - or the perception of it - is becoming a new kind of hanging judge. So far the sentencing rules are hard to predict. Faced with the excesses of a Valley of the Dolls culture, New Labour spin doctors prefer that squinting windows ethos which can't accommodate dedicated politicians like Ron Davies.
Certainly, no Irish politician has been forced out of government for reasons of private morality. Such customs are a matter of self-congratulation. Yet all the signs on it suggest that a culture of disclosure is starting to emerge, one from which all the pooh-poohing in the world will not guarantee us immunity. Rather than having already triumphed over such salaciousness, odds are that its challenges are battering on the door.