I have to say, what this immediately reminded me of was the discussion on
modern humor, where Molly makes the point that commentators basically make jokes these days primarily as a way of reinforcing membership in groups -- "wow, aren't you glad you aren't dumb like those people." So even though I chuckle at these posters, especially the first one, and I would have to agree that they make a good point, I still have a sort of reflex aversion to arguments of the form "if you don't find the same things important, then you are a person without taste and without character." Or more precisely, "(some situation) is a mirror: if you don't like what you see, it reflects badly on you." Exactly these arguments get used to push people around in all sorts of troublesome contexts. For instance, in America this is often a subtle way of punishing people who the system does not reward. You don't hear rich people complaining about the unfairness of the economic system, and there are certainly many rags-to-riches tales; so the country believes that hard work is rewarded, and when people try to point out that there is a lot of latent injustice and very real barriers to economic advancement, there is a nontrivial part of the population who immediately assumes "well, he's just not a successful person, he's not a hard worker, so of course he complains."
Again, I'm obviously not drawing a parallel between Sarkozy and your average American blue collar worker. I'm just saying that in principle, if there is a technique of argument which is suspect, one should maybe avoid it even when the argument itself is correct. Presumably in the case of literature, one need not take pot-shots, but can make much stronger and more robust arguments.
