Why do it do this to myself? Why do I read The Week. I know Damon Linker’s there. I already think of him as a gasbag and a twit. Nobody’s paying me to research his work. Reading him and giving him more than a passing thought must be akin to my impulse to tug at a hangnail.

So, come tug with me, gentle reader. (Yes, I suspect there’s only one of you, at this point.)

Today in Stuff Damon Linker Is Fretting About is Tinder, which I’m told is some kind of dating app that people use to meet people.

The sexual revolution is finally complete.

At least it is among those interviewed for a chilling feature in the September issue of Vanity Fair, “Tinder and the Dawn of the ‘Dating Apocalypse.'” For these millennial graduates of elite colleges who are living and working in New York, the anything goes, non-judgmental attitude about sex that’s spread throughout the culture since the mid-1960s has combined with technological advances (smartphones and dating/hook-up apps like Tinder, Happn, and Hinge) to produce a way of living unthinkable until about five minutes ago in civilizational terms.

Welcome to a world in which sex has been completely disconnected from norms of fidelity and courtship. At work and at play, men and women spend their waking hours gazing at their phones, continually swiping left or right, dividing potential sex partners into two categories (Yes or No) on the basis of a snapshot. A handful of messages later — for some the exchanges consist entirely of pre-verbal flirtation conducted with emojis, for others it includes photographs of genitalia that serve as a kind of second interview — and a “date” has been set. It’s often a date without dinner or a movie or a show or a walk or a concert or even a single conversation. Just copulation with an optional kiss.

Then it’s over, maybe in less than an hour, maybe to be repeated again in a few days, weeks, or months, but in many cases not.

Okay. Let’s break this down. The Vanity Fair article that’s gotten Linker in a lather is one of those trend pieces designed to get people to think that the behavior of a certain subculture is much more common than it really is. In this case, we’re talking about the Tinder habits of Manhattan yuppies. Linker falls for it, extrapolating far beyond the incredibly narrow social world of the article’s subjects to conclude that all these kids today just can’t stop having furtive sexual encounters with strangers.

And yes, Linker thinks the kids are all disgusting.

I suspect many of these liberals — Baby Boomers or Gen-Xers (like myself) — will find this vision of dating as a series of technologically facilitated one-off hook-ups with near-strangers to be pretty appalling. I know I do. There’s just one problem: In order for this reaction to amount to more than an old fogey’s sub-rational expression of disgust at the behavior of the young, it has to make reference to precisely the kind of elaborate account of morality — including binding standards of human flourishing and degradation — that liberals have worked to jettison, in the name of sexual liberation, for the past half-century.

I’m not quite sure why making reference to an elaborate account of morality would rescue Linker, or anyone unlucky enough to be like him, from the charge of making old fogey rationalizations. Most of those elaborate accounts of morality–including binding standards of human flourishing and degradation– were developed by old fogies, so that the sexual habits of the young (particularly young women, whose sexual agency is a favorite target for fogies of all ages) would be less likely to offend their delicate sensibilities.

But for me, the key bit here comes when he suggests not just that he personally finds this form of dating appalling, but that many liberals do too. Speaking as a liberal Gen-Xer, I confess I don’t find the dating practices described in the article appealing. I’ve tried hooking up a few times in my life. (Yes, a few. I’ve never gotten out much.) And it wasn’t for me. As Jerry Seinfeld once put it when weighing the prospect of a threesome, “I’m not an orgy guy!”

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-ms3NPVMJg]

But appalling? That’s an awfully strong word to throw around. I prefer to reserve it for genocides and war crimes and torture, not for discussing who Phil from Accounts Receivable did on Saturday night. Actually, I have a hard time even summoning up an interest in the habits of Phil From Accounts Receivable’s naughty bits . They may not match my own, but unlike Linker, I lack sympathy for the idea that the human race ought to be a multiplied me. I prefer monogamy. It suits my temperament, and I think I’ve chosen my companion advisedly. But I don’t assume that everyone would flourish in it or think of people as degraded because their erotic interests don’t align with mine.

But Linker is appalled, and he begs us to please think of his children:

The world recounted by Sales — or, more likely, a world even less judgmental and even more saturated by even more advanced forms of technology — will be their world. And yet I want so much more for them than that. Though “more” isn’t really what I mean. Not quantity. Quality. Something higher, nobler, less tawdry, more deeply fulfilling and longer lasting than a life devoted to satisfying fleeting desires for physical pleasure and status.

I’m glad Linker has managed to arrange his monogamous, child breeding life as he likes it. Truly, I am. If his children decide they want that too–and, like many “kids today” they just might–bully for them. But doesn’t he recognize how obnoxiously self-flattering it is to define his preferences as “higher, nobler” than those of others?

Let’s let him elaborate:

I want them to enjoy the fulfillment that can only come from devoting themselves to something that transcends the self — a spouse, a child, a family. I want them to experience falling in love and feel their hearts opened to hopes of a higher, more enduring form of happiness. I want them to experience the rarer and more precious goods that follow from the disciplining of their baser instincts (like the animal desire to copulate with a different sexual partner every night of the week) in order to reach an end that’s pursued for its own sake rather than for the instantaneous rewards it brings.

“Transcending the self” and reaching ends pursued for their own sake rather than for instantaneous rewards sound like exciting pastimes, particularly when contrasted with “baser instincts” and “animal desire”. But Linker presents these pursuits and desires as mutually exclusive, as if a hedonist would be so distracted by the constant boinkfest that is his or her life that they can never achieve anything that lasts or devote themselves to something beyond their own sexual gratification. (Linker restricts these somethings to children, spouses, and families, but this strikes me as arbitrary.) Does Linker’s take have merit?

Nope.

Albert Einstein devoted himself to figuring out the laws that govern space and time and in doing so changed everything about how we see both. He also wrote books on politics, religion, and international peace and, for good or ill, got the U.S. atom bomb program started.

He was also…well…a hound.

We can also discuss brilliant naughty people like Rousseau, Schroedinger, Martin Luther King, Tallulah Bankhead, Angelina Jolie (In the past, at least. So I’ve heard), Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, H.G. Wells, Rebecca West, James Joyce, Mozart, FDR, Dorothy Parker, Marlene Dietrich and many many more who devoted themselves to the sciences, politics, humanities, and arts, pursuits that require plenty of discipline in putting off instant gratification for the sake of long term goals. Some of them also had happy family lives, while others didn’t. Such is the way of people who throw themselves into their work.

I guess Damon Linker wasn’t around to inform them that they have to restrict themselves to being pervs because…um…old fogey reasons.

I think we can stop here. Linker’s made way too big a deal of the Vanity Fair article, and I’ve surely made too big a deal of him. Since he begged me to think of his children, though, I do have some good wishes for them. I hope that can they take what’s helpful from having grown up with a man as silly as Linker and drop the rest. I also hope they’ll find useful and interesting work and social lives that deliver whatever form of happiness suits them.