Would being “freed from monogamy” really make these people more free? Much more can be said on the nature of freedom, but this gives at least some sense of the complexity of the notion and how it has been naively trivialized by a world where sexualized personal pleasure is the solvent of all social bonds and the measure of all things.

An article in the Washington Post last week (“How to break free from monogamy without destroying marriage”) described the dynamics of an open marriage and the various “apps” now available for facilitating extramarital relations. The amorality might have been shocking twenty years ago but today such well-traveled territory likely provokes little more than a yawn. Yet the article is still instructive for what the author’s analysis (or lack thereof) tells us about contemporary culture. Indeed, it is a classic example of what happens when your side in the debate is utterly dominant: You become lazy and put forward obvious stupidity as if it were compelling argumentation.

Take, for example, the attempts at offering evidential support for the incontinent sexual promiscuity described. All the usual tricks of persuasion are on display. Tendentiously selective history is wheeled out to make it seem that the idea of love as part of marriage is a recent innovation, emerging presumably after aeons where marriage was merely driven by pragmatic convenience. Homer would have disagreed, as would Dante and Shakespeare.

Bogus science makes a predictable appearance in the form of a piece of pure speculation about the marital motivation of cavemen. Real science, in the form of analysis of the significance of the statistics on, say, sexually transmitted diseases is conspicuous by its absence. That omission is, of course, now de rigueur in all politically acceptable discussions of sexual behavior and human “flourishing.”

And, as the pièce de résistance, once again the Enlightenment axiom, that one cannot derive an oughtfrom an is, is conveniently suspended in the cause of denigrating monogamy and denying any moral significance to incontinent fornication: People commit adultery and get divorced, so sexual promiscuity is therefore good and natural. Well, some people are foot fetishists and others are serial killers. These things may be “natural” but does that make them socially desirable?

Yet even more disturbing than the predictable casual amorality and the lack of argument and critical analysis are two other elements in the article. One is the role of boredom; the other is the language of freedom.

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