1. just because you have the freedom to do something, doesn't mean it's a good idea to do it.

2. from a game-theoretic perspective, it's often rational to be irrational http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&articleID=7750A576-E7F2-99DF-3824E0B1C2540D47&ref=rss

1. I think the choice is best left to the individual, don't you?

2. No kidding. I've noticed already. In this case, though, it's a simple matter of one strategy dominating another.  

What a dumb rebuttal!

“Being in love' is clearly logically and metaphysically possible; there's nothing contradictory about it. It's nomologically possible; no physical law precludes it. Gelernter would deny that it's psychologically possible.”

I don’t understand what you wrote above, Daniel Koffler.

You move from the logical to the metaphysical and finally to the psychological. These are not commensurate faculties.

I am not sure that Gelernter would deny that it is psychologically much less logically or metaphysically impossible to fall in love.  His argument is quite complex.

One of Gelernter’s points, as I read him, is that if one snacks all the time after a while you will be unable to appreciate (love) a good meal. This is the easy part.

It  is only one of the points he makes, he also makes a distinction between “loving someone” and “falling in love or being in love, or romantic love for short.” He goes on to say that

“being in love is a protean state with remarkable characteristics that change the human mind forever. It underlies much of Western art, and certain aspects of religion. It is a painful but powerful state, a psychological crisis that used to be resolved (if you were lucky) by marriage--which breached the dam, released the built-up flood, and allowed a new and higher level of normality to return.”

Here he makes the Freudian point that repression is necessary for civilization to come into being at all. To him marriage is a vehicle for taming the passions and its dissolution threatens to deaden the senses as well as undo the civilizing effect of being in love.

On the other hand, I agree with many of David Gelernter’s critics that his use of literature doesn’t help his case. But this is because literary evidence is a double edged sword and not because he is wrong.

In any case I would have used Denis De Rougemont’s “Love in the Western World” or even Stendhal’s long essay “On Love” and perhaps Freud’s “Civilization and its Discontents” instead of Shakespeare or Jane Austen. Even Proust, who shows the many sidedness of love, would have been preferable.

Gelernter's tortured prose and cringe-worthy nostalgia make him easy to dismiss - which is unfortunate, since there's a serious and respectable idea buried beneath his verbiage. From Rousseau to Balzac, Freud and beyond, unexpressed sexuality (and the unrequited longing that stems from it) has been seen as a supremely creative and idealizing force. Gelernter, in his moralizing, wants to make it into the sine qua non of romantic love, which it's not. But there is something about it amazingly real...ask anyone - sometimes the most intoxicating part of a love affair is not the consummation, but the imagined pleasure and happiness, suffused with desire, that precede it.

As for Gelernter's converse claim that sexual abandon actively destroys the possibility of romantic love...I don't think that's true. But some people, and not only addled conservatives at war with modernity, worry that it might be.

"From the amorous point of view Véronique belonged, as we all do, to a sacrificed generation.
She had certainly been capable of love; she wished to still be capable
it, I’ll say that for her; but it was no longer possible. A scarce,
artificial and belated phenomenon, love can only blossom under certain
mental conditions, rarely conjoined, and totally opposed to the freedom
of morals which characterizes the modern era. Véronique had known too
many discothèque, too many lovers; such a way of life impoverishes a
human being, inflicting sometimes serious and always irreversible
damage. Love as a kind of innocence and as a capacity for illusion, as
an aptitude for epitomizing the whole of the other sex in a single
loved being rarely resists a year of sexual immorality, and never two.
In reality the successive sexual experiences accumulated during
adolescence undermine and rapidly destroy all possibility of projection
of an emotional and romantic sort; progressively, and in fact extremely
quickly, one becomes as capable of love as an old slag. And so one
leads, obviously, a slag’s life; in ageing one becomes less seductive,
and on that account bitter. One is jealous of the young, and so one
hates them. Condemned to remain unavowable, this hatred festers and
becomes increasingly fervent; then it dies down and fades away, just as
everything fades away. All that remains is resentment and disgust,
sickness and the anticipation of death."

Michel Houellebecq, L’Extension du Domaine de la Lutte

A personal postscript...I recently had a poignant conversation with a dear friend of mine - approaching thirty (like me), newly-ABD, Jewish, devoutly secular, who's had her share of fun. She wrote to me, "It's funny how over the years, I am attracted to fewer and fewer people, have much less genuine, lasting emotion..." This is not all bullshit, my friends.

"As for Gelernter's converse claim that sexual abandon actively destroys the possibility of romantic love...I don't think that's true. But some people, and not only addled conservatives at war with modernity, worry that it might be."

I am one of those secular modernist Jews (at war with post modernism, but not modernism) who also worry about the destruction not just of "romantic love" but of genuine human relationships.

The problem as I see it isn't something that can be remedied by individual (nor collective) choice. It is structural in as much as our culture thrives on consumption without end.