The way columns like this work is that the author pretends to have a rational basis for their claims that some feature of the masses' private behavior they don'

The way columns like this work is that the author pretends to have a rational basis for their claims that some feature of the masses' private behavior they don't like is going to destroy society, the trick being that they set the starting point of human civilization as portrayed in their narratives and on their charts at around 1950 (or even later in this example, besides the throwaway Max Weber quote from which the title is derived). This ensures that the audience can comfortably ignore the existence of previous degenerate sorts of trends, which have been sanitized by living generations' nostalgia for those cultural moments. Then, after establishing the existence of a serious threat, they try to sell the audience on their preferred solution. Back when we said "Christian" instead of "pro-social", the demand was often temperance, or sometimes a religious reform that that either seems obvious or blasphemous to modern readers. Today the sorts of people who read columnists have reverence for a political ideology instead of a god, so aside from the largely unchanged admonitions against vice, you get arguments that too much construction regulation hollows out our moral virtues. I don't really mind the admonitions against vice (though I find them uninteresting), but the government passing laws in an attempt to fix our morals has a terrible track record. We ought to stick to cold rationality whenever possible.