Is "destroying passions" a good thing in this paragraph?

All passions have a phase when they are merely disastrous, in which they draw their victims down by weight of stupidity – and a later, very much later one in which they marry the spirit, ‘spiritualize’ themselves. In former times, because of the stupidity of passion, people waged war on passion itself: they plotted to destroy it … Destroying the passions and desires merely in order to avoid their stupidity and the disagreeable consequences of their stupidity seems to us nowadays to be itself simply an acute form of stupidity. We no longer marvel at dentists who pull out teeth to stop them hurting.