But I want to ask is this tendency to marry people we can talk to increasing in the modern world?

In every area and especially with social media people we can really talk to are increasingly easy to locate and we can intentionally narrow down our range of contacts to exclusively those who we can really to talk to.

And over the last 25 years or so corporate hiring practices have become increasingly restrictive in regard to hiring people who are exactly the right fit to a preferred profile, so everyone you see at work will be increasingly people who are on your own brainwave.

No I was just saying succinctly what it took you four paragraphs to admit. BTW, we still have what is effectively Jim Crow and elite domination and there is nothing cynical or corrupt about facing our Hobbsean realities.

John on sexual mores, be careful not to apply bourgeois morality everywhere, while not a land of lust in the dust ala Erskine Caldwell, the South wasn’t Sicily or even Boston. Observers like John Campbell (Our Southern Highlanders) noted that in rural areas baseborn children weren’t the end of the world. In fact, a telling anecdote from the Hatfield-McCoy feud was the behavior of “Ole Ranel” McCoy who refused to take in his daughter, who had a Hatfield baby. This was widely condemned by the community, Ranel as maternal grandfather would have been expected to help out. This isn’t “white trash” behavior, either. These families were the same stock as the yeomen and planters who settled throughout the South, mountain and lowland. I would agree that in towns and as a family became wealthier, there was greater pressure to conform to Protestant mores.

The abolitionists were puritans, and the suffragettes, and most of the progressives. In fact, on either side of a lot of principled political debates you’ll find puritans — capitalism vs. socialism, for example.

One study divides American political cultures into Traditionalist, Individualist, and Moralist. “Moralism” sounds awful, but Traditionalism meant Jim Crow, elite domination, and ignorance, and Individualism meant “what’s in it for me”, boss politics, and graft. Anyone who isn’t completely cynical and corrupt about politics is a moralist — i.e., a Puritan. (In the U.S., the Yankee demographic plus Scandinavians and some Germans.)

The various significance of the word Puritanism do not change my objection to what Robert said. He was just waving a red herring.

Everyone was puritanical about sex in the 19th c. Many of the great French authors were prosecuted. Oscar Wilde was jailed. In most places there was a double standard, with chaste wives and daughters, and whorehouses for the husbands and bachelors.

(don’t bother responding to this comment please

This is not a coincidence. The Puritans really are the origins of liberalism,

“In politics, the blues were born farther north: in the Puritan commonwealth of 17th century New England centered around Boston. For the Puritans, the construction of a godly society was the first order of business. The state was not the enemy of liberty; the state was society’s moral agent.

“Political correctness” and tortured attitudes toward language and gender have long been part of the New England Way. Victorian New Englanders pioneered feminist ideas and daring new styles of dress — but enforced rigid standards of ‘political correctness’ that stifled American literature, restricted its range of subjects, and drove authors like Mark Twain to paroxysms of rage and frustration. In the nineteenth century Bostonian literary puritanism was so focused on sex that “Banned in Boston” was a label that helped sell books around the country. Today’s Puritans want to regulate “hate” speech on college campuses and engage in tortured debates over topics like “heteronormative” discourse not unlike the hair-splitting theological debates their ancestors were famous for.”

Whole article here: http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2011/01/24/the-birth-of-the-blues/

The word “puritanical” has a primary meaning in our language, and it means sexual repression. You are free to stretch the meaning in your own pronouncements, but please don’t use these stretches as an excuse for misunderstanding what other people are saying.

It may even be that liberals and conservatives are in actual fact more or less equally slutty. The difference between puritans and libertines would then be in the degree of openness about what is being done, and the words of the puritans which conflict with their actions.

Or maybe not. I suspect that the behavior of a lot of conservatives is consistent with their words.

Now hopefully everyone knows what I was saying.

Really? The most puritanical people I know are left-liberals with their ultra-orthodox PC speech codes and their equally absurd dietary restrictions (many a SWPL liberal will not eat green table grapes or iceberg lettuce even though the farm workers boycott hasn’t been in effect for decades.)