Mores

All of us seem to need some totalistic relationships in our lives. But to decry the fact that we cannot have only such relationships is nonsense. And to prefer a society in which the individual has holistic relationships with a few, rather than modular relationships with many, is to wish for a return to the imprisonment of the past — a past when individuals may have been more tightly bound to one another, but when they were also more tightly regimented by social conventions, sexual mores, political and religious restrictions.

It is relevant here to recall that the word “morality” is derived from mos with its plural mores, and that in its present usage it has not lost this connexion with the mores — the rules of behaviour — of a society.

Even as the elements of a culture were forming, as legends began to accrue, as their mastery of programming started to surpass any previous recorded levels of skill, the dozen or so hackers were reluctant to acknowledge that their tiny society, on intimate terms with the TX-0, had been slowly and implicitly piecing together a body of concepts, beliefs, and mores.

The country's traditional mores have sparked recent ideological battles, as well as a few national embarrassments.

The one area where sexual mores seem to have changed is gay relationships. At the beginning of 2004, only 46 percent of respondents thought gay sex should be legal; in another poll that year, only 42 percent of people said they saw it as morally acceptable or believed that same-sex marriage should be legal.