During the Thursday morning seminar at Freethinkers Coffee Shop, professor emeritus Lucius Flatley mused on the subject, “What causes major change in the world?”

One erudite attendee suggested philosophers such as Rousseau or Locke; a Democrat plumped for historians such as Marx or Hegel, and a Republican argued for economists such as Adam Smith or Ricardo.

Lucius didn’t disagree with his fellow scholars, but he did suggest that other, little-noticed causes might occasionally be in the mix. He argued that social behavior – or even large political consequences – can be a response to some minor discovery or small circumstance. He proposed an X-rated example: The straight-laced “morality” of Puritanism and the Victorian age of prudery, which cursed Europe and America, was caused by a microbe.

As Chaucer so wittily advised the world, sexual behavior in Europe was uninhibited during the Middle Ages. People lived a smorgasbord of sex. Lubricious conduct was the norm. Peasants perambulated in the hay mows, artists in their arondissements, nobles in their nookeries. From biblical times to Merrie Olde England, celebrities were famous primarily for their dalliances. David and Bathsheba, Sampson and Delilah, Anthony and Cleopatra, Heloise and Abelard, Dante and Beatrice, Lancelot and Guinevere. In everyday life, virgins were so rare as to be Vestal icons.

Bur then, into this meadow of pleasure, and seemingly from nowhere, appeared a previously totally unknown microbe. Its provenance is not really known, but many think that the ungrateful citizenry of the New World sent Columbus home with a “thank you” note – a gift we now know as syphilis. But whoever the donor, within a century it had progressed from haymow to hotel, lavatory to library, den to drawing room, scullery to suite, leaseholder to landlord and neophyte to noble, ravaging brothels and home hearths alike with a disease for which there was no cure. By the 19th century, even kings and priests were dying of tertiary paresis; madhouses were everywhere. The term “bedlam” entered the English language through Hogarth’s paintings of British insane asylums occupied mostly with insane, partial paralyzed syphilitics.

The only way to avoid this penalty for pleasure was abstinence. Ipso facto! Society adapted. New values, new rules, new behavior (even new laws) became the norm. Sex was transformed into the elephant in the room, to be mentioned only with euphemisms – and to be practiced with great restraint.

With the enthusiastic support of Queen Victoria, who lent her name to an age of social misanthropy, sex was submerged in name, thought and action. The breast and legs of fowl at dinner were referred to as “white meat” and “dark meat.” Approved dress became hoop skirts to hide legs, bustles to disguise bottoms and corsets intended to discourage, um, activity. Even the legs of pianos wore skirts.

Then came the antidote. Penicillin. And abstinence was cast onto the junk heap of human experiments. Carnality became “Katy, bar the door!”

To test his postulation in a current circumstance, Professor Flatley wondered if a spot of semen on a blue dress predestined eight years of national misery – unjustified war, false imprisonment, environmental vulgarity, ubiquitous wiretaps and the collapse of the economy. He thought it possible. That spot lost the campaign of 2000.

Offended by that famous blemish on maid Monica’s attire, Mr. Gore chose to distance himself from the source – even going so far as to choose the oleaginous Lieberman as his vice presidential running mate – a man noted chiefly as the first Democrat to excoriate his president for concupiscence. In short, Gore refused Clinton’s offer to campaign for him in Florida.

The rest is history.