Society

A correspondent, who had read my previous comments on women in Islam, asked whether I thought he was hysterical to say Islam enslaves women. He lives in a part of England where Muslims have recently become more of a presence, finds the routine sight of women in niqab shocking, and can't understand why intellectual Western women take it in stride as an addition to multicultural richness or whatever. What, he asked, could ever serve as a wake-up call?

Various correspondents have proposed or at least asked about Christian justifications for homosexuality. Here's a sort of canned response that seems to address most concerns:

I don't view the issue as basically a question of authority. We need a definite way of life, and that requires authority, but legitimate authority is normally rational. It asks for what is best and promotes what is best, and those things can be discussed. For me, at bottom, it's not even a specifically religious issue. It's more a matter of natural law.

I've been reading Moral Mazes, an account of life in the corporate management suite by sociologist Robert Jackall. At bottom, it's a description of life at court. The desires of the powerful are what matter, responsibility exists to be shifted, an Act of God (recession, change in management, public relations issue, whatever) might change everything overnight, and whatever happens has to be presented as part of a rational and controlled system in which one was right all along and nothing could ever interfere with the steady increase in earnings quarter to quarter.

While doing a Google search I ran into an abstract of a 2007 scholarly article by three French psychiatrists whose English title is "New society, new families: a new basic personality? From the neurotic to the narcissistic-hedonistic personality."

The basic thought is that changes in education, family structure, social attitudes, and so on have led to a new dominant personality type with specific pathologies that require a reorientation of psychiatric care: