I’d like to say a couple of things — actually, I’d like to quote a couple of people. And I have a question: What’s a society supposed to do when morality has collapsed — certainly Judeo-Christian morality — and some kind of morality or code is needed?

When I was in college, Admiral Hyman Rickover came to speak. This was hugely controversial. There were protests and all. During the Q&A, someone asked, “Don’t you think students of nuclear physics ought to be required to take a course in ethics?” He said, “No, I think they should go to church or synagogue.” There were gasps in the crowd, and probably some hooting, and a certain amount of tumult.

Rickover has been dead for almost 30 years. Who would make such a suggestion now? It was outrageous — or more like dumbfounding — even then.

Okay, my second quotee: the late Elizabeth Fox-Genovese. Many years ago, she was talking about “date rape,” then a big issue (as now, I gather). And she said something like this: In former times, when a girl said no, what she meant was, “I don’t want to, because I’m not that kind of girl” — she wasn’t raised that way, she went to Sunday School, she didn’t want to disappoint her family or her community, she was saving herself for marriage, whatever. The guy — the asker, the sexual pressurer — could live with that (usually). It was nothing personal. Today, when a girl says no, all she means is, “I don’t want to — with you. With him, sure, and him and him and him, but not you.” And some men (this was Fox-Genovese’s punch line) take that very badly.

Was Fox-Genovese excusing rape? Of course not. But she was pointing out something important, relatively new, and true.

I’m not really sure what society does in a post-moral environment — in a Lena Dunham world, the hook-up world. I have some sympathy with people, as they grope in the dark, trying to figure things out. (By “grope in the dark,” I don’t mean anything sexual, believe it or not.) It turns out to be hard to replace the Bible. And a sexual Lord of the Flies can be not all that happy.