Mal Fletcher analyses the problem and suggests some answers.

Mal Fletcher

We live in very strange, we might even say chaotic, times.

Politics has grown more than a little odd (that is, more so than usual). Liberals dismiss conservatism as empty "populism", while conservatives talk about fighting "culture wars" with presumably zero-sum outcomes.

Meanwhile, digital technology seems to breed curious behaviour, especially in the ways we speak to and about one other and engage each other's ideas.

Families, the bedrock of stable civilizations, seem to take on peculiar forms, to the point where one prominent English judge recently - wrongly, I believe - declared the nuclear family as good as dead.

For some, assigning gender identities is no longer the province of nature; gender is considered a lifestyle option, a matter of personal choice.

In all this tolerance is preached as perhaps the ultimate virtue, often by people who don't seem to understand that tolerance, by definition, requires hearing and understanding ideas with which they may not agree.

For many people, strangeness abounds. Were my grandfathers' generation to be resurrected tomorrow they would feel about as disoriented as Alice did after her descent into the rabbit hole.

In Britain, we can measure the bizarreness of our times by the political process surrounding our imminent Brexit. We are just ten months away from B-day, yet we appear to have no clear sense of the type of Britain we want to become after the great divorce.

Our government speaks to us in a slightly fractured way, as if we're meant to see Brexit through a kaleidoscope in which every pattern is disconcerting rather than interesting.

There appears to be no clear vision of how Britain should look ten years from now, nor any strategy to carry us there.

For its part, Parliament is wrangling over various proposed amendments to Brexit bills which seem designed, in some cases, to slow the whole process to a shuddering halt.

The debate isn't just unsettling, it is strange. I think it's fair to say that in this respect we get the politics we deserve, for there's a certain inconsistency and strangeness in so much of our collective behaviour.

Why all this strangeness? Where did it originate? What is fuelling it?

Many factors play a role, but some are relatively easy to identify - and perhaps rectify. One of these is the oddity we call social media, but which in many cases might better be known as antisocial media.