In recent decades the humanities kind of gave up, and it became almost taboo to try to create grand narratives. But the humanities’ perspective is essential. Many of the philosophical questions that have bothered humanity for thousands of years are now becoming practical. Previously philosophy was a kind of luxury: You can indulge in it or not. Now you really need to answer crucial philosophical questions about what humanity is or the nature of the good in order to decide what to do with, for example, new biotechnologies. So maybe I’ve reached people because I’ve come from the perspective of history and philosophy and not biology or economics. Also, my most central idea is simple. It’s the primacy of fictions, that to understand the world you need to take stories seriously. The story in which you believe shapes the society that you create.
I would agree about "now you really have to answer key philosophical questions .. in order to decide what to do....", except rarely do public policy makers bother to listen to the experts, humanities or otherwise.
I think it comes out more today than it used to (when we had only analog discourse for issues).
So much of the debate about gender now, in a weird way it’s like these early Christians debating the nature of Christ and the trinity. Basically they were asking, was Christ a nonbinary person? Is Christ divine or human or both divine-human or neither divine and human? It resonates with many of the debates that we have now about the nature of humans and the person. Can we be both? Can we be only one? And if you don’t think like me, then you’re a heretic. I mean, the champions of the early Christians were the martyrs and the ascetic monks — you have this guy Simon
standing on a pillar for years. They were exploring the limits of the human body with what was available to them. Now you have, with the gender issue, more questions of what can we do with the body; we can change it like this and like that.
St. Simeon Stylites, a Christian hermit who, in fifth-century A.D. Syria, stood atop a pillar for somewhere between 35 and 42 years.
it’s no longer that a human being is this magical self, which is autonomous and has free will and makes decisions about the world. No, a human being like all other organisms is just an information-processing system that is in continuous flow. It has no fixed assets. What are the implications in political terms? In social terms? I’m not sure.