The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.
Little things had to go wrong for Donald Trump to become president: Comey, emails, all that stuff. Big things did make Trump possible. Big, cultural, political, economic forces opened the door to someone like Trump.
Sports is like rock 'n' roll. Both are dominant cultural forces, both speak an international language, and both are all about emotions.
Where intellectuals have played a role in history, it has not been so much by whispering words of advice into the ears of political overlords as by contributing to the vast and powerful currents of conceptions and misconceptions that sweep human action along.
You can't write about the past and ignore religion. It was such a fundamental, mind-shaping, driving force for pre-modern societies. I'm very interested in what religion does to us - its capacity to create love and empathy or hatred and violence.
The art world is a very prissy little thing over in the corner, while the major cultural forces are being determined by techno science.
One of the great disadvantages of a literary or scriptural tradition like the biblical one is that a deity or context of deities becomes crystallized, petrified at a certain time and place. The deity doesn’t continue to grow, expand, or take into account new cultural forces and new realizations in the sciences, and the result is this make-believe conflict we have in our culture between science and religion.
I try to understand place on a deeper level than just the physical or environmental aspects. It includes cultural and intellectual forces, too. It's an inclusive approach that brings in many disciplines and sees place as a dynamic thing.
Human social institutions can effect the course of human evolution. Just as climate, food supply, predators, and other natural forces of selection have molded our nature, so too can our culture.
Hindus and Westerners alike see in the meat-eating taboos of India a triumph of morals over appetite. This is a dangerous misrepresentation of cultural processes. Hindu vegetarianism was a victory not of spirit over matter but of reproductive over productive forces.
