“Isn't content also context? I ask him. Your experiences, your circumstances, the time you live in? Consciousness isn't free-floating; it's enmeshed.

That is true, he says, but you know, I believe that the modern diaspora--that so many of us find ourselves somewhere else, migrants of some kind--global, multicultural, less rooted, less dependent on our immediate history of family or country to shape ourselves--all of that is preparing us for a looser and freer understanding of ourselves as content whose context can change.

Nationalism is on the rise, I say.

He nods. That's a throwback. A fear. A refusal of the future. But the future cannot be refused.”