"Once you recognize yourself as part of the river, you realize you're responsible for the river as a whole."
A Q&A with Ian Marcus Corbin, philosopher and author of “To Arrive Where We Started”
Ian Marcus Corbin is a philosopher, Director of Harvard’s Public Culture Project, and faculty member at Harvard Medical School. He’s also the author of To Arrive Where We Started: Belonging in the Modern World, which is set to be released next week. I’ve known Ian for four years, and he’s been working on this book that entire time. The final product reflects the care and effort Ian put into the writing process: It’s a beautiful, expansive, yet still accessible exploration of our deepest yearning to be “at home” in the world.
Our conversation pulled on several threads related to this central theme of home. How have our modern, Western societies created experiences of the world that can feel so alienating and atomizing? Why is loneliness better understood as a form of world decay rather than a subjective preference for better relationships? Why does Ian see the answer to this loneliness not in connection, but in the process of becoming participants? And, how has writing this book shaped Ian’s own sense of at-homeness in the world?
Ian has been such a generous friend, confidante, and co-conspirator over the years, and I’m grateful to be able to share his work with y’all. Please consider giving the full interview a read, and if it piques your interest, consider purchasing To Arrive Where We Started.
-Sam
PS: Connective Tissue members can join Ian for our “Beyond Bob Book Club” the week of July 27th, where we’ll be reading and discussing his book. You can RSVP here to reserve your spot, and, if you’re not a member yet, you can join here.
This book isn’t about God per se, but something resembling God seems to be the connective tissue that holds the book together. So, to start, how would you begin to describe your relationship with God today? How has it changed?
You son of a bitch. Wow. I realize that I’m being cutesy in the book, and I’m saying, “Oh, you should connect with God, or something like that.” I want spirituality — I think it’s good and necessary — but I want to be non-prescriptive about the form it takes.
My religious background is intense. In my mid 20s, my Protestant evangelical faith started to falter. I was studying in Oxford for a year — reading a lot of beautiful Catholic philosophy and literature — and converted when I was 25. Then, in my early 30s, I got divorced, and my whole world blew apart, including my faith. The two had been closely bound up, and my sense at the time was that I had been forcibly propping up a religious faith that couldn’t stand on its own. It had seemed impossible to not believe: it had been a foundational part of my experience of reality for my whole life. As a result I couldn’t ask genuine questions; I needed certain things to be true. So when everything fell apart, I let it all go at once.
I had a long decade of wandering. I was pretty nihilistic. But I had children, so I couldn’t kill myself and I soldiered on. Through all that, the art that appealed to me continued to be deeply spiritual works, like Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov or T.S. Elliot‘s poem, The Four Quartets. I often found myself thinking along with religious people and feeling a lot in common with them. Over the past few years, I have become convinced that there is subjectivity — or, we could say, personality — in the world that is not human-like. I feel that it’s benevolent, and that it’s the force that courses through things and animates things. And I feel some contact with it, especially in nature.
I’ve been in a process of trying to understand whether Christianity is the right language and structure to put that in. I’m making progress in that direction. My wife and I attend an Episcopalian monastery for church here in Cambridge, and I meet monthly with the superior of the monastery for spiritual direction. I am, over time and somewhat gingerly, finding my way back into Christianity. At this point, I would call myself a Christian, but I’m still working out the details.
It sounds like you’ve been searching, and that searching nature is reflected in the book itself. But how would you begin to describe the core question that animates To Arrive Where We Started? What deeper truth were you hoping to uncover — whether for yourself or others — in writing this book?
Are we actually at home here? Is this actually a good place? Are we actually a good thing?
The book is definitely both for myself and for others. My concern with the sociological phenomena of anomie and homelessness and loneliness is deeply connected to my own experiences, and my own frustrated sense of feeling cut off from some unity that I should be experiencing. In writing, I was attempting to sort these things out and see what I think about them.
I did some persuasive work on myself. Before writing the book, I had the things that I ultimately argued out as intuitions and suspicions. But I firmed them up for myself in the process of writing. The view of oneself as an integral part of this larger, very good whole increasingly seems to me to be the sensible, realistic view of things. It is just blocked from appearing that way by a lot of the thought patterns that have shaped modern life, including my own.
So I’m trying to preach to myself here. I’m trying to see through many of the patterns of thought that mark our time and place, and to see through them in my day-to-day life, so that when I’m walking around, I don’t feel alienated and lonely.
As I was reading your book, I kept returning to the concept of givenness — that life is a gift to be received, that we are born into and will die with a set of debts that can never be repaid. Why do you feel like this thread emerged so strongly in your book? How does it relate to the human search for home in the world?
An important way we are gradually taught to not feel at home in the world is the sense that reality is fundamentally tit-for-tat — that you receive a good thing only insofar as you have some way to pay for it. For instance, we live at a distance from the miraculous ways that plants grow out of soil and animals grow. I have access to an abundance of produce and meat at the Whole Foods around the corner, but that only comes to me if I can pay. There’s intentionally no generosity.
The fundamental fact is we don’t understand how these processes work. We can describe photosynthesis at an increasingly micro level. But we’re still describing something that happens itself — without which we couldn’t live and with which we can live in a fruitful and beautiful way. Our existence and our sustenance are these miraculous self-generated gifts. The extent to which we’ve been cut off from this truth is an important mechanism in our exile.
Recovering a sense of at-homeness is going to be important. First for finding a better way to live on the personal level — less lonely, less desperate, less stressed — but also in the way we structure our common life. We need to recover the sense that, “Hey, we’re part of one big thing. It’s good, and we’re recipients of it.” Life doesn’t need to be understood as this desperate dog-eat-dog struggle.
What you’re saying sounds good in theory, but for people living in industrial modernity, it can also feel unattainably utopian. But, in the book, you point to several examples of what this wholeness looks like when instantiated within human societies. Did you encounter any that you were particularly inspired or moved by?
You run the danger of sounding cliched if you say this, but a lot of indigenous ways of life live in full confrontation with the realities I’m talking about.
You can read relatively recent accounts from the 1960s, where anthropologists are describing the worldview and way of life of indigenous groups. They talk about the forest, for instance, as loving and providing for them. I spent a little time with a group in Uganda that traditionally has no method of storing goods for the future — they have no interest in it, and, in some cases, no words for it — because they have this ongoing sense of the generosity of reality. They have this sense that there will be enough tomorrow, and if we’re a little hungry for one afternoon, the forest will eventually take care of us. I also write about the Lakota in the book. They are hunters and gatherers, so they kill animals to eat, but they also have a ceremony where they give thanks to the animal. They realize that this is a great gift the animal has given its life so that they can continue to live.
You don’t even have to look very hard — if you get outside of the frame of the past 200-300 years in Western Europe — to find cultures that have a core ethos of gratitude and reciprocity. There’s an economic historian named Karl Polanyi, who says that the striving for personal monetary gain has been relatively scarce in human economic history. For the most part, you would engage in trade and production, but the goal was not to pile up as much as you could for yourself. The goal was to keep your place inside the group by sharing and exchanging, and in that way, you could feel assured that you would be okay. Things like insurance are modern attempts to patch over the loss of that tribal reciprocal form of economics. Traditionally, your insurance policy would be that you’ve been a good member of the tribe — and you’ve been generous when it was your turn to be generous — so when you needed something, you would get it.
Polanyi talks about how individual starvation was essentially unheard of in pre-modern economies. One member of the group starving while the rest of the group had food would be preposterous to tribal societies. The only way you would encounter starvation would be if there was a famine and the group was starving. During the period of colonization, in order to goad indigenous groups into working for wages for the colonizers, they had to destroy communities and traditional means of sustenance. By opening up the possibility that an individual might starve, you have power. You can say, “You have to work for me and for this wage, because, if you don’t, your body is not going to get enough food, and you are going to die.”
Your book also has echoes of Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine and pretty much every essay by Wendell Berry. There’s a consistent, underlying critique of the machine logic of industrial modernity. Can you draw out the distinctions between a mechanistic cosmos versus an alive cosmos? What are the implications for how we live?
Hans Jonas was a German Jewish philosopher who argued that the idea of a cold, indifferent, machine-like cosmos was an absolute novelty in human history over the past couple hundred years. There were various times and places where you might understand nature as being fickle or angry with you. It was more common to think that you lived in a positive social relationship with the natural world. In either case, it was something you could cope with. But for humans to imagine that we stand alone in the cosmos — that caring and value only exists inside our skulls, and then the rest of it is unthinking mechanism — Jonas says this is the true abyss. This exposes us to a nihilism that we can’t recover from.
I keep saying that the dog-eat-dog arrangements we put in place are totally unnecessary. This wasn’t the way humans used to act, and it’s not the way humans act in some places now, so why would we do this to ourselves?
My inclination is not to denounce various people for greed. People are generally doing their best. People are acting on the assumptions and incentives that they’ve been given. So I try to understand this rapaciousness in a sympathetic light. The best I can come up with is that humans have these ways of making themselves at home in the cosmos, but it tends to involve having a more holistic picture of your place within it. It’s not just me against the world; I am integrally embedded in and a part of this thing. But if everything outside of the human head is just cold unthinking mechanism, then it’s much harder to be a meaningful participant.
We still want to be at home though. We don’t want to be racked with fear and insecurity and alienation. So we cope by trying to manufacture a home around ourselves. Often, we do this by accumulating wealth and power, which gives us the capacity to inspire friendlike behaviors from people. If you pay them money, then they will give you a ride. They will protect you. They will bring you food. They will heal you when you’re sick. These are all things that presumably would have been done by fellow tribesmen.
But if the world is this strange place, and we are strangers within it, then it creates an additional urgency to getting and keeping as much as you can. You might become willing to do some pretty nasty stuff, like hurting others or harming the community you’re a part of, to get even more. To me, that’s an expression of a spiritual sickness and a deep loneliness and a belief that, “I need to force reality to be good to me.”
You’ve used the term “loneliness” a few times now. I’ve been fairly critical of the “loneliness epidemic” frame — basically, that I don’t think it exists. But you leveled a fundamentally different critique of the very conception of loneliness that underpins how we think about the so-called “loneliness epidemic.” How would you begin to explain your conception of loneliness, and your critique of the dominant frame?
The dominant frame is a discrepancy frame. We know there are lots of wacky facts like living in a house full of loving family members is not necessarily protective against loneliness, and being by oneself in a mountain retreat is not necessarily lonely-making. This puts the word “lonely” at risk of not having much meaning at all. So, what social scientists have done is peg it to some arbitrary personal point of preference, “Well, if you’re lonely in a home full of loving family members, you must want a different kind of sociality than the one available to you.” It’s a definition that centers on the discrepancy between your desired social life and the one that you have, which, to me, seems so thin and simple that it’s basically true.
But it doesn’t make sense of the devastating impact of loneliness. There are all sorts of preferences you have that are unrealized in your actual life, but they’re not psychologically and physically devastating like loneliness can be. Loneliness can peel years off your life. Loneliness can inhibit cellular repair functions. It strikes me as much more of an unmet need than an unmet arbitrary desire. So I compare it to malnutrition and try to ask, “What nutrition are we giving one another? In what way can a mature, well-fed, self-sustaining animal need others of his kind around him?” Because if he lacks them, he could die.
The argument I try to unpack is this: The human being’s sense of self and world is incredibly complex, flexible, and dynamic, and the way we’ve evolved to make sense of our reality is so complex that we can’t do it alone. You need relatively constant input from other minds around you to make sense of who and what you are and what you ought to do. One spot you can see this is in the experience of solitary confinement. It’s widely understood that extended periods in solitary confinement result in an undoing of oneself and one’s world, where the isolated prisoner loses contact with reality. Maybe he forgets who he is. Sometimes he may be doing arbitrary physical harm to himself, and then when asked later why he did that, he’ll say, “I don’t know, I didn’t know it was me that I was hurting.”
We need people to share our world with us. We need people to help us live in it, tend it, and evolve it over time. If you’re deprived of that world-sharing, then your world starts to come apart and decay. I try to understand loneliness as being precisely that: world decay. You can be alone as long as your world and yourself are staying intact. But at a certain point, for anyone, too much aloneness will start to decay that world.
You intentionally resist shallow solutions in the book. But you do provide a compass for a way out, which seems to involve a mix of what you call world-tending and becoming participants in the broader whole.
If, first of all, I come to understand myself as an integral participant in a larger whole that is good — not as an autonomous island that needs to defend itself at all costs against the people and reality around it — it then comes with a prescription that’s built in: I’m part of this reality now, and I bear some responsibility for it.
In the book, I share examples of modern people having conversion experiences where they’re overwhelmed by this perception of participation and at-homeness in reality. Then they’ll say, “Once you recognize yourself as part of the river, now you realize you’re responsible for the river as a whole.” That, to me, is the sane and non-suicidal path forward from our current attitudes and arrangements.
But is reality cold and indifferent? Is it a place where we are truly at home and we’re participants in a good way? You can’t be argued into answers to these fundamental questions; they’re questions you have to live through. For that reason, the only thing I counsel in the book is a different kind of attention. I’m pulling from Simone Weil, who has a beautiful description of attention as something like “open waiting for reality to penetrate it.”
This is all pretty woo woo, I realize, but we’re in a moment where the question of whether all matter is conscious is becoming a legitimate mainstream question in philosophy and in the sciences. There’s a growing openness to this because the paradigm that locks us into our individual skulls is inaccurate. It requires us to ignore much about reality, and it locks us into hyper-competitive, thoughtless, heedless ways of living that feel self-destructive to many right now. If the book resonates with people, it’ll be because it’s surfing on a wave that’s already taking shape — that people are already getting disenchanted with the machine-like model of reality and are looking for an alternative.
The book ends with a few of the conversion experiences you just referenced, which leads you to a moving meditation on beauty and death:
The virtuosity of life is all the more striking—it might even seem miraculous—when it emerges in a context that also foregrounds its fragility. Here we all are, for a few short moments—tiny, brittle, ignorant, and unspeakably beautiful participants in a drama we could not hope to fully comprehend. Confronted with this juxtaposition, Havel suddenly, unexpectedly receives the intuition that behind the facade of ubiquitous flux, a limitless, invisible reality exists, one in which we are all participants. (p. 152)
Someone doesn’t write a book like this — and end a book like this — without themselves being transformed. You alluded to this in the beginning, so I want to ask it to close us out: How has writing this book affected your relationship with the beauty and frailty of life, and what it means to be at home in the world?
There’s this quip that I heard when I was in grad school, which is that most people are writing a dissertation in hopes of saving their souls. I tend towards living in my own head and being quite isolated from reality, so I wrote a book about being at home in reality. It’s something I have struggled with, and continue to struggle with.
I’ve convinced myself enough that it has started to make a material difference in my day-to-day life. These days, I attempt to be more present. I attempt to not look away from the incompleteness and fragility and mortality of the things around me. I attempt to be present with the imperfect people and imperfect places around me, and not flee away from them into my head, which has been my lifelong instinct. I just finished reading Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies in a reading group with a bunch of undergrads, and it emphasizes a lot of the same points. Over time, I am walking in a closer and more sensitive proximity to the imperfect and good world.
Can you close us out with a passage from Duino Elegies?
Here’s a stanza from the First Elegy. It captures Rilke’s Romantic sense that we exist in a reciprocal, mutually-nourishing relationship with reality, and his frustration at our fearful inability to look our fragile, mortal world in the face:
Yes—the springtimes needed you. Often a star
was waiting for you to notice it. A wave rolled toward you
out of the distant past, or as you walked
under an open window, a violin
yielded itself to your hearing. All this was mission.
But could you accomplish it? Weren’t you always
distracted by expectation, as if every event
announced a beloved? (Where can you find a place
to keep her, with all the huge strange thoughts inside you
going and coming and often staying all night.)
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Sam, thank you for hosting this conversation.
Much of what Ian describes resonates with me, particularly the idea that loneliness is not simply an individual condition but reflects a deeper breakdown in our shared worlds.
One question that arose for me, however, concerns the relationship between participation and social architecture.
If modernity has left many people disconnected from the larger web of life, what are the actual social forms through which belonging is restored?
Families, congregations, neighborhood groups, civic associations, service organizations, local businesses, and countless informal networks all seem to play a role. The challenge may not simply be helping people rediscover that they are part of the river, but rebuilding the relational infrastructure that allows them to experience that reality in daily life.
My own journey eventually led me back to Jesus and the Christian tradition, not primarily through theology, but through decades of community building. Again and again, I found that the practices that generated belonging, reciprocity, responsibility, and human flourishing pointed toward the same underlying pattern: relationship comes before ideology.
That leaves me wondering whether the metacrisis is ultimately less a failure of ideas than a failure of connection—and whether rebuilding the social fabric may be one of the most important forms of cultural renewal available to us.
This conversation is so beautiful and connected to themes I’m exploring in my work, as well. I just pre-ordered Mr. Corbin’s book and am looking forward to reading it.