Prisoners of Our Own Devices

To Arrive Where We Started:
Belonging in the Modern World 
by ian marcus corbin
yale university press, 200 pages, $32.50

Ian Marcus Corbin’s new book, To Arrive Where We Started, offers a deep reflection on traditional wisdom, drawing on complexity theory and thinkers as divergent as Rilke, Plato, Jonathan Lear, and bell hooks to illuminate our need for friendship, community, and immersion in the natural world. It might fairly have been subtitled “doing simple things that make us happy” or “remembering what makes us human.” Preconditions of the good life that were taken for granted in earlier times have been forgotten in ours; we, denizens of a technocratic and alienated civilization, are very far from where we started.

When a civilization cuts itself off not only from its roots, but from universal belief in goodness, goodwill, tenderness, neighborliness, from the folk and the felt, social dislocation, nihilism, and suicide are nigh. A philosopher on the faculty of Harvard Medical School, Corbin gives a dire prognosis: If we do not return to our animality and our corporeality, if we do not reintegrate into organic communities, and if we stick to the Enlightenment’s anemic image of the human (autonomous, rational), then we will find ourselves permanently divorced from nature, from Eros, from God. Man is born free, but everywhere he is chained to screens.

To Arrive Where We Started is more descriptive than prescriptive. Figuring out how to fix a civilization gone haywire is a task too large for a single author. Corbin is content, and reasonably so, to map the domains where an originary feeling and practice may most plausibly be recovered; the specifics must be imagined.

Corbin’s book is aimed at the solitary reader who is capable of applying wisdom to his life and making small but additive, even multiplicative changes. It is not a call to arms. It is a letter to the like-minded. In the introduction, Corbin, raised in the Pentecostal church, a one-time Catholic convert who now attends church at an Episcopalian monastery, acknowledges that he is motivated, philosophically, by an abiding sense of “spiritual homelessness”; To Arrive Where We Started is not for the faithless, but neither is it one for the orthodox; it is for existential grapplers and seekers. 

Corbin is a romantic prophet. Despite his mild, interrogative tone, he is a severe critic of the modern world, and, as with all true prophets, his vision of the future might be difficult to swallow for those in his own time and place. But for those with eyes to see and ears to hear, it is not a matter of if our algorithmic, screen-based mode of living will produce a larger cataclysm, but when. Our “winner take all society” is “showing signs of exhaustion” and “may collapse,” Corbin writes, citing fentanyl deaths, assisted suicide, and mass shootings as symptoms of a rapidly sickening culture.

Corbin’s core claim is that, just as the human body is a complex system made of subsystems and subsisting within larger ecologies, humans are never independent from higher-order systems. Whether we know it or not, we always exist in a state of interdependence. Corbin develops the implications of this anthropology to show that in friendship, in sex, in the marketplace, in nature, we tend toward antagonistic, transactional relationships rather than interdependent, coevolving, co-regulating relationships that implicitly acknowledge the need of all for all.

The modern world makes the subject lonely in the crowd. The relationship of one American to another is closer to that of prisoner and prison guard than to friend or neighbor.

Modern man is unable to participate in what the Native Americans called the Great Mystery or what Plato called eros. We inhabit our own isolated worlds rather than a single shared world with an “ethos of reciprocal recognition.” We are besieged by images and opinions and personae—the simulacra of friends, lovers, family, neighbors—but starving for conversation, authentic exchange, and the joy of shared loves.

If I check my DraftKings account and see that my Knicks bet has paid off, if I get a bonus at work or a payout from getting enough clicks as a social media influencer, perhaps I feel some dopamine rush, some pleasure at having, at least temporarily, more money. But there’s nothing about this that I can share with anyone else. I’m an isolated money-maximizing unit. What Corbin calls “ownerism”—a society constructed around the goal of ownership and consumption—has won an “overwhelming” victory. But through conversation, deep friendship, participation in the world, Corbin believes it is still possible for the individual to open himself back up to the world.

We’re all guilty and we’re all innocent, according to Corbin, drawing from Father Zosima’s reflections in The Brothers Karamazov. As soon as the subject admits that they need the world, need home, need beauty, something shifts. The shame that comes with alienation (the many “I should’ves” that attend a life without real guidelines, rules, or traditions) fades away before the rediscovery of our interdependence.

The message of To Arrive Where We Started is idealistic. Once you do acknowledge your shame at being a modern, alienated subject, and open yourself up to the love around you, then every day more and more love will come to you. The earth and other people become more alive to you as the quarantine of person from person produced by technology is breached.

This is easier said than done, but Corbin’s short book takes the saying part seriously. His biggest intervention is to shift us away from the Enlightenment’s false anthropology of the autonomous subject to a vision of the integrated self, embedded within larger spheres of family, community, nature. Change the frame, Corbin hints, and you start to change the picture.