Welcome to Madison’s Footnotes, the substack page for the Madison’s Notes podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.
Americans are more isolated, polarized, and depressed than ever in recent memory, and yet many citizens share a deep desire for community and friendship across political lines and in new creative ways. How may we bridge that gap? To help answer that most pressing question, in Episode 2 of Season 6, I have as our guest the philosopher, essayist, and author, Ian Marcus Corbin.
A graduate of Yale Divinity School and Boston College, Mr. Corbin is a senior fellow at Capita, the program director of Harvard University’s Public Culture Project, and the author of To Arrive Where We Started (2026). Drawing on his book, we discuss the human longing for belonging as the way to deal with our modern crisis of loneliness.
We begin with Corbin’s journey from a teenage Christian punk rock fan raised by hippies-turned-Pentecostals into an Ivy League philosopher working at the intersection of neurobiology and culture, and along the way, we also discuss texts from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets to Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday, Plato’s Symposium, Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, and Karp Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, not to mention figures such as Black Elk, Roger Scruton, as well as Corbin’s personal friend, Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy.
This conversation has been edited for clarity and length. Please enjoy.
Ian, welcome to the podcast.
Thanks a lot, Ryan. Thanks for having me.
I remember hearing that your parents began as hippies playing in a reggae band, but became Pentecostals. In their home as a teenager, you became a Christian punk rock fan, and then as an adult, a writer and philosopher who works at the intersection of science and culture at an Ivy League university. Do you see this process as one of homecoming or one of exile?
Oh, what a great question. This is something that I’ve thought about a good bit.
There was a period in my twenties where I was pulling away from certain parts of my upbringing. I was becoming an academic. I was going off to study across the world. There was a period there where it really felt like I was leaving. I think it felt to my parents like I was leaving them and what we had all loved together. Shortly after, right around that same period, they started to drift away from the Pentecostalism that had defined the years of my childhood and adolescence.
I came back from some studies at Yale—these had been really formative years for me—and I had learned how to be an adult sitting at these seminar tables. I came back to the Boston area, I started seeing my parents regularly again, and the only way I could think of to be an adult at the dinner table with them was to act like I was at a Yale seminar table, which was, of course, obnoxious. Nobody wants that.
There was a sense there for a bit that we may have just diverged here. Our paths may have diverged. I think as I’ve grown a little older and I hope matured into the sort of paths that I’ve ended up taking, I’m more and more convinced that I haven’t gone very far at all.
The experiences of belonging and the kind of communal, ecstatic experience even, have animated my interest in philosophy, the art that I really enjoy, and the friendships that I seek out. I had a lot of years of really wandering, but I never stopped longing for that kind of spiritual depth and connection.
Now at this point, my parents are incredibly proud, a little confused about what I do, and I think we have a great common understanding and a great relationship now. So I think there was maybe a period of wandering and experience of exile, but I don’t feel that way anymore.
Coming from such a background, when did our crisis of loneliness first strike you? When did it first impress upon you that you had to write a whole book about it?
Sure. I’ve had my own personal crisis of loneliness that I’ve been working on for forty-something years now—which is not to say that I lack friends or family. I don’t. I have wonderful friends and wonderful family.
And maybe this is in part the kind of occupational hazard of being a philosopher, but I live a lot of my life in my own head, planning and strategizing and trying to anticipate potential problems and solve them in a way that sometimes, that quite often I think, leads me to hold reality and the people around me at a distance, probably out of some instinct for self-protection.
I talk about this a little bit in the intro to the book. I think I have that native gut-level experience of alienation and loneliness. It’s been a driver of why I do philosophy. I was in the art business for several years. It’s a lot of what I love about the arts is the ability to connect and feel like there’s something important and deep that you share with the people around you. The fact that this may not just be me, or there may be a version of loneliness that is endemic in our moment.
I was at Oxford for a year reading political theory in 2005-2006. And at that time, John Rawls was just absolutely dominant in that world. And so Rawls is the quintessential post-war liberal. And it’s always dangerous to talk about Rawls because he wrote so much and he was so smart.
But I would say just very generally, thought that those points of contact with something really deep and profound—whether it was religious, spiritual, deeply ethical and philosophical—that those points of contact were points that were not going to be able to fully reconcile together in a diverse multicultural society, so it would be safer and better and will lead to more societal stability if we can leave those things in our private lives, leave them at home, not treat them as matters for public discussion, and have our public life be washed of those idiosyncrasies and those depths.
I remember reading this and thinking this just can’t be enough to sustain a civilization. That mutual individual interest, that I’m going to stick with you, Ryan, and I’m going to stick with the people around me because it’s in my interest to do so, and then you’re going to do it because it’s in your interest. And we’re not going to share any deep sense of who we are or what we’re about or what we value or where we’re going. That struck me as weirdly thin and probably not sustainable.
At that time, as I say, Rawls was the political theorist, and my teachers at Oxford were pretty confused as to why I wouldn’t find this compelling.
They of course let me read things by Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre, who were at that time well-established critics of Rawlsian liberalism and not totally ruled out of court. And I read thinkers like the two of them or Michael Sandel, and thought: “Okay this, this communitarian critique of liberalism just seems on point to me. Apparently, this is a weird point of view, because everyone else seems to agree that Rawlsian liberalism is the key to running society.”
So I think in the past 20 years since then, more and more people have come around to the idea that maybe the post-war liberal settlement is a little bit thin and that maybe in the absence of deep shared stories and values and goals, we might have problems with things like social cohesion. I would say that we might have problems with people rushing off into little enclaves that might be antagonistic towards each other.
This is something that Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil observed in mid-century France and Germany that, really, the central and most important seedbed for that sort of radical unhealthy politics—built around enmity and us-versus-them—the most important seedbed is loneliness or what Simone Weil calls “rootlessness.” So I think that’s just become a little bit harder to deny in the past 10-15 years.
Of course, you have things like the surgeon general coming out and talking about the epidemic of loneliness. You have empirically just much greater incidence of isolation where people aren’t really seeing other people. They’re not socializing. They’re ordering their food through apps and hunkering down in their apartments with their computer in a way that I think now everyone is awake to.
Would you then consider your project a part of the post-liberal projects in political thought right now? Or would you simply trying to recover a version of liberalism that is able to actually have greater social bonding?
So I don’t know. It’s a fair question. I sometimes periodically promise myself that I’m never going to talk about liberalism again because every time I talk about liberalism, it turns out the people I’m talking to mean something different by the word.
That’s fair.
So certainly post-war liberalism, and especially as it ended up either producing or getting caught up with economic neoliberalism, I think is not working. I think we need to move past it, and I think we will move past it. That’s where a lot of the energy is on both sides of the political aisle, both here and in peer countries. I am trying to imagine what comes next. I think that we need to because there are lots of people imagining right now and arguing for a future after liberalism in ways that I think could be really destructive and dangerous.
I suppose the post-liberal moniker has become associated with a very particular approach, in the American context especially. If I were European, I might be more comfortable with the designation. But in the states, it’s just such a particular thing and it’s just probably not where I am.
To get into your book, you set it up large beginning with a scientific account. You use T.S. Eliot’s poetry from The Four Quartets to create the imaginative framework, and then get into looking at a kind of metabolism and the basis for human cognition and how these processes interact with each other. Can you tell me a bit about that, please?
I’m a philosopher by training and kind of personal inclination. I’ve spent the past several years now working as a researcher at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, which is one of the teaching hospitals for Harvard Medical School. I’ve been hanging out with a lot of scientists, and that has exposed me to some really interesting work in empirical, scientific, and non-philosophical fields.
When I was sitting down to write and to think about loneliness, alienation, and belonging among humans, I was also at the same time reading and teaching some philosophical biology or philosophy of life. And so I started to see these both interesting convergences and divergences between the behavior of human organisms and other sorts of living things.
It seemed to me that there was a sort of work of interpretation and homemaking that was pretty universal among living things, and that a living thing bursting into or dropped into some environmental context needs to make sense of its environment needs—in some at least rudimentary sense—to cognize its environment and seek out the most hospitable and homelike location and arrangement.
I was learning this from a school of thought that’s called the Santiago School of Cognition, which was started by a couple of Chilean scientist philosophers named Maturana and Varela. I was reading some of that stuff, and I thought it was just interesting to argue that living things in general are doing this work of interpretation, cognition, and homemaking, but then to also look at what is particular about the human way of doing that.
This was in part to solve a puzzle, which is that you know a human being—and many human beings are—can be ensconced in an absolutely safe, comfortable, prosperous kind of perfect environment. You can imagine being a rich person in a kind of heavily guarded mansion with every luxury and comfort and pleasure available to you, and yet feel deeply not at home, right? So this struck me as a puzzle.
It dovetailed with a problem that I was seeing in the social scientific literature around loneliness, which was that there was not really, to my eye, a serious or sufficient definition of what loneliness is. Because you can be deeply lonely in a house full of adoring family members, and you can be not lonely hiking the Appalachian Trail by yourself, I didn’t think that was well-theorized or understood in the social scientific literature.
And, holding the human process of homemaking and feeling at home up against the more generically organismic process, it seemed to illuminate the problem in a way that I at least enjoyed. I’ve always liked writing that draws together lots of disparate, or disciplines or considerations and tries to tell a story that makes sense of them together.
The way you write about using the Santiago school and its theory about the interaction of an organism in its environment as an act of interpretation, from the bacteria to the baboon, it almost felt like Aristotle’s formal and final cause. Do you think at all that’s a modern restatement of that kind of approach to biology?
Can you unpack a little bit more what you mean?
I’m thinking of the way the complicated, intelligible process that an organism interacts with its environment, almost as if there’s a sort of mental process at work making use of it and going towards a certain kind of goal. At one point you suggested in your book that it could be that we need to posit, I think, mind as a more universal property, and I was wondering if that was maybe a contemporary, perhaps functionally equivalent, account of trying to give a more teleological process in nature.
I’m very comfortable talking about the soul for living things, which is how Aristotle talks about is the entelechy, the sort of embedded, inborn, goal-directedness or endedness of living things.
I find that among scientists describing the operations of a cell or an organism, we’re phenomenally advanced in terms of being able to talk about the different sort of discrete functions in a cell and how they interact: how this part of the cell is working to constantly refurbish and renew this other part of the cell, and that part of the cell is feeding that one and is acting to protect that part of it.
And so we can identify all the discrete mechanisms. But at a certain point, you’ll often see scientists resorting to these kind of vague weasel words where they’ll say things like, “Okay, the system is directing that,” or “The organism is ultimately orchestrating all this.”
As if there’s agency.
Well, because there is a directionality and there’s an orchestration that you can’t pinpoint in any spot. You can’t say, “Here’s the command center,” because you try to find a command center, and lo and behold, it turns out that command center would be inert on its own, and it has to be activated by another part of the cell.
This is part of the problem with the sort of shorthand views around genes: genes being the things that run everything. Actually, genes are inert. They need to be called into action by other processes and parts of the cell or the organism. We’re dancing around the fact of psyche, of soul, and using these words to try to put the question out of court. So yeah, I’m increasingly just comfortable thinking in terms of soul, and I think souls are directed towards ends. It’s not that specific necessarily.
I think one thing that’s just so miraculous and amazing about living things, and maybe I speak specifically about humans here, is that there’s this phenomenal combination of goal-directedness and flexible responsiveness.
That your soul, Ryan, wants to live and live fully and live well and to flourish. It wants you to be a kind of flourishing overall human being. But the paths that you’ve taken towards that end and the paths that I’ve taken can be wildly different, right? Because at every moment, you’re responding to a really complex, precise, sort of network of phenomena, experiences, histories, memories, and conditions. But through all that adaptability and relationality, there is the kind of the steady goal of yourself—which is to live fully, live, live well—stays in place
Is that what’s unique about human interpretation? And does that at all necessarily make us somewhat lonely creatures?
So, I think the degree of flexibility is much different for us. The ways that you can make a way in the world as a human are more various than the ways you can make a way in the world as a bacterium. You could be a guru sitting on a mountaintop. You could be a consultant. You can be a craftsman. You can be a stay-at-home parent. And all these ways can work to make yourself at home to both provide for yourself in like material ways, but also to understand yourself, to understand your world, and to feel at home in it.
So I do think that flexibility is especially pronounced in humans. And I think it is at least connected to the fact that we can have what appears from the outside as a really perfect arrangement, and we can feel like we don’t belong there, because being at home for us is a kind of holistic matter. It’s not just, “Do I have comfortable clothing and enough to eat?” It’s “okay, where do I come from? What is the meaning of all of this? What’s the meaning of my life? Am I respected? Where do I stand in the community? Have I contributed? How should I live? What should I hope for?”
For us, there’s all of that. And I don’t want to rule it out of court, but as far as I know, there are not other organisms on Earth whose sense of home is quite so complex and therefore so delicate. One thing can be off and an otherwise really suitable, excellent life can feel like an exile for us.
You coin the terms “cognitive metabolism,” “world tending,” and “world decay” to describe respectively the interaction of culture and metabolism, then to describe how we have a settled way of life together, and then to describe the breakdown, which is particularly endemic today. Can you dive into that the three tiers for me, please?
So regarding that sort of complexity and fragility of a sense of world, self, and belonging that I was talking about, one interesting thing about it is that we seem to capital-N need other people in order to maintain a sense of self and world that can add up to a feeling of being at home in the world. And it’s not totally clear at the outset: what is that? What is it that we need from each other?
If you have enough money, you can purchase all of the practical sort of experiences of friendship, right? You can purchase assistance when you need it. You can purchase companionship. You can purchase sex. You can purchase most of the things that friends do for you in an obvious practical way, but feel utterly bereft and lonely. And so what is that missing ingredient? I think it’s that we need to share a world with people. So we need to be around people with whom we can understand and interpret and reinterpret reality with.
For instance, like teenagers growing up with like super-loving parents, if their worldview starts to diverge as they’re as teenagers, which very often it does, they can feel totally lonely and abandoned, right? “Oh, I want nothing to do with this. This is terrible. I want out of here.”
Because, as I said, these senses of ourselves and world are fragile and they need to be built together. And if you feel like the world that you’re starting to see emerge is not shared by the people around you, then you’re going to really want to find people who do share your sense of the world.
I try to get into it a little bit and I compare it to the process of physical metabolism, where energy is taken in, broken down, and used for ends that already existed within the organism, so just the way that your body wants to keep growing hair or fingernails, but you need to eat apples and hamburgers to power that process.
I think that the process of tending a world—of interpreting it, changing your interpretations as you go, like understanding it, knowing how to live well in it, knowing what is important and what’s not important in it—requires inputs of outside energy. I think that you need other people to look at it with you.
There’s all sorts of empirical evidence that you could cite from neuroscientists and others about how looking at a problem alone is a far more cognitively taxing thing than looking at it with a friendly co-observer. Because in a practical, measurable way, you’re offloading some of the cognition onto the person with you. You’re not having to carry the full load of sense-making by yourself. You’re in this sort of subtle, or sometimes not so subtle, feedback loop with another mind or minds.
That’s what I mean by the term “cognitive metabolism”: that where you’re metabolizing the judgment energy of other people, and it’s allowing you to make and maintain and adjust your sort of vision of the world in front of you. One of the ways I try to explain that is that judgment about the world is inherently underdetermined.
So Kant talks about judgment as this sort of mystery. He thinks it’s something that if you lack it, you’re maybe incurably stupid. Because it’s not about applying rules, right? In any judgment you make, “Okay, is Ian a charlatan? Does he have something to say? Is he lying to me?” Whatever.
You could be wrong about all of it. There’s just no rule to apply. You’re working on experience, you’re working on hunches, you’re working on your ability to read the person across from you in a really sort of animal way that is actually beneath a lot of our explicit cognitive processes. We really have no right to operate in the world with speed and confidence, because we could be wrong about everything at every moment.
I think that when you are in a position where you feel like you have to interpret, inhabit, and act in the world alone without other minds to cognize it and interpret it with, it starts to break down. And that’s what I mean by the phrase “world decay.”
I use the example of the experience of solitary confinement. There’s a lot of literature on this, and it’s really fascinating. You have prisoners who are forced into solitary confinement, first and foremost, like a regular lonely person. They start to lose the ability to focus their attention and to regulate their emotions, their bodies, and their behaviors.
Then as things progress, if you remain stuck in solitary confinement, there’s well-known phenomena of people experiencing what’s called “derealization,” where you lose the ability to tell what’s real and what’s fake. You’ll start to hallucinate. You’ll start to hear things that aren’t there. You’ll become unshakably fixated on gruesome fantasies of killing your guard and torturing him. Prisoners talk about seeing their jail bars kind of vibrate when they’re actually not moving.
That’s a pretty extreme example, but even for the milder form of just losing the ability to focus your attention or to regulate yourself, I think, these are early symptoms of your world coming apart. Because a lot of the ability to focus your attention on what is important requires an understanding of what’s important, it requires an interpretation of the world around you.
The ability to regulate yourself in pursuit of the kind of person you want to be or pursuit of different goals also requires a sense of reality. We can’t maintain it alone, and one of the ways that it can start to decay is when we’re deprived of other minds to look at it with, and that is precisely what loneliness is.
This is why a monk can spend a good bit of time in solitude, and not go crazy and not have their world decay. In that case, I think, a lot of the kind of great practitioners of solitude across civilizations seem like they’re leaving human sociality for some kind of determined period of time to engage in a different kind of sociality, like a different sort of mind-sharing, but in that case maybe with a deity or saints or something like that.
You have a very fascinating example from Stefen Zweig’s The World of Yesterday about a form of exile and total world decay. Can you please tell me about your love for that book?
It’s The World of Yesterday. From the Austrian Jewish writer Stefan Zweig, this memoir talks about his upbringing in fin-de-siècle Vienna, which was incredibly cosmopolitan, progressive, pretty wealthy in his part of it, and super creative in the arts. He talks about first the Great War and then after it, the Second World War, as having really destroyed that world, so that he was himself permanently exiled and homeless.
He wrote the book towards the end of the Second World War (it was not over yet), with his wife Lotte assisting him. They were in Brazil at the time, and Zweig believed that world was just gone and never coming back, and he would always be worldless. So they mailed the book off to the publisher and then both committed suicide because there was just no world for them to live in.
This is just a really fascinating thing about people, which is for us that thick sense of a world— that includes a sense of who I am, what I ought to do, what’s important about me, et cetera—is so necessary and so core to our existence that we will end our biological existence in a lot of cases if we lose that maybe airier, more spiritual sense of self and world.
You counterpose the world decay with the term oikophilia, “the love of home.” Now, there was a popularizer of this term from the last 20 years named Roger Scruton. Was his thinking at all an influence in your use of that term or was this a convergence?
This was a convergence. As I understand it, Scruton was using the word to refer to a kind of love of one’s own and of settled custom and tradition and the familiar, which I don’t mean to disavow that. Obviously at the moment we’re in right now that the longing for that kind of homeness, familiarity, and rootedness—honestly, I think a lot of people feel it.
But the ones who are being most vocal about it right now are using it in a pretty kind of agonistic and warlike way to say that we need to clamp down and expel people who aren’t from here or who don’t belong here. And there are there are problems with large-scale transfers of humans between societies. I think that does raise a lot of very serious problems that need to be thought carefully about. But that’s not, the kind of oikophilia I’m talking about.
As much as I think tradition and place and rootedness are extremely important, I’m talking about a just an ability to be at home wherever you are, to be at home in the cosmos, to be at home in yourself, and to be at home among the people that you’re around. Tradition and heritage and all that do really help. That is some of the primary ways that people negotiate a home. But it’s also insufficient, right?
Like I live less than an hour away from the city I was born in Newburyport, Massachusetts. I live among New Englanders. I’m a native New Englander. And there is a good bit that we share, but it doesn’t suffice to make me just simply feel at home among them. I think that the oikophilia that I’m interested in is something that you need even in a kind of settled traditional society, like maybe the one Scruton was pointing at. It’s a belonging that we really need in our modern reality.
I think there’s a lot to mourn about the kind of de-villaging of the world. Right? Across all sorts of societies, it’s becoming less and less common to live in the kind of human-scale village where your ancestors lived. I spent a good bit of time in Africa during the time I was writing the book and saw how that was functioning there. And yeah, there’s something rich and beautiful about the village level being long rooted in a place like that and among people whom you know.
But that’s just not the reality for a lot of us. Quite a lot of the Earth’s population lives in cities. I don’t see a large-scale return to village life in the offing. I think we have to f- we have to focus our attention on how to feel at home where we are. And so anyway, all that to say that the version of oikophilia I’m trying to unpack, is larger scale and in a way less specific than the one that Scruton I think is interested in.
You cite at one point Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation (1944) to discuss the effects of modern capitalism overthrowing settled ways of life throughout the western hemisphere. And then you also use the example several times throughout the book of Black Elk, the chieftain, and his shock at New York City and seeing the wealth disparities there. Using these examples, how do you find that the economic processes of modern life are interacting with our desire for home or undermining it?
Yeah, so Polanyi—with his wonderful book, The Great Transformation—talks about the enclosure movement in Europe, which moved villagers out of their kind of ancestral villages through various long-running mechanisms, and ended up resettling them in factory towns away from their roots, and away from the things they had known into anonymous cities where they were a kind of hourly employee.
He talks about this process repeating under colonial rule in various parts of what we now call the global south, and he finds this system of individual wage labor to be really anomalous in the human story, just based on what he looks at in this empirical record that he had access to. It’s anomalous for a few important reasons—and reasons that are still important, I think, for our own thinking about economics, place, community, and belonging.
He says that the idea of laboring for money, and laboring for as much money as you can possibly get, had been a relatively unknown thing in most human societies. And that as industry was being built up under colonial rule, you frequently have this confrontation that would happen where people building the enterprises—who wanted a kind of good liquid labor force to show up and work for the wages that they were willing to offer—had a problem, which was that people didn’t want to do it.
They didn’t want to sell their time and to devote their efforts, their agency, their strength, and their creativity to other people’s projects. And so they had trouble recruiting, and they would say, “Look, you’ve got to do this or you’re going to starve. You can’t eat.” According to Polanyi, the answer was, “No, I’m not. That’s just not true.”
What Polanyi says is that in most agrarian or hunter-gatherer societies, or traditional societies, individual starvation was unheard of. The group could starve if there was some sort of catastrophic famine perhaps. But the idea that you, Ryan Shinkel, have not been working very hard, and therefore you’re not going to be able to eat anymore while your group has plenty to eat, would just be shocking and incredible to a person from a traditional society. And that is when you mentioned Black Elk, who’s a Sioux medicine man.
He goes right at the end of the 19th century (I don’t remember the year) to New York City for the first time, and he’s astonished to see that there are people who look like they’re starving to death, and there’s other people who have more than they could ever spend in their lifetime. This just seems to him farcical, like utterly illogical. How could this be happening, that Ian could have so much, and Ryan could be by his doorstep starving, and Ian would just be like, “Yeah, that’s my stuff. You can’t have that at all.”
So Polanyi says that this is a common intuitive orientation in traditional societies. And then for the owners of these nascent enterprises—in order to accomplish the goal of getting a kind of willing labor force that would work for the wages they wanted to offer—what they had to do was they had to destroy traditional society.
They had to go and they had to maybe destroy the sources of their traditional agrarian life ways. They had to break up groups, and they had to destroy villages in order to create the possibility of individual starvation. Because then once you’re faced down with the prospect that you or maybe you and your partner and your children are going to starve to death, you’re going to be like, “Alright, I’ll show up. I’ll be there. I’ll work and I’ll work for the wages that you’re offering.”
So that’s the Polanyi story, and he quotes in that context one of my favorite thinkers, Aristotle. And Aristotle’s writing about different models of home economics, the economics of the home. He says that the natural way is householding, where you make sure you have enough for your people. You trade a little bit, because you can’t produce everything you need and neither can the other households. But Aristotle says that trade for the purpose of maximizing your individual gains is unnatural for us, and that this is a sort of perversion.
I would say that, reading into it a bit, there’s something weird and bottomless and just cancerous about the desire to gain forever more and more. So that’s what I take from Polanyi. And then there’s this really interesting lineage of anthropologists. Polanyi taught this guy Marshall Sahlins, whom I reference a little bit in the book and whom I really like. And then Sahlins taught David Graeber, whom I also reference a bit in the book.
In some of your writing, I see not just a radical philosophical critique of modern economics, but also a perhaps longing for more local tribal life. For example, you wrote in the Washington Post in 2020 that the decline in young people moving away from the home and living with their parents was leading to the collapse of the nuclear family, and that was a good thing. Can you please tell me a bit about that as an example of what I was describing?
The pandemic was leading to more kind of home-sharing between the generations that, whether it’s grandparents or adult children, more people were bunking down together as a result of the pandemic. That was a good thing because, as much as the nuclear family of mother, father, and children, is obviously a good and necessary thing, the idea that this is the family unit is a pretty recent invention. And I think one that’s not great for the people involved.
My wife and I live in Cambridge, we both work, we’re raising children, and it’s really hard. If we lived in a little family compound with grandparents and aunts and grown children, I think there would just be a lot more load-sharing, and life would be more feasible. I think you see tremendous amounts, certainly, of love and devotion from parents in situations like ours, but also quite a lot of burnout and a lot of exhaustion.
Insofar as we’ve been able to have more of a kind of villagey experience is insofar as we’ve had other families, or maybe family members, who can help us raise the children and whom we can help them raise their children. That is such a wonderful relief and grants such a deep feeling of friendship and shared hopes and shared occupation together. I think that we really quite need that.
There was a substack post I saw recently that I thought was interesting. The author basically says that part of the reason why certainly millennials, and maybe Gen Z-ers, feel overstretched and feel that their economic situation is bad and is worse than the generations that went before them, is that they’re needing to buy back at market rate a lot of the kind of services that in earlier times would’ve been offered by the community.
That would’ve been (and not the greatest turn of phrase) what we call “social capital.” For example, here in Cambridge everyone pays for childcare. Everyone pays for after-school programs. Almost everyone pays for professionals to watch their children for big chunks of time. And it’s incredibly expensive. It’s insanely expensive, but somehow also the people doing it get paid very poorly. I don’t fully understand. But we’re devoted to our careers because we have to be because this is the “two-income trap.”
Life has become too expensive in most cases for one person’s income to suffice. And so then we have to spend a lot of our incomes paying people to take care of our aging parents and to take care of our children in a way that I think is not a great bargain, honestly. I don’t think it conduces to the kind of flourishing life and flourishing communities that I wish we had.
And speaking of flourishing communities, you use a couple, I think, extremely well-chosen examples to talk about the meaning of love and friendship and how to live well by loving well. I’m specifically thinking of the speech of Diotima and Socrates that you go into quite a bit from Plato’s Symposium, and also the life of Father Zosima in The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Could you please tell me about Diotima and Zosima?
Oh goodness, okay. Diotima comes from the wonderful Platonic dialogue, The Symposium. Basically, the dialogue is a recounting of a dinner party where the guests are all competing to make speeches about Eros, the god of love, and why eros is a good and beautiful thing as opposed to just a sort of animal urge to copulate, let’s say. And Diotima is the final crowning speech.
What she argues is that when you have to fall in love, or even to be strongly attracted to another person, is a disguised longing for eternity. And if you follow eros correctly, you gradually come to see that it wasn’t someone’s body that you wanted on one level. That longing—that kind of onrush of joy that you feel when you meet someone who you might want to love—she describes it as being pregnant. You have something you want to give birth to. There’s some part of you that you want to extend into eternity and extend beyond your own mortal lifespan.
She says that can happen either in terms of the body or the soul. The body would be you want to have children, pretty simple. She doesn’t think that’s really the best. The best is the longing for some form of spiritual children. And she thinks that pursuing this longing by loving another person, contemplating doing philosophy together, and making speeches about what you’ve seen, moves you up this ladder towards this pretty indescribable, ineffable encounter with the Good itself, that’s immaterial and eternal, and that fires everything else that exists through participation.
That everything that exists and is good and is beautiful participates in this kind of deep core primal goodness, and that by following eros into the contemplation of this deep goodness, you become able to be a truly happy, virtuous person who knows what to do and when to do it, and who is attached to the right things, and who is just genuinely good in lots of ways.
I think that her description of that meets up pretty well with what I’m trying to talk about when I talk about being at home in the world. So that’s Diotima. And I unpack that because I think that sharing a world with a friend is what allows us to inhabit a world in a kind of steady, serious, and home-ish sort of way.
For a human being to be at home in the world, we have a holistic form of cognition where we want to be able to understand what I’m doing this morning in the larger sort of cosmic context. What does this all mean? Where do we come from? Where are we going? What truly matters? And for that, you start to tip into things like metaphysics, philosophy, and religion. What Diotima shows me is a way in which our longing for one another has a certain natural inclination towards the whole of reality and our place within it.
So she provides at least one demonstration of a vision of that. I don’t think it’s nearly the only one, and I try to look at some other versions as well from non-Western sources. But the role she plays in the book is showing how kind of metaphysics and friendship tend to meet up.
And then I think, having alighted upon a vision of metaphysics or the whole, when you share that with someone, that’s the sort of thing that can really bond you together and form a true community and a true sense of brotherhood and sisterhood. So that’s Diotima, and I’m happy if you want to talk about that at all.
It seems to me in the speech of Socrates’ account from Diotima, it’s the particular going to the universal, the finite going into the eternal. And for Father Zosima, the transformation of his life, when it comes after the “Rebellion” and “The Grand Inquisitor” chapters from Ivan Karamazov, it’s a counterpoint: that it’s the eternal entering into the finite and into the particular. Does that strike you like that at all? Like the directionality?
Yeah. I think they would, to some significant degree, agree on this. It certainly is true that for Diotima, she’s telling the story of going from particular to universal. She does a lot of punchline, for that ascent is the descent afterwards, that go: “And this is how you make a truly virtuous life. This is how you truly befriend the gods. This is how potentially you might be able to court the possibility of eternal life for yourself.” So there’s a cyclical thing to it for Diotima, and I think there is I think there is for Zosima as well.
You were talking about forming friendships. And I notice that you have developed a personal friendship with the Senator from Connecticut, Chris Murphy. I was wondering, maybe using that as an example, how’d you become friends?
Great. It’s a somewhat funny story about how Chris and I became friends. A good and dear friend of mine here at Harvard who also writes about moral formation, individualism, community, and loneliness, met Chris and was asked to pull together a little panel of people who are thinking about these things because Chris was starting to recognize, I think, for a few reasons.
He’s an intuitive guy. He was just picking up on stuff that was happening in American society and then, also is a senator from Connecticut who’s worked harder than anyone in American politics, I think, towards the goal of greater gun control. Part of that is because he was in Connecticut when Sandy Hook happened. So that got him thinking along the lines of “What is this? What is this kind of spiritual sickness in our society?” So he started thinking about loneliness and things like that.
He asked for this meeting, and then my very dear friend, who was organizing it, said to me, “Would you want to come?” Because I was writing about things like loneliness. And I said, “I sure would like to come.” And then a little while later he’s like, “Actually, now that I think of it, you’re a philosopher, and the senator’s going to want like hardcore policy proposals, so maybe you wouldn’t be the greatest.” And I said, “No, Rich, I can do policy. I’m going to do it.”
So he let me on the call and then I came armed with a little policy proposal that I had cooked up. And the first thing that Chris said on the call was, “Hey everyone, thanks for being here. I need to figure out how to talk about metaphysics in public.” And I said, “How the tables have turned. Maybe a philosopher is exactly what we need.”
He explained that on the left there’s been a deep difficulty for at least a generation or two—related to some of the stuff I was talking about with Rawls and post-war liberalism before—with talking seriously about belonging, about purpose, about spirituality, and about meaning in public. And he said, “Look, I need to figure out if there’s a way for me as a Democrat to do this.” And I jumped out of my chair on this zoom call and said, “Yeah. This is super important. There really is.”
I pointed to a lot of the heroes of American liberalism like MLK, Bobby Kennedy, Sr., and Cesar Chavez, and said, “Look, these people are all speaking out of a deep spirituality to the political questions of our day. I think it’s absolutely possible for an American liberal or American leftist to do that.” Everyone else mostly presented policy proposals on the call, and then the call ended. And I was like, “What on earth was that? What happened in there?”
But then I got a note from one of the staffers. He wanted to talk. We just started talking on the phone and then in person, we wrote a couple of articles together, and yeah, we’ve developed a really nice friendship.
You had a great essay in The American Interest in 2019, “On Hyman Bloom and the Art of Dying Well.” And you ended with this line: “If our existential posture impacts our experience of death, our experience of death likely impacts our existential posture.” Can you tell me what you mean by that?
I think what I meant is that being shielded, as many of us increasingly are, from these moments of kind of existential confrontation—like watching a loved one die, maybe caring for them as they’re dying, seeing their body displayed at a funeral—these things are becoming rarer.
We are more shielded from them. Cremation is becoming more popular. There’s just not as much kind of really visceral personal up-close engagement with death. And of course birth rates are falling, which means that there are more and more people who also don’t have that kind of bloody firsthand acquaintance with the beginning of life either.
I think that can that can protect us from asking deep existential questions to a certain degree. If you’re at a funeral, you feel that weight, right? That weight of mortality, that weight maybe you would say of futility, that everything passes, everything’s temporary. We can’t protect or preserve or save things forever.
I think that’s a necessary moment for us. I think those are necessary moments, because those questions are very real and we do have to understand and to some degree reconcile ourselves to the fact of our finitude, our creatureliness, and our mortality. You can choose not to look at those things. You can choose to protect yourself.
But I think that just is a recipe for all sorts of psychological difficulty, because I think those questions will stalk you one way or another. You’ll find that in some half-baked, half-conscious futile way, you’re trying to outrun death, right? Or you’re trying to build up enough strength and protection and wealth around you that on some kind of psychological level that you think will save you, even though of course it can’t. So that’s the sort of thing I’m getting at.
To wrap things up, there was a final passage from your book that I was wondering if you’d be willing to read.
Yeah, in the lead up right to this ending passage, I’m talking about a kind of way of life which is organized around acquisition and a form of ownership that is individualistic, maximizing, and irresponsible where it might seem totally morally licit to let the people around you starve, while you have more than you could ever spend. I’m talking about that kind of lived reality and arguing that I don’t think it’s sustainable. I think it’s starting to fray and that we’re going to have to think past that. We’re going to have to come up with and instantiate different ways of being together.
So this is a chunk of the last paragraph of the book:
Nancy Fraser is correct that at present, the old is dying and the new cannot be born. But many things seem impossible until they happen. A time of radical change is coming, and there will be no shortage of dangerous proposals for the ordering of our common life.
We would therefore do well to work now and tirelessly to lay the groundwork for a new culture that will be humane and good. This is not the work of a few years or possibly even a few decades. It is a generational task. But if we do it well and with some good fortune, we might be able to echo in time some other words of Simone Weil: “You could not be born at a better time than the present when we have lost everything.”
Excellent. And with that, we shall end. Ian, thank you for joining us on “Madison’s Notes.”
Yes. Thank you, Ryan, for having me. This was a great conversation.
