Homesick: Alienation, Belonging, and World Decay in a Technological Age / Ian Marcus Corbin
For the Life of the World / Yale Center for Faith & CultureShow Notes
It took Odysseus ten years to sail home from Troy to Ithaca; we can fly the same distance in about an hour. But faster travel hasn't brought us any closer to home. We can know more, do more, and connect more than ever, and yet our ability to belong to our own reality seems to be shrinking. Philosopher Ian Marcus Corbin, who teaches at Harvard Medical School and directs Harvard's Public Culture Project, takes up that paradox in his new book, To Arrive Where We Started: Belonging in the Modern World. The title comes from T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets, and Corbin reads Eliot's lines as something like a mission statement for humanity: the point of the journey is not to escape reality or optimize our way around it, but to truly belong to it.
In this episode with Evan Rosa, Corbin unpacks why so many of us feel, as Rilke put it, not really at home in our interpreted world, and why technology may leave us suffering too little to live out the old mythic lessons of departure and return. Together they discuss why coming home first requires a breaking, from the Lakota vision quest to Eliot's apophatic poetry, and what it means for a world to decay, leaving people with no past and no future, whether their culture has been devastated or they are being raised on ten-second clips. They also explore what Corbin calls “ownerism,” the high fences and heated pools we build when the world stops feeling like home, along with contempt for the world, collapsing birth rates, and the dream of escaping the planet, to Mars or into the metaverse. Along the way, Corbin draws on Simone Weil's wager that we could not be born at a better time than when we have lost everything, and on Father Zosima's call in Dostoevsky to love all of God's creation, every leaf and every ray of light, as a way back into belonging.
Episode Highlights
- "For me, feeling like I belong in my world and I understand it and I fit it's never been a simple thing, and I've always had the sense that this is something I was questing towards." - "That's either a world in decay or that's a world that hasn't had the chance to get fully formed in the first place. And I think that's an incredibly strange and dangerous place to be." - "Maybe it takes you 10 years to get back to Ithaca or whatever. But… to be a young person striking out into the adult world with very little sense of what matters to you or who you are or where you come from, gosh… I wouldn't trade with them." - "It looks to me honestly like a society hurtling. And I don't know what we're hurtling towards, but we're hurtling. And like with scant ability to look up and ask, 'Well, is that where we wanna go?'" - "The world is not a home to us, right? It is this empty, cruel thing. So the best I can do is throw up some really high fences, get a nice heated pool, right? Get a nice security system." - "We can't just produce and promulgate whatever the consumer will click on because I am a weak man, and I will click on things, right, that aren't in the long run good for me." - "Take a good teacher who cares a lot and take one really good book and 12 kids and put them in a room with no distractions and no telephones… and my goodness, you'll have the most transformative and beautiful experience of learning and community you could hope for." - "Every good thing around you will die, as will you. And you have to be strong enough to stand there and take that punch, right?" - "Who's the crazy one here?… I sound woo-woo, but the system that I'm pushing back against is kinda suicidal."
About Ian Marcus Corbin
Ian Marcus Corbin is a philosopher on the neurology faculty at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, director of Harvard's Public Culture Project, and an instructor at the HMS Center for Bioethics. His first book, "To Arrive Where We Started: Belonging in the Modern World," was published by Yale University Press in 2026. He studied politics, religion, and philosophy at Gordon College, Oxford, Yale, and Boston College, a
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