Common Good Podcast

Dr. Ian Marcus Corbin: Restoring the Common Good

July 30, 2024 • Common Good

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The Common Good podcast is a conversation about the significance of place, eliminating economic isolation and the structure of belonging. In this episode, Joey Taylor and Sam Pressler speak with Dr. Ian Marcus Corbin about loneliness as a spiritual and material crisis, agency, world making, and Restoring the Common Good.

Ian Marcus Corbin is a philosopher in Cambridge, MA, serving on the faculties of Neurology and Bioethics at Harvard Medical School, where he co-directs the Human Network Initiative, and is a Senior Fellow at the think tank Capita. He has a book on belonging forthcoming.

Check out Sam's new policy framework.

Works Referenced in this podcast:

This episode was produced by Joey Taylor and the music is from Jeff Gorman. You can find more information about the Common Good Collective here. Common Good Podcast is a production of Bespoken Live & Common Change. 

 Ian, I've heard you describe loneliness as a spiritual or a metaphysical crisis more than anything else. So I'm just curious, like, as we start, where your head is at these days, particularly when it comes to loneliness. Solidarity belonging  in American life. 

Yeah, one thing I'm trying to do is to stop talking about spiritual and material things separately at any point. I think loneliness is a spiritual crisis. But because of the kind of creatures we are, it's also a material crisis.  we forge our sense of belonging and community and self and place and all that with other people engaged in common projects and that can be  as abstract as the project is, we're keeping this family afloat, we're working together to maintain a household. That could be you, know,  we're running a political campaign or we're working on some issue we care about or founding a company or something. But typically I think for humans, this material cooperation and the sense of spiritual  direction and, commonality these things come together.

What was the evolution for you in shifting from exclusively talking about it from a spiritual and metaphysical lens to that merging of the spiritual and the material? 

So I've just finished the first draft of a book on this stuff. And I have found that that's a very useful way to figure something out, or at least to  get as close as you can. So it was just in the process  of writing. I found that  looking into the ways that communities seem to form  and take shape for humans, it's rare to have a community that doesn't have a spiritual sense of who we are and what we care about But that sense just seems to, as a matter of fact, develop around material facts of our lives. So there's this really excellent book by a philosopher named Jonathan Lear at the University of Chicago. It's called Radical Hope  and it's about the Crow Indians and Their reaction to the destruction of their way of life. At a certain point, the U. S. government decided that we didn't want the Indians to be able to have the way of life that they'd had for thousands of years. And so we had a specific campaign to kill all the Buffalo. We piled up around 60 million Buffalo on the plains, And there are reports that Lear quotes from the aftermath of that, where pro Indians say things like, you know, after the buffalo were gone, nothing happened. So the idea that a whole way of life  has sort of gone out of existence, the virtues, the norms, the spirituality, the sense of what makes a good man or a good woman had been closely tethered to this life. That they've been living on the planes and then once the materials substrate was gone, the whole life went out of existence. And you see something similar with case and Deaton's work on death of despair, you have situations where industry has left a particular area, jobs are gone deaths of despair come on the heels of that, but Case and Deaton are quite explicit that this is not just a matter of purchasing power,  happened here when a, factory closes and the town becomes desolate  is that a whole way of life has gone out of existence. So it was looking at examples like that, that convinced me that I need to try to stop bifurcating. 

You were saying the part earlier on this kind of spiritual piece and how the spiritual and the material, the spiritual and the communal are just naturally embedded. I had this crazy experience of essentially, as a student building this organization that became now like the largest community arts in the country for veterans and their families. And what I found in my own life was this simultaneous move of seeing the experience of people coming together to support one another, no matter what, as nothing like other than a sacred experience in and of itself. And it was that experience of both  facilitating and then being a part of that community was actually a Deepening experience for myself and deepening my own spirituality and connection to the sacred.

 That's great, Sam. So, I teach in the classroom. I've taught for about 15 years now. And I feel like I have experiences in the classroom where the atmosphere starts to feel sacred. And it's not necessarily that we're talking about religious matters or spiritual matters, but there are times where I've had class sessions where things break open and students just started admitting how much pressure they're under and how anxious they are about everything and how their life feels like it's not in their control. And you get this sort of, like, almost hushed atmosphere where, like, okay, we can tell we're touching something very important here. And I have this instinct that feels sacred, but I guess I don't really have a super precise definition of what sacredness is unless it is something like  touching the deepest or most powerful aspect or driver of the thing we're doing together. I mean, When you say that you've encountered the sacred in these conversations with vets, how do you understand that?

 I try to think about very specific examples of those breaking open points, I think there was an element of air that was elevated above all else, people who maybe eight weeks prior didn't know one another would, over the course of eight weeks, potentially drop everything to support that person to their left or to their right. That  in some ways can just be seen as mutuality or maybe something tied to solidarity. But I think  there's like an enchanted nature to it.  There is a feel that goes beyond just the material I'm showing up to support you when your loved one is in the hospital. And the fact this bond didn't exist between a group of people eight weeks ago now exists. And now we have a shared commitment to something bigger than ourselves, that to me is what I experienced and I saw form and to just define that in material terms seem to be missing something that was core to its essence.

I 

A phrase that you've used in some of your work is this idea of spiritual unspooling and it feels like you and Sam are talking about a deepening of the spiritual experience, a sacredness, whereas some of the work that you're trying to do is the preventing of our present state of sacredness maybe is the way you can say it. Could you talk a little bit about what do you mean by spiritual unspooling and  how does that connect with this pursuit of the sacred? 

My friend, Chris Murphy was the first person I heard using that phrase to talk about our current moment. He's a U. S. Senator from Connecticut who I think has been doing extraordinary thinking and extraordinary work on this stuff for the past couple of years. I think that 1 of the things that Chris is gesturing towards with that that I also see is a way in which I think more and more of life is getting commodified and people are feeling more and more they are sort of on their own here, that we live in a really go it alone sort of place  which is really quite a strange condition for humans to live in.  It's not totally out of the ordinary for humans to live near other groups that don't care about them  but the idea that one might live entirely around people who just don't care if you fail or succeed or starve or prosper. That's a really weird state. If you were to describe that state to someone like, Aristotle, he would say, well, that's exile. You're describing living in exile, living in a place where you're a stranger, if you live in a place where you fall on your face, there's no one to pick you up, that's not a normal human place. And in lots of ways that we could  get into and try to dissect, America's not that bad, but we're moving closer to that situation than any kind of settled civilization that I can call to mind. If materially speaking, I know that I'm a missed paycheck away from losing my apartment, having nowhere to go, or I'm one serious health problem away from total collapse and no one would, help me then that just is going to redound to my larger sense of like, all right, what kind of place do I live in? Am I part of this community or not? Is the world a good and generous place or is it a stingy and withholding place? And I think in some Concrete and at the same time spiritual ways America  has been moving in the direction of Something like what Aristotle would think of as exile 

I'm thinking about this dynamic and maybe the first time I read this, it was in a eric Klinenberg op ed in the times a few months ago. he basically said something along the lines of, loneliness isn't the problem. It's that too many of us have been left to figure things out on our own, basically to have been left alone. And I think, there's some transition that's happened where we've not only left more people alone, but also the access to social support has in some ways become a private good where if you have more education more access to financial resources, not only can you get that social support  vis a vis broader friend or communal networks. Because so much of even what we do in community and where our friendships are, are mediated through those  financial or economic channels, but you also have the ability to pay for that social support. And so you've almost seen this kind of polarization where  if you have a college degree, if you have financial resources, as you both have. The benefits of richer communal and potentially relational lives and  the ability to outsource the support that you can't get from those lives. Whereas if you're on the other end, you have increasingly so access to less of either. And there is a spiritual element of that in and of itself to not feel that I have an obligation or I owe it to people who may live two, three miles away from me but may not have that same level of support. I don't know how that hits you, Ian, but that's just something that's obviously been very present on my mind.

The ability to purchase services To have yourself or your aging mother cared for by professional nurse or something.  It's really clear that there are differentials between educated and less and richer and poorer but can you get some concrete examples of where the unpaid access to community is sort of 

Yeah, 

diverging between the educated.

Yeah. So what you've seen  in the last 30 years on the religious community side is that  people with college degrees are continuing to participate in religion at higher rates than people without college degrees. Some exceptions among the Hispanic and black populations, but still seeing that divergence. If you see community participation in civic life, there's a massive divide in who has the ability to participate in non religious communities. And this is stuff that Putnam has talked about, but in some ways that is because we've shifted these communities from more broadly inclusive and financially accessible communities to private ones that have higher financial  and geographic barriers to entry. I think you could look at the college divide itself as a  institution at the adult transition, this kind of key transition in life where we've essentially allowed people to supercharge their friendship and mentorship and relational networks. And as the military has gone from a standing military to an all volunteer force, and basically we don't have an alternative pathway at the adult transition, you've seen that emerge as in and of itself a relational divide between those with degrees and those who don't have degrees.

Yeah, I mean, I'm sympathetic to all that. I think that seems right. But couching it in terms of ability to access is interesting  because, of course, church is free. And in fact, churches are throwing their doors open and begging people to come in regardless of means, I think. And so, if it's right to catch it in terms of ability, then it would seem to be an ability and then in  a cultural sense, , maybe the case in Deaton we're talking about it's not so much purchasing power It's a way of life that has sort of become inaccessible to the certain people. How are you thinking about it? 

 I would say there's a few different elements of it, so one is, do these opportunities even exist near where you live, and this is some of Tim Carney's work in Alienated America, essentially,  you've seen a geographic divide in what Harihan folks call like civic opportunity, more well off places tend to have more of these civic opportunities, less well off increasingly. But then there's also what I would call an agency side of this,  which is I don't have control over my schedule next week. How am I going to be able to do this? Or I have to work 3 jobs just to keep afloat. How am I going to be able to do these things that are more meaningful Outside of work I think there's an opportunity access side, but then there's the other side of it, which is agency. 

 maybe I've mentioned this to you, Sam, but agency is increasingly important to me as I try to think about this stuff. Because for 1 thing the kind of bonds of solidarity we're talking about typically emerge in cases of shared agency where we care about the same stuff together. We're pursuing the same stuff together. And I think it's important for our moment because in lots of  concrete and less tangible ways, I think Americans writ large are feeling more and more deprived of agency they sort of find themselves in confrontation with  massive forces that you could barely understand and  could never push back on in any meaningful way, whether they're economic systems, government systems certain personal forces, massive corporations where you just cannot talk to a human being routed between robots until you give up, in that sort of loss of agency you encounter things like depression and loneliness  And then you encounter things like  consumption and addiction. There's a massive portion of our economy right now that's powered by  products and services catering to people who are lonely don't feel a great sense of agency. if you are in the lower socioeconomic class, you're less educated. You have good reason to feel like you don't have a whole lot of agency in your life and in your world. And,  if you have a lot of really enticing, very carefully designed products designed to give you a little dopamine hit, make you feel a little better for a few minutes, it's gonna be hard to resist that. And I mean something like getting the family dressed up, getting them all in the car, heading them to church. It's a pretty high agency process, I know, because we do it occasionally. And it's really hard to get everyone out of the house on a Sunday morning. And so I can imagine that that's  in the mix as well.

I heard you talk about world making. And I think this a topic of your new book, if I'm not mistaken. You're discussing the importance of agency and how this is a shifting emphasis and focus for you. What does that have to do with world making? And could you describe a little bit of the vision that you have for the world that you'd like to see us make together? 

When I talk about world making in the book and elsewhere I'm thinking about the process by which you go from being a mammal kind of plopped down in one little square of dirt  to being a Full human person who understands what his or her goals are in life, what kind of person they are, what kind of person they want to be, where they come from, in what way the things you're doing today in your life matter, in what ways they sort of shape you as a person, shape your community. That's sort of what I mean by a world. That kind of full fleshed out sense of reality where your day to day tasks are meaningful. So a little separate from the question of like what kind of world we want to make together. 

world making in the book is more of an individual pursuit. 

Well, no, it's it's necessarily a communal pursuit, because you leave a human child alone, even if they stayed alive by some miracle they wouldn't come to have this full fleshed out picture of reality on their own, these are necessarily things that we inherit. From our parents and people who study child development have all sorts of really precise explanations of how this happens, from very early stages of life babies are ascertaining and mirroring their parents evaluative  experience of things. So if you as a baby can tell that your mother really values an item, then you will mirror that you will value that item. You'll think that's an important thing. So, from the very early stages, we're absorbing almost by osmosis  an increasingly fleshed out picture of reality.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I'm especially interested in world making framed as collective agency. I think that orientation bumps up really close with what we're talking about when we're talking about the common good. And I do think , the challenges and obstacles to agency when it's framed as collective agency is connected to, but distinct from the challenges and obstacles associated with individual agency.  It's often easy for people to say, here's what I want to do in terms of my education, in terms of my profession, in terms of my family or how many kids I want. And they have a certain level of self determination within them to say, I can realize this stuff. But when we start talking about the larger context. The larger political context, the larger communal context  I often hear people talk about general sense of hopelessness. Well, I can't really do anything towards the end. And so I'm interested and what does it look like to engender a sense of collective agency and when it comes to those larger of umbrella topics?

I've spent an inordinate amount of time with Gen Zers in the classroom, and they're known as this super idealistic generation, which I think is right  but in my experience, they're also a pretty apathetic and disempowered generation. They feel like they're just bumping up against stuff. That's way too big for them  have any meaningful impact on. And so you just have to kind of fall in line be a good company man or company woman and sort of get a little bit of financial security and try to keep your family going. In terms of what we might do to kind of ameliorate that reality, I mean I think one thing to say is that the people that I'm describing who feel disempowered or extremely elite American college students  who have about as much agency in American life as you could possibly have at this moment, this time and place  the fact that they are feeling disempowered and insecure and precarious in their lives, I think is a sign that The paradigm we're all  acting within, is becoming undeniably broken. It's becoming obvious to everyone, at least everyone under a certain age  that our current systems aren't working in any meaningful way. So that's promising, that starts to make room for Some radical counter proposals  whether a credible one will emerge in the next three years, five years, 10 years. I don't know exactly  and whether it will be good. I actually don't know either. I do think there will be lots of people jostling or lots of ideologies jostling to fill that vacuum in the next several years. And I think it's, incumbent on any of us who are observing these things and caring about them, it's incumbent on us to start building and to start building an understanding of where we ought to go. Because I, think we're not that many years from a pretty broad based realization that the kind of go it alone, maybe call it neoliberal approach to running a common life is just not workable. 

So I actually think that's a really good transition point to some of the work you're doing with Senator Murphy and more recently with Governor Cox of Utah, which is restoring the common good. I'm wondering if you could just speak a little bit to that. And in this, Jostling for what comes next where you see  some of this work with policy and maybe more broadly politics  fitting in. 

 In terms of politics, I'm part of this group common good initiative with the Republican governor of Utah and Democratic senator from Connecticut handful of thinkers drawn from left and right. I think that, at least in that group. There's pretty comfortable convergence around a lot of these themes that Americans do feel deprived  agency that we don't feel able to band together and make significant changes in our world. We don't feel a lot of ownership over our lives and the direction they'll take  and that that's a very bad thing. And that's something that we can, and then we have to work on. So I'm optimistic  that there might be a realignment in the off thing where we can sort of step away from these really pretty ossified and useless categories of left and right.  you were to design a politics around restoring common agency to Americans, I think there's a lot there that both left and right could grab on to. George W. Bush wanted to have an ownership society and since he said that ownership has just become more and more concentrated. home ownership feels pretty inaccessible to really a lot of young people. A lot of my students at these elite universities will say flatly yeah, I'll never own a home. That's just not in the cards for me. And, they feel like they just won't have control in their jobs, they'll just have to grind for whatever Goldman or McKinsey wants, 60, 70 hours a week  until they can kind of build up enough money to take care of their Family  and I think, that concentration of agency has led to. In a period of stagnation, right? business filings are way down.  There are people like Peter Thiel or Derek Thompson who've talked about this. We seem just not really capable of making new stuff right now, \ we  not capable of imagining new stuff right now. We seem like we're mostly in a circle the wagons holding pattern in a lot of America. I don't know who's going to get to it first in terms of an actual politician or a movement or a party  but I think there's massive upside for whoever can think up a politics of collective agency. we've had now three, Meetings and that's been a combination of putting our heads together to  try to get at the root of some of these problems that we're all concerned with the problems of loneliness on me.  shrinking sense of agency and belonging and ownership. And also to hear from community members in these places about what they're seeing and thinking and feeling and then  try to imagine, where could we go from here?  It's going to be a long term project. We're not going to pump out a fully fleshed out common good policy platform in the next few months. I think there will be some written output from it this summer. might keep our heads down a little bit during the kind of full throttle election. But then, coming into the new year, we want to just keep working on this  and ideally to forge a new sort of politics  that would cut through a lot of the divisions between left and right and could be genuinely creative and imaginative.

 Is there a vision for this new form of politics that It's grounded in like, I've heard you've talked about, and I know you and Senator Murphy have written about RFK before as an example from the past. When you think about what this new politics could be what is it? 

I don't know exactly what shape it would take.  There's some low hanging fruit, which I say is low hanging, but would be extremely difficult  to execute on. I think the idea that you can evacuate economic life of moral judgment is insane and has done a lot of damage. And I think there's a lot of Americans on left and right who are ready to be persuaded of that. So the idea that like, Hey, you're making good profits for your shareholders. You're doing good work. Full stop. That's lunatic. It does pass for serious thinking right now and lots of American boardrooms. But it's extremely vicious and I think a lot of people are ready to put that to bed. We just need to make a really sustained and full throated argument about that. So I think getting rid of that paradigm and demanding that in your personal life, in your political life, in your communal life, in your business life, we have obligations to each other. That's a case I think can be made. 

There's this speech by RFK that  I love and I tear up every time I listen to it. Where he talks about GDP, or I think it was GNP at the time,  says, America is really good at measuring GNP, but terrible at measuring the things that actually matter to us that actually make life worth living and make us proud to be Americans. I think that  allowing our public life to be governed by big data and algorithms and the numbers is a huge mistake and when RFK calls for a society that is foregrounding the stuff that actually matters and trying to measure it and trying to make decisions based on it. That's not  some great  move a philosophical genius that's pretty straightforward. And I think most people can grab that pretty quickly. And I think most people would agree. So, to a certain degree, we don't need some incredibly massive genius rethinking. We just need to like, snap awake and Make some decisions that make sense for us. And then a lot of people could agree on.

So something I'm struck with in this is in some ways, if I were to  take a more critical approach here, you have a group of people who are in elite academic think tank circles in this common good initiative. You have a set of policy makers who have historically promoted the technocratic policies that you're in some ways critiquing, saying  that way of doing things is not the right way. And so I'm just, I'm just curious how you're holding that tension in this work right now. 

Yeah, that's a very fair question. I've spoken recently to a couple of people who have  been central drivers of the move to make things more technocratic and measurable and algorithm driven, who, now in  mid career have Have had a Damascus moment where they're like, oh, no, I've made things much worse. Oh, no, this is not working. We need to rethink everything. We do sometimes run the wrong direction and it's good and fair to wake up from that. 

We've seen this happen 30 years ago, we saw a bunch of people at Harvard  Bob Putnam, Michael Sandel, all these people. And then people who got into pretty high levels of policy, talking about things like the common good, things like, communitarianism and strengthening community. And ultimately you end up with AmeriCorps as a policy outcome, which is great.  I have no issue with AmeriCorps, but not necessarily fundamentally structural change, then the continuation of the existing paradigm. And so there is this element of history rhyming a little bit and what is different now and how do we hold that tension?

I think Sam, you and I, have been fortunate enough to be in conversation with some people who were there in that last wave of communitarianism. And, one thing that seems different is  the openness to spirituality and the openness to the deep and important role that  religion and spiritual reflection playing these things, it wasn't quite so central when Bob Putnam was convening meetings with Obama George Stephanopoulos  Harvard. There was a deeper commitment at that time to a kind of Rawlsian bracketing of spiritual religious questions that I think is, At least in the people that I talk to isn't quite so central now. 

you're on right now the common good podcast we often orient ourselves around local community and I think some of that is specifically in reaction to the hopelessness  that people are feeling at the national level conversations. And so I would love to hear you talk a little bit about the connection between this initiative And local work. Maybe another way of asking the question is, how does my community specifically respond to what you're doing? What's the invitation in your work for my community? 

Reality happens for the most part on the local level. This is where I live. My life is in a particular place. If it's not changing things here, then it's not really doing much.  I do think that for human beings, we're weak and fragile things. We're needy things. And for the most part, we've had our needs met historically by asking each other for help by contributing to one another's projects by taking care of each other when we need it. And there's been a move as societies have become  more mobile.   more shifting, less stable. There's been a move to institutionalize that mutual aid and things like unions and insurance companies  and away from the asking your neighbor or your plan or your family for help. That ends up becoming  baked in and becoming part of culture, that like, it would be embarrassing to go to my neighbor and ask for help with something. Like I pay people to help me.  And I think there's no material  obstacle to a neighborhood kind of banding together and helping each other. There's a cultural and spiritual obstacle where it feels like that'd be embarrassing. That'd be humiliating. That'd be really weak for me to admit that like, Hey, I need help right now. And so  I think we need to push from both sides always. We need to push to change the larger narratives and the frameworks and the systems  that go into shaping my day to day experience of the world. But we can also push on our day to day level as well. I think right now, in my neighborhood, we had a, block party a few months ago And actually, since then, there's been a real explosion on our street of people hanging out on the stoop and talking. I had to teach a class the other night, and my wife was out of town, and so our neighbors across the street, who we had just met took our son over to theirs to play with their daughter for a few hours while I taught. That's one example that I, I think we can shift the culture of our little local area  at least a little bit in a way that makes us feel a lot more at home when we walk out the door  our street.