Transcript for episode 44

Grant:

My guest today is Ian Marcus Corbin. He's a writer, researcher, and teacher in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He's currently a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School where he co-directs the Human Network Initiative. The Human Network Initiative uses the tools of humanities, medicine, and the sciences to explore human interconnectedness and advocate for a more communal, less individualistic understanding of the human person. Ian writes on various, wide-ranging topics, including art dealing, social class, beauty, and weakness in publications ranging from the Washington Examiner, New York Times, and Plough.

So, Ian, thanks so much for joining me today on the podcast.

Ian:

Hey, Grant. Thanks so much for having me. This is a pleasure.

Grant:

Good. I always ask my guests to fill out their biography a bit. So, can you just [give] a very quick overview of how you got to the Human Network Initiative? I know that you have worn many hats in your career, and you have a really interesting background. So, I think it will help our listeners get a sense of who you are.

Ian:

Yeah, I don't know if I would call it a career. [laughter] But let's see. I did an undergrad degree in politics at a place called Gordon College. At a certain point in there, I had something approaching a religious or existential crisis and turned to philosophy. Did a master's degree in philosophy of religion at Yale Divinity School and then a PhD in philosophy at Boston College.

Somewhere in there, I became convinced that the academic track was in no way going to allow me to feed my children. And so, I got into the art business for a few years and ran an art gallery called Matter and Light in the South End of Boston. That imploded for various uninteresting reasons. And, just about that time, I met a very smart and very sort of curious and open-minded neurologist slash, I guess, anthropologist named Amar Dhand, who then hired me into his lab, which is in the neurology department of Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School. And so, then, we've been working together for, gosh, coming up on two years and just trying to think really broadly about the human person and intersubjectivity and our relatedness and how those things kind of manifest in topics like brain health and general flourishing. So, that's the project right now.

Grant:

Yeah. So, as you said, in a prior life you owned an art gallery. So why is the contemporary art world so obscene?

Ian:

Artists are often canaries in the coal mine. They tend to be some of our most sensitive citizens, really trying to understand stuff. And I think in some ways the art world right now—and I've been away from it for a few years now—but I think it's manifesting a lot of the maladies of sort of society at large.

If you dig in, if you go to a city like New York or Boston or LA or Miami, and you kind of get yourself into the rabbit's warren of the actual artists' studios, you'll find that there's a lot going on. And there's a lot of really wonderful, beautiful stuff going on.

At the level of the big institutions and the big, important galleries, I think that's less true. You know, and I think a lot of the problems that I would identify in sort of current-day liberalism, just show up there. So, on the one hand, a really phenomenal concentration of wealth, and just getting more and more concentrated every day, you know, where you have a handful of really blue-chip galleries like Larry Gagosian and David Zwirner that are just vacuuming up bigger and bigger slices of the pie. You know, and they have gallery presences in every rich city, basically. And it's becoming basically impossible for sort of small and mid-level galleries to survive. And a lot of that is because, you know, if you look at the sort of raw totals, the art business is doing fantastically well right now, but a lot of that money is coming from like Saudi Arabia, Russia, China, and these sort of very wealthy elites there, who kind of want to buy into a European style of prestige and status. And so, you know, if that's why you're collecting art, then you want to go to the most prestigious, highest status gallery. You want to go to someone like Larry Gagosian and be able to say, "Look, I bought this most expensive Picasso ever sold, and I bought it from the most prestigious gallery in the world."

So, there's a ton of concentration in that way. And I don't. So that's one thing that I would relate to kind of the current state of liberalism. And then, also, I don't see a ton of really bold, brave spiritual visions being advanced right now. I see a lot of critique and, you know, that's something that, you know, that's a dynamic you can see in liberalism, as well, that, like, it sort of disdains to generally advance big, serious, bold spiritual visions of like human flourishing or what's important and contents itself more with trying to sort of find instances of oppression or whatever and kind of ferret them out and get rid of them. And so, I don't know, I think that sort of dual structure—phenomenal concentration of wealth and a kind of almost hollowness and a reliance on, heavy reliance on critique—are two of the big pillars that at least I saw in the high-level art world.

Grant:

When I read that paper that you wrote, I was struck with, to your point, how much the elite art world just mimics elite culture in general, the concentration of wealth and the inability to say anything profound.

Ian:

And it's sad because people don't typically get pulled into making art—instead of doing something practical with their lives—they don't typically get pulled into making art because they're cynical money chasers, you know, or they just want to find some kind of vaguely novel form of critique. You know, a lot of them are really idealistic and deep, deep people, but they just get, the institutions and the power structures sort of steer them in a particular direction. You can either kind of live on the periphery and starve—and there are lots of wonderful artists I know who are doing that, who are just sort of making beautiful, uncompromising art and can't really find a gallery to represent them—or you play the game that's being played.

Grant:

All right. So, I do want to change the subject a little bit and talk about some of your current work. So, as you know, if you're paying any attention at all, you know that we're in the midst of this loneliness pandemic in the same time we're in the midst of this COVID pandemic, and they obviously are mutually reinforcing in many ways. So, one of the real challenges with addressing this problem of loneliness is it's very hard to define. Why are current definitions of loneliness insufficient?

Ian:

So, the regnant one that almost everyone uses, it's a couple of decades old and it's basically defines loneliness as a discrepancy between one's desired and realized social connections. So, there's just some discrepancy between what you ideally would want to have and what you in fact have.

Now that's attractive and gets used a lot for a couple of reasons. The most important is that it's just extremely difficult to pinpoint anything objective and observable that sort of kicks one from feeling like they belong to feeling lonely. So, there is some correlation between being objectively isolated, you know, not having people around you who are checking in on you and feeling lonely, but it's a fairly weak correlation.

And we know that it's extremely possible to be deeply lonely while in the middle of a bustling family home. And it's also possible to not feel lonely while you're living in a cabin in the woods by yourself. So, what are we going to do with that? Right. Like, some people will say, "Oh, it's, you know, these two things are distinguishable. And the way we'll distinguish them is to say that loneliness is the sort of subjective condition of feeling isolated." But that doesn't make a ton of sense because loneliness is actually worse for you than isolation is. So, isolation has some health impact, but loneliness has more. So, it's sort of odd to say that like, "Well, the subjective experience of isolation is bad for you, but actually isolation itself, you know, it's bad, but it's not that bad." [laughter] Right? Like that's a sort of funny way to try to formulate it.

That is one that people use, but again, the dominant one is the discrepancy one. But that, you know, you can see why you'd be tempted to use it, but also why it just doesn't have a lot of power, doesn't have a lot of purchase on the phenomenon because, you know, I have untold numbers of discrepancies in my life between what I would ideally like and what I have. And very few of them sort of flood my body with cortisol, a stress hormone, and make it difficult for me to regulate my behavior and make it impossible for me to focus and lead to all sorts of self-destructive behaviors, and then, you know, lead to serious increases in mortality rates and all this stuff that we now know loneliness does to us.

So I, you know, I think we need a better, deeper, richer understanding of what it means to belong and what it means to be lonely. And so, that's something my colleagues and I have been exploring over the past several months.

Grant:

So, you did differentiate there between isolation and loneliness. Is isolation necessarily a bad thing. Can it be productive in some way?

Ian:

Yeah. I mean, I think solitude is a very, very important thing. I think it's something we all need doses of. And I think that a lot of important advances in culture and society and thinking and the arts come out of experiences of solitude. Something interesting to note, which I can, we can expand on a little bit, is that while solitude has been an important part of the human story—it's in existence as long as we can look back—the really great adepts at solitude have typically been religious people, who have not taken themselves to be leaving sociality behind, right, when they go off into the wilderness or wherever, but actually take themselves to be going in pursuit of a better sociality. Right? Like, contact with a different kind of other, whether it be God or some nebulous spiritual force or whatever.

So, yeah. I mean, I think like being alone is quite healthy for you. For that aloneness to be total isolation, right, where you're not in touch with anyone, with any agent who's interacting with you, I think we can't survive that very long. I think that our understanding of self and world actually proves to be really fragile. And they proved to not really be able to hold up apart from some sort of intersubjective feedback loop.

So, one of the examples that my colleagues and I have learned a lot from is solitary confinement, which was really interesting. As you maybe know, some of the main early exponents—or sorry, proponents—of solitary confinement were Quakers in Philadelphia. And, you know, they pushed it for good philanthropic reasons, which is that they had a sort of philosophical anthropology which said that, you know, fundamentally what each of us is is a kind of a solitary unit. And, you know, we come into society and hopefully it's a healthy kind of sociality, but if it becomes not healthy and if we end up engaging in a criminal way with those around us, that the kindest thing you could do for that person would be to pull them out of society for a little while, sit them by themselves, and let their machine kind of reset. And then, the idea was we would send them back out into society as a sort of healthy republican machine.

So, I'm not sure I've heard of a case where a philosophical point was so roundly disproven. Because that anthropology turns out to be just the opposite of what is true. So, it turns out that, you know, people who are sort of taken away forcibly, deprived of sociality in solitary, really their worlds kind of come unglued. You know, they, at the very mildest case—and this is pretty general, pretty universal among prisoners who go through this—they sort of lose the ability to focus, right. They could say, you know, tell their mind that they want to think about their mom or they could try to look at something in front of them, and they just are incapable of it. Their mind kind of runs away without them and sort of attaches to whatever it wants, typically quite negative or often violent thoughts. They have a great deal of trouble regulating themselves and regulating their behavior. And those are the mild cases. Those are people who, I would say, typically have come into the situation with a quite strong sense of the world and of themselves.

People who have it rougher in solitary will experience all sorts of wild stuff, like derealization, where they no longer can tell whether the things that surround them are actually real or just their imagination. They will hear things. They'll see the walls of their prison cell move or start to melt. They'll hear voices. They sometimes will engage in just sort of arbitrary acts of violence against themselves and against their physical environment. And then, if you ask them about it later, they'll say, "I didn't know it was myself I was hurting. I thought it was someone or something else."

So that, yeah, it turns out, as I interpret this, we really need other people around us, other agents, to sort of keep our sense of reality of our world and of ourselves sort of stable, coherent, you know, harmonious.

Grant:

So, this sort of boundary case of solitary confinement begins to form your phenomenology of loneliness. So where does that phenomenology of loneliness take you? What, how would you define loneliness, then? And how is that a corrective to the sort of existing definitions of loneliness.

Ian:

Yeah. I mean, I think loneliness is, it's a kind of world decay where your sense of your place in the world and, you know, your task in the world and what's true and what's important and what's valuable and what's false doesn't really hold anymore. And I think to be alone, you know, to pray or to meditate or to write your novel, need not result in that kind of decay, and loneliness really only begins when that decay begins.

So, I mean, another sort of interesting kind of the opposite end that you can look at is child development and how we developed from sort of infants who are entirely helpless and confused in the world into competent agents. And so, we know that from a very early stage infants are constantly absorbing from their caregivers a sense of reality, right. So that's clear enough. That's pretty obvious. But that sense of reality is really quite rich and variegated, right. So, I believe, I want to say it's from six months onward, infants will watch their caregivers—and usually it's just a couple of people—but they'll watch them interact with the environment and they'll not only kind of mirror and take in and absorb a sense of what their parents think is true or dangerous or delicious or whatever. But even, like, they'll take in their parents' or their, sorry, their caregivers' evaluative judgments. So, something that, you know, an item that a baby's mother sort of smiles at or looks fondly at, the baby, even from six months, will treat that object better. They'll treat it with more interest and respect. So that, we're constantly, as we develop, engaging in this sort of co-attention to the world, and we're just absorbing our parents' picture of the world.

And it doesn't come cut up into facts and values. It's not like we build a sense of what is true about the room that we're sitting in, and then, subsequently, we sort of cobble on a sense of like, "Well, and that there is quite valuable. That's quite important. Et cetera." In fact, it all comes interwoven. Right? Like, in our experience, facts and values are always presented together. And they need to be because we have to act as agents in the world. Right? Like, it's not enough for us just to understand things. We need to be able to know what to pay attention to and what to value and what to run away from and all that.

And that's actually what I think, you know, I said before that I think loneliness is a decay of this sort of coherent kind of picture of the world. And I think if you look at the sort of the common symptoms of loneliness—and I mentioned them in the context of solitary confinement, but this is more garden-variety stuff—some of the main markers still are an inability to focus and an inability to regulate oneself. And if you think about it, both of those things are deeply dependent on evaluative judgements. Right? So, like, focusing behavior, you know, both of us right now, and anyone listening, is at this moment confronted with an incredible sort of quantity of sense input, right. And you could be paying attention to anything that's in the room with you right now. You could be caught up on the little sound of the air conditioner or any of the things flashing in front of you or whatever. And you're able to maintain focus because you have a stable sense of who you are, where you are, what's important in this room, what your task is right now. And were that to start to diminish, it might be harder for you to focus your attention. And similarly, were that to start to diminish, it might be harder for you to regulate your behavior. Right? That, like, these sorts of subterranean value judgments are kind of what allow us to just function as humans at all.

And I think that, and here, you know, we're doing theory building. There's sort of a back-and-forth in this process between, you know, we'll uncover these really interesting empirical data points and we'll try to interpret them, and then we'll go looking for more data points.

But my interpretation of this, as I think about it, right now, is that while facts and values are both deeply important for us to orient ourselves in reality, we also are aware that value is ascribed a little more tentatively than other sorts of judgments. Right? That, like, for me, the fact that this concrete pillar that I'm looking at in front of me is not going to move, is solid and it's not alive. That's quite a stable judgment on my part. But that it is beautiful or that it is valuable to me or important or worthy of respect. That stuff might change a little bit day to day given the sort of context of my life. And so, those sort of value ascriptions are somewhat more fragile. And so, they're one of the first things to go when I lose the sort of scaffolding I need in order to kind of make a proper world or tend a proper world.

Grant:

Right. So, do you think, then, that might the polarization that we see and the deaths of despair are a certain manifestation of a form of social loneliness?

Ian:

I do. Yeah. No, I absolutely think that. An individual with a really firm sense of the world and a sense of their place in it and their task in it can just handle a lot. And they can handle, for instance, a lot of disagreement, and they can handle, you know, facts that may be difficult to initially kind of jibe with their world picture. Right. They can sort of, they're flexible; they're strong enough to absorb that kind of stuff.

But if you think about it, like, if your view of reality is a little bit fragile, it's a little bit tenuous--and it's deeply important to you, right; like you need this in order to just function. If you find yourself surrounded by people who just totally reject your whole world picture and think it's just evil or wrong or stupid or something, that's deeply threatening. Right. Like, Dostoyevsky says in The Brothers K [Karamazov] that one of the things humans want most deeply is to find some object that we can all bow down and worship together and that we'll kill each other in pursuit of it.

And I think you can start to see why, in this sort of narrative we've been developing here, that we need each other to keep firm our sense of the world. And if you're in a period, as I think in some ways we are in America right now, where a lot of people have relatively fragile senses of self and world, and they're suddenly sort of hurled into constant confrontation with people who think they're animals, who think they're totally wrong, like that's a terrifying place to be. And you want to fight and you want to discredit these people who would kind of call into question your whole system of being in the world. So, I think the polarization absolutely has to do with these sort of relatively weak pictures of the world.

Grant:

So, a lot of the questions that I ask in this podcast always sort of come back to public policy. It's an area of, it's my area of research. Is there anything that we can do from a state perspective, from government, in order to address loneliness? We know that in England there is a particular institute within the state that is supposed to be addressing loneliness. Is this something that the state can touch?

Ian:

I don't know. I mean, I think pluralism is a big, difficult problem. And pluralism in lots of ways is a beautiful thing. I live in a relatively diverse city, and I take great pleasure in the difference or varieties of people and things and cultures and cuisines I can take in. But it's also tough to form a really coherent, mutually supportive coterie of individuals who have drastically different values and orientations.

And so, I mean, what can government do in that case? I mean, one recent—and by recent, I mean, let's say the past seventy-five years—one recent answer has been to just, you know, bit by bit, as much as possible, try to keep those deep questions of world making and value kind of out of our common life, kind of privatize them, let us pursue them on our own time, and, you know, come up with some totally sharable, noncontroversial set of public values that we can pursue together. And, of course, you can see this in some political philosophers, like John Rawls, who think that we need to sort of as much as possible leave those deep, thick—and he would say totally vital—things in the private sphere.

So that makes a certain amount of sense, and it can provide a decent kind of system of cooperation. I think it typically needs a lot of help from outside. So, for instance, like a terrifying enemy can be super helpful. You know, so if you and I disagree about a lot of stuff about, you know, what's important in the world and what's good, but we know for damn sure that the Soviets are way worse, [laughter] then that's really helpful for you and me kind of staying on a team and not shooting each other. Or if it seems like, you know, we're just in a gold rush in our particular time and place, and you can just get rich, and, you know, there's tons of social mobility, kind of like we saw right after the Second World War, that can also kind of kick the can down the road a little bit in terms of helping us to fashion a common life together. Right. Like, you know, we just say, "Every boat rises when there's economic growth. If you go out and thrive and make a bunch of money, I'll then make a bunch of money." And like, we can, then, like we can feel ourselves to be cooperating and working together, even though on a deep level, you know, maybe we might not share all the values.

But, you know, the Cold War ended a little while ago. You know, there's been a succession of other sort of candidate enemies to hold us together. We had a Al Qaeda for a little while, the Taliban. And while those ideologies are not good, they're evil, I think that the huge prominence that a lot of people were inclined to give them was in part because like, "Okay, good. A common enemy again, right?" Like, "We've been starving over here since '89 without someone to fight against, and so good. Now we can be a team again. We can be one America again."

But oddly enough, really interestingly, Grant, you know, we think of the aftermath of something like 9/11 as a moment of great national unity. Right? Like that's sort of the narrative. But according to one longitudinal study where they kind of surveyed year after year, there've been two major spikes in loneliness in the past seventy-five years in America. One was in the two weeks following the assassination of JFK and the other was in the two weeks following 9/11, where people expressed very high degrees of loneliness.

So, there's a really excellent sociologist named Claude Fisher who wrote about this, and in his book, he says, you know, "This is interesting, but it can't be right. It must be that these people who answered these questions were feeling depressed, and they accidentally answered that they were lonely." And I think that it actually makes perfect sense that, if the framework that I've been trying to unpack here is right, it makes perfect sense that you would feel lonely after an event like 9/11 or after the assassination of your president. Right? Like, your picture of reality and your place in the world would have been rocked to a significant degree. And maybe you still have people around you, and maybe, you know, the people around you agree to a significant degree that, like, you know, we gotta stop the terrorists and, like, we shouldn't shoot presidents. But still, you know, despite that perfectly widespread and easy agreement, something about your world picture still really suddenly feels unstable and, as I was saying before, like it's falling prey to decay. So, I mean, you know, that's, that's a big part, I think, of our sort of crisis of political belonging.

And then, you know, the financial story. You know, the American dream that we've been telling ourselves and each other for a long time now, I think it's just not seeming credible to a lot of people right now. I think that it's becoming pretty difficult to not notice the tremendous way that wealth is pooling and growing in certain tiny sectors of the American electorate and, you know, other places just absolutely stagnant and just really just being pumped full of credit so that they can keep buying knickknacks, [laughter] but really being pretty badly left behind.

So, I mean, those are the closest things that I can adduce to sort of—well, I mean, there are other causal mechanisms, like social media, and we can talk about that—but those are two big ones. And, you know, the government could try to find someone worth declaring war on; that that might help. I hope they won't do that. I really hope they won't to that. Or, you know, they, I think they could also make up some ground by making a fairer economy where, you know, not so many people go bankrupt paying medical bills, stuff like that. So that's at least some stuff, but there's much more.

Grant:

Yeah, this reminds me of Stanley Hauerwas always makes this argument, particularly in War and the American Difference, where, as Americans, we need to come to terms with the fact that our solidarity has always been grounded on the mutual shedding of blood. Whether it was the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, World War II.

So, you did mention this question of social media. So, I want to talk a little bit about screens. You've been writing quite a bit about screens in the last few years. So, I do think there's this growing consensus that our screens are probably bad for us.

Ian:

Yeah.

Grant:

At the very least, social media. So, whenever I tell people that neither my wife nor I have a smartphone, we inevitably get the same reaction. So, first, is a sort of dumbfounded silence, and then, "I wish I could do that. I'm so addicted to this thing." So, while we know they're probably bad for us, we can't or don't want to quite give them up. So, do you see any future scenario in which persons actually unplug or log off in any meaningful way? Even though we kind of know that they're bad.

Ian:

I would say that it's not even the case that we suspect they're bad but don't want to give them up. I think we know they're bad, and we want to give them up but can't.

I've been teaching nineteen-year-olds every semester for like the past decade or so. And I want to say there's a consensus, like, that they hate what their phones do to them, and they hate how addicted they are, hate how anxious they make them, but really can't. And they'll all go through these periods where they will delete certain social media apps from their phones, but they always get them back. And I remember talking about the singer Leonard Cohen, who I like a lot, to a group of students after class and talking about how he would go for significant periods of time to an island in Greece where it was totally off the grid, and he would kind of live very simply. And I said, you know, and kind of waved my iPhone at them and said, "You know, these things would be useless there." And they just sort of sighed. They were like, "Oh my god, [laughter] that sounds amazing." But then, you know, the same kids were like eager to get the latest upgrade.

I actually think that, you know, we have a situation here where a lot of the richest and most successful companies and individuals in America right now are kind of like strip mining the American people. [laughter] They're stimulating greater and greater levels of addiction and dependency and misery, which like require ever a greater and greater engagement with their products. In most colleges, I can say Boston College, which is probably the one I know best, computer science is growing like at an insane rate, and we cannot hire CS professors fast enough. And there's all sorts of other stuff that's sort of just dying. [laughter] And so, you have like a lot of the smartest nineteen-, twenty-, twenty-two-year-olds every year, like, you know, spending all of this social capital, all of this money, all this effort, all this brain power to like learn how to use computers and then going off, in a lot of cases, to places like Silicon Valley, to make these applications and these modes of product delivery more addictive, right. And applying really serious, cutting-edge psychometrics, like to figure out what shade of red in the notification is going to give you the greatest buzz and make you most, like, you know, fiend hardest for another hit.

And I think that it really does, it's kind of—and look, I speak as someone who has a Twitter account, and actually, to be fair, someone who's benefited a great deal from some of the people that he's met. You know, it's, some of those connections I've made have been really wonderful, and there are people I count as close friends, now whom I met initially on social media. So, I have to be realistic about that.

But I do think a lot of it, you know, wouldn't work if we weren't lonely. And then, it wouldn't work so well if it didn't make us even lonelier. So, it's a tough spot. I mean, again, so much conscious, concerted effort being put into making us need these things. And again, I think we all feel a little bit stifled and overrun by them. But, you know, are we going to get to a point of some mass movement or some sort of like, you know, kill your iPhone movement? I hope so. I suspect so.

I also, like, when I think about this, you know, the statistics you read about very, very high levels of like antidepressant use. And like, there's a lot of pharmacology that's sort of also feeding into the stability of the system that would seem to me to allay the possibility of big revolutionary change. And I might be wrong about that. I mean, I probably am actually because, I think, you know, we've seen just the past five years that, like, there may be a lot more discontentment and a lot more sort of anti-system, you know, not bias, but anti-system sentiment than might be obvious on the surface.

Grant:

So are teens and young adults more or less free today than they were in 1960, which is arguably the height of the disciplinary model of power. We think nuns with rulers, emotionally removed, disciplinary fathers. Are teens today freer than they were in 1960 with so much disciplinary social control?

Ian:

Yeah, probably not, but you know, obviously, it'd be impossible to measure because there'd be different forms of unfreedom that you'd be measuring. I mean, I generally think, you know, a lot of people take 1950 or so as sort of like some originary moment in American society, right, like, for good or ill. There're some people who look back on it, you know, with great nostalgia, because it was a time when civic participation was incredibly high. Right. And if you look at the slope since then, it's just entirely downhill.

But, I mean, a couple of things to say about that. One, it was a weird blip. Right? Like, we hadn't been in that shape before 1950, all of a sudden we were, and now we're judging based on a sort of anomalous data point. But also, you know, if it was that sort of rich and communal and engaged and everyone working together, I just don't think a whole generation would have fled it the first chance they got. Right? So, like, if what the Greatest Generation was building there in the suburbs or wherever, was a rich and good and sort of flourishing, enabling thing, they could have passed it on a little bit. But they couldn't. The Boomers just fled it as hard and as fast as they could. So, I do think there was something stifling and kind of milk toast and artificial about some of that stuff. And then those were a lot of the social critiques you saw back then was not so much, you know, that we're all atomized and alone, but that like the form of community we have is fake and stifling and stifling. And so that, I have to take that as, you know, having a serious grain of truth to it. You know. But they were able to kind of bust out and run out to Haight-Ashbury or run out to Woodstock and, at least for a time, leave a lot of that behind.

And, I mean, I guess maybe kids now, yeah, maybe they are less free. I mean, Mark Fisher, the late English social critic, he thought that we had made a transition, I want to say from, it was like a disciplinary society to a debtor-addict society where there was, you know, greater levels of social control but it was enacted by making me need things. And then, like, exercising power over me based on the desires that I had sort of ingested from you.

So yeah, maybe that is a harder thing to fight. Right. It's a harder thing to track down and to know how to give it the finger. [laughter] Whereas, like, you're mean dad and like the mean nuns, you know where they live. Like, you can go somewhere else. So yeah.

Grant:

So, which social fact is most determinative in modern American life, race or class?

Ian:

I mean, I'm inclined—maybe I'm a Pollyanna, I don't know—but I'm inclined to see class as being more important. And I think at the same, you know, in the same breath, you can say that race is extremely important, and that, in fact, they're so deeply interwoven that it's in many cases hard to tease them apart. Right. Like we have, the levels of wealth accumulation of black versus white Americans, it's like appalling. Right. And that's happened in lots of times and places. It is not always the case that you can tell the difference between the rich and the poor by looking at them from a thousand yards. And right now, you can, or in that dichotomy between the average white person and the average black person. So that, like, it's hard to see white and black people without seeing class read into their racial makeup.

You know, there are some ways in which you can undo that. Like, you know, a white guy who's clearly homeless, who clearly has various manifestations of poverty and lack of education, I think will be treated quite badly and will not benefit very much from white privilege. And probably, like, you know, some of the minority physicians who are in the Brigham, where I work, or in Harvard, like, you know, have a very different sort of time than a black man who bears all the manifestations of poverty and lack of education.

So, I'm inclined to think that America is a kind like, you know, winner-take-all, success-and-status-obsessed place and that race kind of finds its slot in there. Of course, there are like genuine, deep enmities that some people bear towards people of other races. I'm maybe a little sheltered based on where I've spent my adult life, but, yeah, that's how it looks from here.

Grant:

So, in what ways are COVID and our responses to it a unique metaphor for modern life?

Ian:

Yeah. I mean it sort of dramatizes some stuff. It dramatizes a certain amount of isolation, a certain like withering away of some sort of common life.

So, Hannah Arendt thinks that loneliness is like the marker of the modern condition, and precisely because she thinks it is a kind of worldlessness. And she thinks that the roots go deep. We're in deep trouble, if she's right, very deep trouble, because she thinks on the one hand that like totalitarianism, and particularly Nazi totalitarianism, grows in the soil of loneliness. That's sort of what it needs in order to flourish. And that, also, loneliness has some of its deepest roots in the Industrial Revolution. And that, like, once you pull us out of villages—and we're no longer hanging out where our ancestors hung out, no longer sort of operating on a scale of a village, where we can act in concert, we can sort of have some hope of achieving some kind of consensus, and exerting some kind of collective action together—then once you pull us out of that into big, anonymous cities, like we're kind of screwed, and loneliness is going to be our default state, 'cause we can't act in congress together. And if she's right about that, like, I don't know what we're going to do. Like, because, you know, things are only getting more urban and more concentrated as time goes on.

So, I mean, I think some of that sort of modern condition of loneliness, anonymity, that's been sort of heightened by the pandemic. And I think we've all been more and more able to meet our day-to-day needs without needing to interact with other humans. And it's hard to interact with other humans. Right? It's like much easier to have your pad thai dropped on the front porch, and then just get like a ding on your phone that your pad thai is here, rather than have to interact with some jackass at the restaurant.

[laughter]

And it's made it much easier, and I, you know, I fear that some muscles are atrophying, some muscles that are required to thrive in a rich, thick social network.

Grant:

So, it's interesting that you mentioned Arendt. You know, given the decadence of modern America, the inequalities, the cheapening of human life, are we the Weimer Republic?

Ian:

[laughter]

Damn. It was going to come up. I don't know. I think that the like wholesale crushing and humiliation that Germany experienced during the First World War and afterwards probably sets things in a sort of more dramatic light than we are in. On the other hand, Weimar didn't come out of nowhere, right. And like, there's plenty of that that's just been the situation of like the kind of displaced wage laborer, you know, in a big city, living in a tenement building, working for a factory. Yeah, there is, there's some stuff that's actually, it's kind of spookily reminiscent. That you can see like, you know, before the First World War, where you have men fretting publicly about the sort of decline of masculinity and like various sort of self-help guys and snake oil peddlers saying like, "Oh, well here's the supplement that can cure you of your effeminacy." And you have women reporting high levels of anxiety and neurosis and being sold lots of pills to try to calm themselves down.

So, I think we're not quite Weimar for that reason that like we're probably just participating in some modern maladies, and we didn't just get absolutely crushed by, you know, in a war. And then, also, you know, I think one thing,—this is a little funny—one thing that maybe is in our favor is that we're such a diverse and disagreeable country. [laughter] That like, it's hard to imagine what we could all get swept up into the point where we could really get enough of a quorum to do a genocide.

[laughter]

Grant:

Yeah, right. You know, so many people were talking about Donald Trump being an autocrat, but he was an exceptionally lousy autocrat. I mean, he couldn't even get himself elected one extra time, you know, despite his best efforts. Do you think that's why he was such a lousy autocrat? It was the nature of the American public that we just could not, like our polarization is what kept us away from having an effective autocrat?

Ian:

He, also, is an exceptionally lazy and incurious man. [laughter] Like, he's not organized enough to lead a genocide or anything.

But I mean, yeah, probably. I mean, yeah. You know, there are lots of people, I mean, not just lots of people but like a big swath of the country went into like hyperventilating red alert for the past four years. And, like, there was a full-scale, kind of no-holds-barred effort on the part of every powerful institution in America to like discredit this guy. And yeah, I think that's, I don't know, a tough current to swim against. Again, if he was, didn't have some of the personal flaws that Donald Trump happens to have, like, he probably could have got himself back in another time. You know, maybe, I don't, I'm not an expert in any of this stuff, but, you know, maybe if there hadn't been a global pandemic, he might've just slid back in, again.

Grant:

So, here's a timely question. We're in the middle of the Summer Olympics—who knows when this episode will air—but is Simone Biles weak or is she strong for stepping down from the Olympics in order to reportedly preserve for mental health?

Ian:

I think that, really, you know, elite excellence just comes with a cost, and, you know, I'm positive that anyone who achieves that kind of like world-historical level of excellence, like, they have to warp or destroy some parts of themselves. And so, to step back and say like, you know, "I'm not going to spend all of myself on this, right. There's some part that I need to keep aside. You know, this costs too much for me." I don't know if that's weakness or strength. I mean, it certainly takes some amount of courage, maybe some realistic thinking, but, you know, is it a deviation from the kind of courage and the kind of self-discipline that got you there. Like, yeah, it's also that. I would think that it has to be a sort of mixed bag.

One thing to say to connect it to some of the earlier parts of our conversation is that others have pointed out that due to various restrictions, she was not able to bring her family and her full team with her. And so, she found herself much more alone. And if all this stuff that we've been talking about is right, about the way that our networks and our people around us kind of firm up and sort of keep stable and solid our picture of what we should do, you know, it may be that that was part of why, in this case, she felt unable to do everything she might have.

Grant:

So, how do we trade off acceptance of our own weakness, which is, seems to be a virtuous thing while also celebrating heroism? There's an article in, I think it was the New York Magazine that was talking about Simone Biles and was juxtaposing her against Kerri Strug. I think you're probably old or young enough to remember Kerri Strug, who was a gymnast in the eighties or nineties, where she came back out with a injured ankle, she did a vault that actually won the gold for the United States, and she was celebrated as this hero.

Ian:

Right.

Grant:

And those two stories were set up as the opposites of each other, celebrating Simone's willingness to realize her own limitations and saying that Kerri Strug had done herself great damage, but this is also remembered as one of the great heroic acts in the history of the Olympics.

How do we trade off this acceptance of our weakness with the celebration of heroism?

Ian:

Yeah. I mean, I think you probably don't get greatness at a group level without some people sort of hurting themselves to make it happen. I think that probably just is the case. You know. And so, I think you could pretty easily paint Strug as a sort of, as a hero who sacrificed herself for our collective greatness.

I have read that actually, you know, the US had already clinched gold at that time and her coaches had just crunched the numbers wrong.

Grant:

I didn't know that part of the story.

Ian:

And so, you know, and the doctor who, I think, carried her off was Larry Nasser, who turned out to be like an absolute monster and serial abuser. And I mean, that's tidy, right. Like, you know, like that makes a nice literary narrative of it, you know, for people who really want to emphasize, really, the sort of the way that people do get ground up in the gears of like collective greatness, right. Because it's not, it doesn't look noble when it turns out your coach crunched the numbers wrong and made you bust your ankle for nothing, and the guy who carried you off was like a disgusting predator. I, like, that kind of that tilts the scales in a particular direction.

But yeah, I mean, I think it probably is correct that there are trade-offs to be made, and, you know, there's not, I think, a sort of Platonic form of a human society, right. There's not a particular degree of ambition or greatness that, you know, is our birthright that we have to live up to or a particular degree of like, you know, day-to-day happiness or like self-acceptance or whatever. I think it really just probably is trade-offs.

Now, ideally, hopefully, you get a society where everything makes sense together. Right? Like that can incorporate like our humility and our weakness, and yet call us to something great and tall and strong, and have a space for us to land when we fail, and have all of that stuff. And probably some societies have gotten closer than others to achieving that. It doesn't feel to me—and like, you know, people always think, Nietzsche says people always think they're sort of the last generation and like that they live in sort of uniquely bad end times. And so, whatever. Maybe it's always been like this. But it doesn't feel to me right now that we have a super balanced, coherent sense of like how to be a great human, what to do when you fail, you know, all of that. It seems like a lot of people are pretty confused and drifting. And that's probably not at all unrelated, I think, to the sense that we have a sort of crisis of trust and crisis of loneliness and like, you know, right now, crisis of legitimacy, right, and expertise, where like massive swaths of Americans just do not believe the people in charge and do not trust the doctors and all of that. I think it must all be kind of woven together.

Grant:

So, Ian, I really could talk to you all day, but we're coming up on the end of our time. So, with that, I want to thank you for joining me. This was a lot of fun. Hopefully we'll be able to do this in person someday. I know we were supposed to see each other at a conference right before COVID hit, and I hope we'll be able to meet each other in person someday. So, this was really fun. So, thanks so much.

Ian:

Let's do it, Grant. Thank you, sir.

Grant:

Alright. Take care.

Ian:

Bye.