Prisoners of Our Own Devices

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